The Freedom Fallacy: Understanding Player Autonomy in Game Design

[Music] autonomy today and something that for a title I started to call the freedom fallacy and I'll give you a little background and how we're gonna set the talk really it's a you know over the last decade two types of games have made the most money driven the most gamer hours and one is competitive multiplayer and the others open-world genres and what we're gonna do today because we had to sort of pick a lane and then drive down it is that we're gonna look at open-world because when we're it's not that autonomy is only important in open-world games in fact autonomy is probably the single most important player experience variable across all genres is the building okay when I stopped it stopped I didn't realize I had that kind of power but anyway we're gonna talk about open-world games as a

as a way of talking about autonomy but the principles we're going to talk about today are a highly applicable really regardless of what you're working on just some quick background on on me and my group and my company I'm a behavioral scientist by training I focused a lot on motivation and emotion and understanding what were the different context and forces that would motivate people both in high quality ways and bad ways and I did that work way back I don't know too long ago about 25 years ago is when I finished that and I immediately pivot out of that and tried to start applying it to various work context in commercial contexts one of them being video games and so we started doing that work about 15 years ago we then added to the team and immersive games all the senior leadership are either researchers and people looking at motivation and good methodology or they're people that are coming out of the industry who've had roles from studio head to producer to essentially everything in the food chain

and we really wanted to have both of those things in the organization to drive our culture and make sure that whatever we were doing we wanted it to be valid and we also want it to be typical so that's that's really what we are in our heart so we do a tremendous amount of work on video games if you probably 40 or 50 different research projects a year on video games and we've been at this for about 15 years now we have a model called the player experience of need satisfaction model that I'm going to touch on today and that's really at the heart stuff we're going to talk about autonomy is one of the things in that model um I did want to say that that model has a tremendous amount of validation and I really just wanted to touch on that point because you hear a lot of models when you're coming to GDC and out there people are always being really creative about thinking about what is it we're all trying to understand our players one of the things about our model is because of our pedigree and science and our disposition we've taken it out and we've

made it available for people at other academic institutions and basic scientists to independently test it because we really wanted to know is it valid does it work and there's a lot of literature validating it and so if people afterwards want a reading list or you know want some of that material I'm happy to provide it as I said this model is called the player experience of need satisfaction model I'm not going to be going into the components of it in a tremendous amount of detail because I've done that like 12 times over the last ten gbc's so there's a lot of stuff in the vault on the model so people want to get a lot of the background material but this is really kind of a I don't know in level 200 or 300 course looking specifically at autonomy I do want to touch on the model briefly though as just a little bit of a cliff notes or a Primmer and the model really has at its core there's lots of different dimensions to it but at its

core it talks about the fact that all of us have basic psychological needs that we have are intrinsically motivated to have satisfied and that move us forward in other words we don't need anything external to us in order to motivate ourselves we have things happening inside and it's our philosophy and the science bears this out that if you can create the circumstances that let me have those knees satisfied you have reached through the deepest most powerful form of motivation of course this is very important in the video game space because games are a discretionary activity people do them because they want to do them and there's lots of competition and so being able to develop that deep high-quality motivation it's really essential so just quickly those three needs are the need for autonomy which we're going to talk about a lot today that's in short our desire to feel like we're writing our own story in life that we're agenting about what we're doing and that we're endorsing the path that we're on and as

we'll see I'm gonna use the word a lot too they called volition we're gonna get to that in just a few minutes ii need is the need for relatedness this is our desire to feel like we belong we're connected to others that i matter to you and you matter to me and the third is a need for competence or sometimes we call it mastery and this is our desire to feel successful and effective and what we're doing and also to feel like we're growing and elaborating ourselves and we're reaching you know more and more abilities and experiences and so these are the three core needs and i'll be referencing back to them today we're really going to focus on the primary need for autonomy and it's because this is really the foundation core foundation of what makes modern games work now I bet if I said to everybody here do you know what autonomy is everybody would say that they didn't know what economy was because it's a pretty common word it's not like a 50 cent word we hear it all the time and developers design using a general sense for autonomy all the

time it's like okay I need to give my player this thing called autonomy so I'm gonna and then you know insert your custom recipe right here the problem is that or the challenge is that autonomy is a very complex concept and misunderstanding it can backfire and we're gonna I'm gonna tell actual you know case examples as we go along here of how that's happened so what we want to do today now since the doors are closed is what we want to do is we want to science this up so that we can help everybody understand autonomy not just make autonomy but the autonomy so that you can dominate the market so it's really understandable by the way that economy is misunderstood because the dictionary doesn't even get it right from the standpoint of psychology all right if you look at definitions of autonomy you see that lots of words like freedom and independence and freedom and independence it's sort of everywhere and there's a reason that it's like that

