The Gamer's Brain: How Neuroscience and UX Can Impact Design

[Music] all right good morning everybody thanks so much for being here I'm excited to talk about two of my favorite things today the brain and video games although I admit I was excited but video games were younger that I got excited by neuroscience and psychology but anyway my name is silly Houghton's a quick description of my background I've got a PhD in psychology I was a researcher in childhood development our research our toddlers learn about arithmetic I started to work at VTech ten years ago to create educational toys and video games I joined Ubisoft HQ in 2008 where I did all the training session called how does the brain learn for designers artists and game programmers now let's transfer to Ubisoft material to work on UX for Rainbow six then I joined LucasArts where I developed York's practices until well I couldn't anymore and I've been at Epic Games for nearly two years now developing UX practices for the studio so the concept of this presentation is a

mix from academic series Ubisoft Design Academy training interaction with many many game developers throughout my journey so user experience and the gaming this industry is getting trendy so are psychology and neuroscience but what does it mean really how to do it right where to start how to know when progress is made what is the key brain knowledge that you really need and that you can apply to your game but most of all why does it matter why knowing about the brain can help you develop video games when for many of you you've been doing it for years so before we get into the depth of the subject let's take a let's look at a classic task of psychology a design to understand how the brain reasons so here are four cards each of them has a letter on one side and a number on the other side two of these cards are shown with a letter side up and two with the number side up so here's here's what you have to do you have to define which card all

cards you need to turn over to determine whether the following claim is true if the card as an A on one side then it has a 3 on the other side take a few seconds to think all right so how many of you think we need to turn over a and three can you just like give me a quick idea how many of you think we need to turn over a and three all right what about a only okay so in deductive reasoning an argument is invalid if the premise is true so in that case a but the conclusion is false so not three so to verify that you need to turn other a to verify that is a treat three home the outside you do not need to turn over three as even if we found another letter behind it and one is validate the argument the same way that you do not need to turn over see lastly you need to turn over seven to

verify that there's not an A behind it because then it would invalidate the integral the argument so in a wizened study not even 10% of subjects from the correct solution even though we all believe we had good logical skills since you found the correct solution great job and this is not because the brain is stupid or not logical it's because the brain has evolved to recognize patterns and find shortcut that we are that because of that we survived so far after all the brain is very efficient for everyday tasks and the mistakes in May the brain makes are insignificant trade-offs in the scale of evolution however as a game developer this raises difficulties you must take into account if you want people to have a great experience playing your games this is what you need to understand the gamers drain in your own that's what this talk is about not Korean game developers hard to do their job you know that already it's about using neuroscience knowledge and user research methodology to constantly making you aware of these biases so you can make the best decisions for your game so you have to

keep in mind that there's only so much workload the brain will tolerate the brain consumes 20% of the body's energy although it makes up only 2% of a person's weight so the workload in your game has rededicated to the core experience you want to offer not in figuring out menus for example or items that's why defining your core pillars and sticking to this vision is crucial to have great user experience now always trade-offs to make and prefer is hardly reachable the work is about making sure the trade-off makes sense for the extremes you intend that the thing in your game must not be difficult will have any challenges quite the contrary but the challenge challenges must be about the core experience and nothing else think about it as if playing golf with a green bowl might be spicing it up from some hardcore golfers maybe but the golf experience is not about making it challenging to find the ball so here our purpose to talk about three important things you need to know that the brain that can help you on a daily basis perception memory and attention so

whatever you do watching a movie listening to music playing a video game your brain learns it makes new or reinforce synaptic connections anything to bring processes and learns always comes from an input and in the end it changes the memory of a subject and the quality of the processing depends highly on the attentional resources applied which also dependent on the emotions and motivation self although I want to really have the time here to address emotions and motivation a little disclaimer this is highly simplified merely an overview with a few examples the brain is not working in buckets like that and the making games is very complex so is the brain but for communication sake and for the sake of Atari brains this morning after all these parties and stuff I just for each bucket explain how it works in a nutshell point out the main limitations and give an example or two the hardest knowledge applies to game

alright let's start with perception so perception is not a passive window to the world information is organized through a three level process here I'm just going take the example of vision because it's more visual that is the same thing with all senses so it all starts with sensation so if you look up the skies at night what are you going to see is this at the physics level these are dots I will display a specific orientation spatial frequency and brightness the brain very quickly is going to organize the visual field this is the perception level the brain is really heavily words to recognize shapes patterns so in that case are you going to see a salsa the last level is the cognition level access to semantics knowledge so if you know about that particular constellation you will recognize Ursa Major and we can we could believe that it's always going bottom-up but actually very very frequently at a

top-down process meaning that your knowledge is actually going to influence the way you perceive things I'm going to give you a little example here all right what do you perceive