and why it makes sense because that definition works for let's say if you're talking about countries we're talking about Australia or you're talking about Bolivia except decision really Bolivia this is Paraguay I'm sorry we just have John Oliver fans and our staff that help me put this deck together and maybe most apropos for this the best example for this audience would be you know Naboo but you know it's okay if we talk about countries in this way or if we're more and more you're hearing about autonomous cars and different technologies and it makes sense of when we're talking about those things you know that you know independence maybe is the right term but when we're talking about people it doesn't apply it's if we're complex we have consciousness right I mean I don't mean to get to Cartesian about the whole thing but you know if we're we have a will and a self and we that creates a lot of complexity when we're trying to understand the notion of autonomy and so

what I want to do right up front is pivot us from the idea that autonomy is about freedom or independence to this definition which is autonomy means that when we act we do so volitionally this is the new synonym I want to give for autonomy here and volition isn't independence or freedom to do whatever you want volition is wanting to do the things that you are doing right god bless the internet so the freedom fallacy as as I said in the title is that autonomy equals freedom that freedom is a synonym for autonomy in reality autonomy equals volition and I'm gonna give some proof here from everyday life there are many ways that we freely relinquish freedom in our lives right so

if we think about autonomy is freedom that thesis gets disproven in the way that we actually act and go about our lives so you know the probably the biggest one is you know we meet people we fall in love and we get married right and so then freedom actually goes down you're no longer you know stay up to the middle and I released I can't no no but you know things change right but interestingly our volition goes up and our you know our sense of agency and that we're writing our personal narrative in that sense of autonomy those things go up even though we've given up freedom and then of course that story only gets more complex right and then but you know again it's this is what somebody with a small child and puts this into every deck maybe maybe in a few years I won't but but you know it's the most wonderful thing but it's also tremendously giving up freedom so if we think about it as if from a freedom standpoint we have a problem but when we think about it from a volitional standpoint remember we have multiple

basic needs right it's not just that we want to be the authors of our lives we want to actually do something in those lives we want to have needs satisfied for belongingness and connection and growth and all of these different things and so we all of those needs drive volitional behavior and when that happens we feel agentic and we feel like we are authoring our lives in a much fuller way than if we were simply behaving independently or behaving with freedom right so we create in our own life structures and all these other things that are rich with need satisfaction and it's that idea that's the overarching thing I want to talk about today is that really when we're talking about we're going to look at it in open world games but we're looking in games it's not creating freedom let players do whatever they want give them independence it's about creating those that need satisfying structure content and systems so that they are volitionally engaged and deeply satisfied and that these needs are

really the three channels for building that volitional engagement satisfaction so that's just a little bit of a kind of run-up to how we're gonna think about autonomy but let's start talking a little bit about what does this mean for games well the first thing is that there are some sacred cows out there or debates that you know I think have started to change but certainly we're red-hot you know years ago before you know singer player games started to become less and less popular this is whole thing about well players really want good story it's my job is I need to give them an experience and you know I'm gonna give them some choices that's really about giving them experience and then there are other people like No well here are all these examples where you need to give them freedom all right because that's what players want where they want to create their own stories and the reality is that that's a false dichotomy players everybody is right in that scenario the the thing that unifies it is if you think about it as volition if you think about it as how do we

satisfy players needs the reality is and we're gonna see this in games that there are components of of narrative and you know rich narrative that's written by you guys that we're drawing players into through a focus on meet satisfaction and then there's also satisfaction through more open choice full mechanics that we think about more traditionally as the purview of open-world games and another thing is that you know I always hear terms that I trouble me a little bit so the whole idea of sandbox games I know sandbox games are a thing and I don't have time today to go into when sandbox works but a lot of times the idea of sandbox if it can they can really turn into motivational sand traps because you sit there and you're like I'm gonna build this experience I'm gonna put all these activities in there but I don't think about the question of what am I going to do in order to build volition and not just provide all of these things for people to do in the

sandbox and then expect them to go out and do that and so even successful games make this mistake quite frequently you can see examples in almost every successful game out there so you think read that Redemption and this is of course a story where you're John Marston you're bringing your own brand of justice to the West you know this is powerful and the way you're gonna do that is sitting at a wood table and making sure you don't cut off your own finger or your LT air people whisper throughout Italy in hushed tones of your incredible ability to clean up after the pigeons or your these guys you know cyber super hackers I don't know what the tagline is for these guys but they look pretty badass right it doesn't seem like they're gonna take down the system by playing chess in the park

particularly if they're doing it with an analogue speed clock what seems a little unusual for a hacker theme anyway I don't mean to pick on these things what I'm trying to bring up is all all games do this because when you build a big world you know is on the checklist is I have to put things into that world for people to do what are people gonna do in this world and that's the right idea but the issue is you need to ask the question do these things build volition are they helping the player to create their own agenting player narrative where they feel need satisfaction in those things and if those activities are not are just things out there for someone to do but are decoupled from any need satisfaction point then they're not going to be activities that the player engages in and so one thing that I always recommend when we're talking to developers is when you're thinking about these systems when you're thinking about content when you're thinking about all these necessary ways to layer in this activity into a game to include this on

your checklist you know how are you building volition and engaging in the pivoting one thing that's really promising though about this idea and the pivoting from freedom to volition is we no longer have to be afraid of structure and kind of directing players to do things it's okay to direct players to do things as a matter of fact in all the research that we've done both in games and out of games structure is better than providing open and free environments in satisfying people's needs for autonomy and this relates right back to the point I made with the example of people getting married and doing all these things is that when you provide structure you're essentially communicating to them here are pathways here are ways in which you can have your needs satisfied you can engage in these activities you can engage in them by the way the structure of this activity is you know you can do a bigger sandcastle if you are doing it with another player so there's opportunities to you know

satisfy related ministers opportunity it's creating those structures that accent that Telegraph or communicate needs satisfaction that actually build that volitional engagement and not just giving them a lot of freedom to do whatever they want to do even if the game is enormous and it's filled with tons of activities it doesn't matter if the player doesn't see meaning in the options that are in front of them right so in Far Cry 3 I'm just picking one at random I'm trying to you know pick from a variety of different games there's the opportunity to go you know kill water buffalos you know so that you can get crafting materials and of course when you first go to do this this has meaning it has meaning in building volition because there are needs being satisfied you know you have the ability to craft materials and make different things which gives you meaningful choice which makes you more identical satisfies autonomy you also are crafting things that help to increase your ability and

power which is helping growth and efficacy so you have autonomy confidence I don't think there's any relatedness news and shooting the water buffalo I don't really know so I so that's the thing that's in this formula it doesn't mean you've got to hit every need every single time but you can see that you can the way I just did you can look at any act and try to tear it down about what is going to be the experience in terms of need satisfaction that builds volition and the problem here is that once you get the thing that'll that that and so it's no longer relevant you still have all these water buffaloes on the map but essentially you've you've lost any support for volitional engagement in that activity and what happens then is you still got a map with a lot of water buffaloes on it but now all these things that are so-called opportunities for action or things that you want to do these are really just points of noise they aren't really opportunities so the key is not just to offer more things and fill up the world with things to do it's certainly more is better but it's most

important that however much you have you need to have a dense network of things that matter to people because that's what drives volitional engagement now this is a little sidebar you hear this all the time you want meaningful activities you need things that matter you need things that people value we're always I mean nobody describes their game as it's a game full of experiences they say it's a game full of great experience it's a game full of meaningful experiences but when you look at those words you know again as a as a behavioral psychologist like okay well how we're gonna define what those words mean there are many different ways you could do that but really what I'm talking about meaningful were you know meaningful experiences valued experiences it really does all come back to are these needs being satisfied and I say that because we've just collected a lot of data to see that that works really strongly other things may work but we know this works really well so I want to next take a little bit of time and go through some of the ways that

monitor games and leading games over war games right now are building volition and deeply satisfying autonomy because even though the ingredients may be the same autonomy competence relatedness the formulas can change there's a lot of opportunity to be you know very creative and how these things get satisfying so the first is you know what we call the amusement park structure and this is really invent and forever dominated by the game that essentially created the open world genre you could argue which is Grand Theft Auto and the reason for structure is you know operates on a pretty simple premise which is build a dense world of satisfying rides right so when you are engage in the narratives in Grand Theft Auto you're not it's not really your narrative you know you're switching characters you're engaging different stories but you're getting exposed to this world and these opportunities of

things that have meaningful value in that when you engage in them they're you know you're conquering challenges you're these are not these are good rides right and because there's enough of a spectrum of these good rides it's actually very neat satisfying and you feel a sense of meaningful choice so this is all building volition so GTA doesn't win because it's really big and there's lots of things to do and I mean how whenever any open-world game starts to come out people start one of the metrics that people start talking about is how big it is well we discovered you can take the vert last version of our game and fit it into a map that's ten times as big and everybody gets very excited about that and the reason people get excited about that is one of the ways that players assume that they're going to have all kinds of autonomy is it's big because they give you the benefit of the doubt that no matter how big it is it's going to be awesome so so that's kind of I

guess a good thing but it also creates a very high bar to clear so you get a lot of freedom but you also have all of these really enjoyable and meaningful activities in GTA but what GTA lacks are rich opportunities for growth you know it doesn't have RPG mechanics or you know again I'm talking about early you know early GTA I know if there's multiplayer and all these other things now I'm just trying to lay out a little bit of the fundamental DNA of the game and what it lacks really are rich opportunities for growth and also for creating a players story because the whole idea of a player narrative the player narrative is really critical because that's how players integrate an amplified Alishan right we're all we're engaged in a personal narrative all the time and when we go into games that narrative just continues so these narratives will ideally reflect the player self interests and values and games can build volition by giving

players the appropriate tools in order to build those narratives and so what we've seen GTA is we don't see a lot of rich building blocks for that but amusement park structures are relatively thin but they do give kind of words and verbs I'm a mole I'm a triathlete I'm gonna be in a drag race and so the player then has to assemble you know essentially a narrative about well I'm a really unlike the most awesome drag racer you know in GTA or you know they're assembling a narrative but you know it's really it's relatively thin and so when we then start to look at some other examples of how it needs to be satisfied in open worlds we start to see how people turn the knobs on some of these things in order to increase volitional engagement so the next thing I want to turn to is an approach called the dense RPG approach and a good representative for this is Skyrim people have played the hell out of Skyrim for a

lot of hours over a very long period of time it has a very high level of sustained engagement and volitional engagement as Skyrim really wins because they have incredibly rich RPG systems that deepen volition by empowering growth and providing richer narrative threads they're giving much longer narrative threads than you would in an amusement park structure right so there's just it's a staggering amount of things that you can do when you're in the game and this results in more elements of needs satisfaction in order to build on volition you've got more meaningful choice but you also now have the ability to build a gent acknow rodas because you've got all these narrative threads that you can begin to stitch together to build your narrative these are not things that are really present in the amusement park structure that builds volition the other thing is that you're not just looking at issues of overcoming challenges and filling moment to moment satisfaction of competence you're also engaging in

growth through the RPG mechanics and that is one of the most powerful ways to build volition if you create that meaningful sense of growth in games so Skyrim again using the same ingredients but they're essentially putting them in in different degrees and creating different systems in order to build volitional engagement the main volitional hook of course is this growth and it's integrated with a massive quest system but I would say that one of the things that's great about it is that when you engage in question you do things it has an impact on you so your personal narrative to be a vampire you can actually change who you are and become a vampire so there's this impact of systems as you make your choices that truly make the character that you're building your own which is really which is really powerful volitionally you've got in Skyrim something you don't have in GTA which is you get full sentences

I'm the head of the witches college and you know I'm the leader of the Thieves Guild I suck blood of sleeping villagers I now have these larger chunks with which to build my planar narrative and so all of these things have meaningful impact on the actual character themselves but there's one thing that is missing from this which is that in the end nothing really matters no matter what you decided to be a werewolf vampire cat person who I don't know to fill in sentences here whatever you decide to do you know this you don't have this major you know this main storyline that you're you're shifting or adapting this there's no there's no epic impact on the world really the impact is just building a narrative yourself so that's very it's a very powerful game but I want to turn now to another formula that's out there in order to build autonomy and build volitional engagement and that's the idea of narrative impact so the representative game we're going to pull here is Mass

Effect so Mass Effect the main volitional hook the main thing that makes me feel a gentle and engaged in what I'm doing and needs satisfied and what I'm doing is not just I can change the world I can change the universe and so they're spreading out across multiple needs various satisfaction so you're getting meaningful choice you probably can't notice it's slightly less meaningful choice but your instead of making meaningful choices amongst little tributaries and rivers of things are going on that as you wouldn't Skyrim you're making choices between these sort of deep you know these deep rivers that go very end and they're all like coming towards the ocean and you have a sense of epic scale and this is rendered in the content and in the cinematics and in all of these things right so you feel this deep sense of narrative purpose and because you're directing these great narratives you also have relatedness right everybody that I know has a Mass

Effect story about like Oh as I thought you know they felt this moment of connection mine really was involving Talley and I accidentally killed her and then I had to go back and reload my save game and it was very traumatic because I didn't know if I saved in time but it's okay she's okay she's okay and then there's also some growth and some overcoming of challenge in the game but you know that's not really the the tentpole of the Mass Effect experience so matter of fact if grand theft auto give us words and if skyrim gives sentences mass effect is giving whole paragraphs the players to kind of assemble and put together right and so you're able to put together you know a richer story more quickly that can build a stronger volitional engagement with the game and so it's all powerful stuff when when it works right when it works and you're telling the story you want to be telling and then you get to see it

jump to life on the screen it's very powerful the problem for you guys as developers is if you take this kind of approach you have you know what we call kind of a mind-reading dilemma which is that you've got to figure out not just like this paragraph and paragraph two and paragraph seven but paragraph 48 and you've got to figure all that stuff out and that's and that's really hard to do because players are going to have different opinions and you can't fully realize every possible outcome and so your risk of breaking volition is really high right a player could be putting together this really great narrative and then and then and then try to get to a point that they want to get to and if you don't offer it it's not just that they have a bad moment it's that really you know blows apart the whole narrative for them now it's the same thing that's going on when we look at what happened when mass effect had the big ending debacle right

because if mass effect is sort of standing on giving people meaningful choice to create their epic story about how they save the universe having everything in the same way is not just like oh that oh I'm really mad at you for doing that it's hundreds of I mean this is deep because we're talking about basic silent psychological needs so what you have happen is by the end of the game the betrayal happens because they essentially kick out meaningful choice because the ending is the same and then what's meaningful choice without that foundation then there is no you know narrative purpose that falls away and then if nothing I did really matters then I didn't really save tally you know she she doesn't love me come to accept it you know that falls away and then

with all that gone you no longer have any structure supporting politian and worse yet you've essentially violated this contract with the player because you've you've messed with their basic psychological need for autonomy and this is the thing about autonomy autonomy is is powerful stuff it's like the fentanyl of not that's the best example but you know it's stuff that it's it's super powerful but it can you know you've got a handle in it really carefully so bottom line is you don't want to mess with autonomy all right let's talk about one more and then I want to turn a little bit and talk about based on everything that we've said about some of these dynamics systems what could come next so the net last one to talk about is Witcher which you kind of see is a hybrid it's sort of cool and when witcha came out we had the chance to play that game and look at that game because which it really takes

inspiration from Mass Effect and Skyrim structures so you see a rich main narrative that's like Mass Effect it's fully realized and there's a beautiful deep story there but you also see an incredibly deep system of quests and stories and activities that can be undertaken in the way that Skyrim provides them and in some ways that provides nice coverage and that provides nice dense coverage for need satisfaction whether you're engaged in the big epic story or you just want to have a meaningful a couple hours of play to help yourself progress lots of deep volition building again meaningful choice over narrative you've got a lot of the same kind of relational dynamics and you've got a little bit of growth growth is not kind of the you know there are PG systems and they're not as dense or as rich as Skyrim's but you are

conquering challenges and you're really kind of hitting on all these cylinders so there's very strong volitional engagement one thing the witcher did very it was very interesting to me was they traded in fidelity in order to better deliver on the promise of impactful choices and so they couldn't fully render all the endings they want to render so like well let's not render them let's just tell them comic book style and let's make the bet that the player just wants to see the story they want to finish the story and they want to see the story that they were writing and I think that was the right choice you know would it be great if they could have fully rendered everything sure that would have been great but the choice here to focus on a dynamic that is going towards need satisfaction versus just going towards fidelity I think is always the right decision also even in their side quests there side quests were not just take these 10 flowers to Bob in the town

over there side quests were pretty fully realized three-act structures you know girl gets a mystery handed to him that he must solve and he goes and figures you know it's put in front of him and he has to make a decision and then he sees an impact and so there's a sort of full narrative that lets people you know again have their paragraphs handed to them about what they're doing but if they miss that it doesn't these things are decoupled from the main narrative so it doesn't break their volitional engagement in the game itself so having kind of these nested you know deep stories deep side stories within the lords or main narrative worked well so one of the reasons that I talked about multiple games and multiple strategies is to point out that there is no one right way to do this we can certainly look at it in as researchers we do we look at well this seems to have a lot of

value in this said we this has some value and this is more about but there's lots of different ways that you can tackle these issues all of which are focused on need satisfaction in the service of building volition and people leaning forward into the experience but there are lots of ways to satisfy those needs right I did want to point out though that in all the things I just talked about all the reasons that these games are winning really aren't about freedom they're about that meaningful choice growth mastery and that basic needs satisfaction so let's now turn to the challenge here which is only a handful of companies on the planet can really make these games right that can make volition at scale and even for them it's hard now what's the timeline you know between these games being released I mean this is this is epic so that creates an opportunity like if we can find ways to deliver dense volition at scale then open world is going to

become a much richer space for both developers and players right so our little scientist guy which is really you guys you know like okay how could we do that and there are lots of different directions I could go in now about things out there and the waste people are trying to think about that but I just want to I want to do this one because it's so what's the main one I think and it's really salient which is procedural systems the magic of procedural generation right we can press a button and our game springs to life so I say the agony and the ecstasy because there's no doubt that people want that to be true right we want that to be true we just want that game and that's because of our need for autonomy right and you know there's a couple mares here I'll just pick the most recent one which is no man's sky and I don't want to pile on and complain about no man's sky I actually I played the hell out of no

man's sky I think knowin sky is a really important game and there's tons I love about no man's sky but you know no man's sky had some issues and I had a lot of issues with players and it has to do with all the experience real things we're talking about and it has to do with the fact that they fell into the freedom fallacy trap if you want to see more evidence that autonomy is the single biggest thing that your players are thinking about think about the fact that when the game got delayed Sean Murray got death threats just cuz they got delayed this also happened I think I don't remember but I think during some of the Mass Effect stuff there was also a story about some death threats for a bit like like death threats about a game and I was thinking well the only two games I know that over big space games I wonder if there was something about the promise of autonomy there that's really pissing people off right then when the game launched of course we have all the stuff that people have heard about what's the nasty backlash against it because why why was there a nasty backlash because people

there's nothing to do what am i doing there was there wasn't any dense volitional content in there for people to consume and be sad people burned through the the very thin layer that was there on the first two planets and they were out if that and then there came the existential navel-gazing about maybe it was all of our mistake like I seem I saw multiple articles I thought it was really funny and really they were fundamentally making a point about autonomy I said why is it that we expect so much is it that we you know fill in the story here and I find all this fascinating because it really makes perfect sense to me because of how we're all fanboys of autonomy that's what we want and so we need this space game space is a perfect example for that it doesn't mean that it has to be a space game we need a game that fulfills the promise that we think about when we think about no man sky but of

course we all been through this before we went through this ten years ago with Spore right and again spore did some amazing things but sport was a disappointment and it was a disappointment because of autonomy everybody wanted to get to the space stage and spend the rest of their lives exploring all this awesome content and you know that didn't happen because there wasn't a focus on volitional engagement and of course you know there are people in the wings waiting to come in so there's some other people on deck to either make us all super super happy or need to go into hiding I don't know but I'm rooting fruit I'm rooting for it I'm rooting for this genre I think I understand why players wanted players you know project this to come back to the point I was making earlier they project this deep autonomy satisfaction within this universe but it's because they don't know what the game is yet so

all they had to go on the only information they had to go on is when you tell them about size and they project autonomy and decides and don't fall into that trap because they don't really want size they want they want size but they want to be they want volitional engagement and so we figured out how to make all these planets with procedural content I just want to say that if we're going to solve this issue whether it's in space or some other type of game we're not going to solve it by procedurally generating content and then back filling it with handcrafted you know material and activities you know it'd be like trying to fill up the ocean with a shovel it's just it's not gonna happen so I want to propose that you guys all go out and maybe tackle if you're not already you tackle a challenge which is the idea of building procedural volition and what I mean specifically here is that you create systems to automatically

generate content whose focus is the player experience of those facing new satisfactions and that may sound like a moonshot of an idea but if you think about it look we we already know we've distilled down what the essence is of that all-important economy satisfaction which is pollution we know what the granular experiences of need satisfaction are that accrue to that and we can look at current games and we can see the types of things that they're doing in order to satisfy volition so we have a lot of interesting pieces on the board right so now what we have to do is we just have to figure out how to how do we get that the scale right so you know shouldn't be that hard obviously super complicated because now we have to deal with we have to deal with psychology in the mix and we have a whole other set of variables but you know I think that I think I would love that game I bet most people here would love those games I think it would be transformative to the creation of games and I know that players want it because players already

feel like they've been promised it like 40 times so there are you know there are a little bit on edge and suspicious at the same time there are some glimpses I see out there I'm just going to touch on one of them of some cool ideas that don't really qualify procedural generation but but do some interesting magic tricks that show you can generate a lot of the experience of depth and volition even with very limited resources by by being smart about what you're doing so you know shadow of Mordor has the Nemesis system and it has sparks of this kind of idea of being really efficient to generate an expectation and deep experiences where you know the it procedurally generated you know a nemesis for the player and it did that by you know when you have interactions with this orc this you know they have massive impact not just on you know the orc itself if you you know shoot an hour through its eye or whatever you do to it

that you know is blocked off but also you know that orc is pissed or if that or kills you by the way whether you win or lose you know things happen right the orc kills you suddenly the orc becomes more powerful now there's this you're knitted together in this relationship and also you've learned a schema for the game that isn't exactly accurate the schema is wow these orcs they really take everything personally this is what could happen now you know deployers can pattern fit very quickly that there wasn't that much dab but just the amount of depth that was there allowed for a really compelling personal narrative where people felt like this is my story that was my one eye torque that I you know shot the arrow through right and so you see all of these stories on the internet of players who have these interactions and then you know they get online and they start talking about oh yeah kill this guy you know this is just

I I'm not going to read all this but there's many many examples of it just to call one thing out the Nemesis system let me craft my own story in relationships in the end the fighting was the end of the game for me me and my bitter rival and nemesis were friends so if I were to put up I don't have it here but the need satisfaction chart for for Mordor you know there's this amazing thing which is that this procedural procedural system but this system that laid on top this Nemesis system created this deep relationship satisfaction related in this satisfaction with an enemy which is really fascinating so there's really innovative things we can do to take a little and turn it into a lot experientially I just want to close by talking about a couple of things that I think might be worth considering and I'm saying this fully aware that I'm neither a video game designer nor am I an engineer so feel free to chuckle or everyone do but

I am somebody that works with data and numbers a lot and I am somebody that works with formula and and also trying to take people and this is gonna sound awful but take people and turn what they're experiencing into things that can be measured and that we can put a number to and that that number is meaningful for something and I just want to say that that's the piece that behavioral psychologists carry around a lot which is you can measure things like love and all these big ideas you can actually find ways to operationalize and measure them and since that's true I think what we need to do is we need to put more player verbs player variables into our equations for procedural generation and so instead of just procedurally generating content and then trying to manually wrap systems over the content why can't we be creating systems where as players make choices and they and they act that the game world is

procedurally altered and it's scale it's not just the decision point that puts you down a bunch of you know pre-rendered content any pre-rendered content be but it's procedurally generated the second thing is to focus on meaningful impact impact is key and we've seen that in all the things that we've talked about so we could focus on dynamically changing content goal structures activity structures in response to what the players are doing right and do that procedurally you like what the hell does that mean what does that look like I don't know right that's you know we're here to innovate and design so these are just some some thoughts I had about this and the last thing I want to mention is this idea of latent variables and for the non math people latent variables are just variables that get computed from other variables so you're tracking all this telemetry and the things that people are doing in the game one of the great things that is now happening in behavioral science is that you can compute weighting

variables on latent variable profiles for people that essentially let people be their own baseline for various things and you essentially are getting pictures of who that person is I think these variables could be used as weighting variables in the procedural generation equation so that you could surface four players in a much more powerful way the the types of experiences and content that are actually aligned with what it is that they have an affinity for them and we could do that much more than we are simply by tracking behavioral telemetry the way that we are now so anyway there's you know we can talk about you know ideas for this all day but I really think that I I think if we're gonna actually create the game that we all hoped no man's sky would be or spore was or maybe what we're all the next things are I think that we're not gonna crack that unless we can begin to think about engineering deep volitional player

experiences through needs satisfaction I think that why not I think it could be done I think it's going to be hard but everything worthwhile is hard right so I think that's it just remember whatever comes next autonomy whose volition not freedom Thanks all right so people have questions that can come down to the mics all right yeah hey how's it goin thank you I was wondering if you had spent much time thinking about with regards to belongingness and relatedness the role that other players can play and of course how one would measure that effect once you realize that there are other players that are creating this sense of belongingness so one thing I didn't talk about at all today which was just very deliberate is other players other

players is a massive interpersonal variable and mechanism for needs satisfaction it's you know when you look at competitive multiplayer games the reason that the competitive multiplayer games are so big and I didn't talk about them but i referenced them in the beginning you know a lot of this has to do with that kind of relatedness satisfaction that's going on I think that when I think about relatedness in this context I I just go back and just like any other system I would say what are the experiences or social systems that you want to set up in the game for you know multiplayer interactions and how do those systems facilitate belongingness facilitate I matter to you and you matter to me you know the classic example from you know World of Warcraft or the tank healer structure is that was a mechanic that fostered people feeling like they matter to one another because they did so you know that's why

that takes hold on a relatedness level so the question is how can those systems be built but I think it's massively important and if we were doing a talk on relatedness I would have gone into all those things but what I will say and I'm glad you're asked the question is that relatedness and you saw it in the marriage and having a baby example is a massive driver of volitional engagement so I does that ok that's your question all right who was net Huisman Walker can you wait okay sorry Walker yeah hello I'd like to talk a little bit about pursued revelation there is a general said actually do something that you mentioned it's Forex strategies like civilization or stellaris talking about space but yes yeah how do you think can we distill somehow the principles

like is that a walk in these forests games and apply it to open world yeah I saw I think sure I think that's as good idea as any I mean I I think that those games have a lot of very deeply nested systems that all operate and they create a they create a dynamic arc to a game that can last you know I don't know 20 or 30 hours I think what we're talking about here though is taking things to a much greater scale in other words when you play those games you do get a narrative arc but you tend to you tend to play the same story over and over again this is the story of you conquering the world or the story of you conquering the universe and then you just kind of go back again it doesn't create this kind of persistent persistent universe that I think is a different thing then things like those strategy games are but to your point I think that some of the ideas in there

about how they're combining dynamic systems in order to create a ever-changing you know landscape moment-to-moment that lets the player in one game say I'm pissed off at Gandhi for nuking me and another game being mad at you know I mean Montezuma and you know you know I think there's something worth mining there for welcome so it might just be a terminology but in your in your graphic about autonomy competence and relatedness holding up volition like volition you have also pointed out is is the same as autonomy so what the hell right doubt right so you're asking a really nuanced semantic question so autonomy is autonomy is the feeling of agency it's the feeling of that I am creating my story right hmm that's really what autonomy is volition

is if you want to be doing something then that aligns with that sense of agency right and so when I put the autonomy as a support there are other things that also create that sense of wanting and other things there's the creation of meaningful choices and and those sorts of things the other thing I would say is that if you want to get really deep into self-determination theory it's often the case that you talk about autonomous functioning as a roll up of all the needs satisfiers because that's if you had to pick one overarching principle of self-determination theory it's that you're behaving in a way that feels like you fully endorse the path Iran and these things all become inputs to that okay I was one of the designers on spore and we had like after the game shift a lot of hardcore game players really hated it when they were down on it like you mentioned but we also found that a lot of younger players just loved it like to the point of people like where

sport to like I'd love that game I played it all the time and I was wondering if you did much research about age and how it relates to autonomy like why was kids be more autonomous or willing to play in these systems and adults might be so there's a lot of possible answers to that one thing is there's context in Spore and so the you know this the creature editor was one of the most amazing things that Gaines has produced and you know it had a context that kids could really relate to I mean it looked like you know taking a giant the play-doh machine and bringing and putting something together in infinite ways and bringing something to life and they can map that schema really easily so there's there's some of that sort of schema mapping and affinity for that that's going on I think that also it's a it was a context that smaller game of doing that creating crease was like what I'd be interested I guess my question is did kids want to go to space or the kids want to play around like did you ever look at the telemetry and the me Haverhill data because that would

give you some clues yeah not directly although we did have a lot of like parents telling us that their kids couldn't play store anymore like they had to take it away from them because they played it too much yeah and we've seen like drawings from kids that show the whole arc from cell all the way up to space and they would draw by hand yeah we're playing the game so yeah I mean my bet is that we don't we don't know except on data that it's that they're kind of playing at that level I mean I think I bet if you just looked at how many kids play the creature crater mothers might complain about that same thing as it was such a compelling piece yeah and I think the more general question I have is just the age and autonomy like independent of sperm so the thing about the needs are that they are you know one of the quick examples I use is that it's the same as you've got I'm talking about psychological needs you also have physical needs and so you have a physical need for hunger and thirst and think about them in the same way as that so you know a kids have them

adults have them old people having young people having it's like you know kids don't have less hunger than adults do or less of a need for food than adults do these are universal things at every age and across you know really globally and when I say that we've measured kids we've measured across the world women thousands of studies and a lot of domains outside of games that validate the needs the question is just how what are the channels by which those needs can satisfy and so the one thing I will say is that for adults there are certain things where we have autonomy that they don't feel they don't we don't feel like we're flexing a lot of muscles for growth and experimentation like picking out our own clothes for example you know that's not there's not something that's very needs satisfying we've kind of got that down weave pattern fit the whole picking out our clothes thing but for kids you'll see in games that they'll have affinities I want to wear the goofy hat and I want to do this thing and I want to experiment because they don't have disposable income to go buy clothes though so the needs are the same but the channels by which they get satisfied can

differ as a function of age preference taste those sorts of things okay all right thank you yeah so a lot of what you talked about I think he touched on this a bit but it sounds like a lot of creating volition comes from aligning narrative and player choice so theoretically perfectly aligned narrative with absolutely no dissonance between player choice and narrative would have very strong volition is that right they would have well I think you're describing like a movie yeah so I would what I would say is that movies are awesome you know in other words like people get very involved in these in these experiences and yes they can be very volitionally engaging yeah but you know are they but they aren't really the they aren't as engaging as games that give them more opportunity for all the other things that you saw reflected in the model so

things like the ability to grow and conquer challenges and you know you know have relationships and those things those things are not as deeply satisfied in just a simple perfectly aligned linear thing and they certainly don't provide as much value as something that can provide 200 300 400 hours I guess if you can tell a four hundred hour story but I've never seen that done right yeah so so anyway it's it's people are volitionally engaged but they know when they're not writing the story and systems to let them write the story in our research are more powerful than that okay yeah I guess I'm kind of asking more around the hypothetical which is probably not possible but the idea of if the narrative drives for the player were perfectly aligned with what the player wanted to do yep the act or the lack of breadth of choice could almost be hidden

so in a situation like that like a narrative revolves you what the breadth of choice involves you sorry the breadth of choice would just become hidden somewhat so if my what I want to do is a player is always what the game allows me to do theoretically there should be no difference between a fully like procedurally generated game where I actually have every choice because I'm always doing the thing I wanted but I'm wondering if you've thought about that at all like in terms of well that's if there's gonna run into the mind-reading problem there because I mean that's the issue it's like Sophie so in any universe why not I mean I was doing it let's do it with you in a universe where you could create a game where every turn that the player made was they thought there were both of maternes but it was only that turn and it just kind of followed them perfectly and so you could deeply realize it and crush it that would be awesome I I don't think it's I don't think it's I think I just try to rephrase the question yeah I is it a

game like say an uncharted game or a Last of Us do you think those actually have potential for the same levels of volition as a more open world game or they just inherently better at dealing with other needs or satisfying other needs I think that when people find the in those games when people find the narrative engaging and they feel like they the needs are being satisfied for their sense of you know competence or connection to NPCs or whatever those things are that they are volitionally engaged in those experiences I think they're simply at a competitive disadvantage to other games that are let giving them all these tools to more fully realize a personal narrative so I mean you know so that's a little bit different than saying this one's worse at volition than this one is because I think if you took in the moment is the person volitionally into this I think that there are certainly going to be moments when the games align as you point out where people are going to have volitional engagement I think it's it's looking at it this other way that I

would say that you know this is a main reason why that genre has largely died out real quickly you talked about your examples you talked about Skyrim and games like The Witcher one of the things that's so different about those games is Skyrim kind of gives you the avatar suit unless you sort of made that character anyone you want to be and customizes race gender all that stuff now could you guys ever collect any data or have any findings I'll try to isolate what engagement rate versus you know players that get to choose exactly who they want to be versus somebody who steps into a Shepherd or Jerell yeah so I have we have a look at that recently but I've looked at that you know in the past and from a from a volitional standpoint if there's not a major there's not a massive impact of those things right because the reality is that regardless of who I skin myself as in that game whether I get to pick the skin or whether you make me Shepherd or somebody that what the

research does show and that we know we've answered pretty definitively is that there used to be a debate of do people get in the game so that they can you know do crazy things and pretend they're a plate of you know sentient spaghetti and whatever and games allow you to be anybody that that's not what players do because they want to feel volitional engagement have needs satisfied they've they've optimized how to do that by actually being who they are and wanting the game to let them be who they are right and so they're gonna tell player narrative whether they're you know whether they have to play Shepard and they don't like the color of his you know shoes isn't really going to matter they're gonna you know essentially be looking at the core mechanics of the game and narrative and everything in order to tell their story so thank you how much up we're done alright I'm sorry I mean I'm giving this sign that sounds serious so thank you very much everybody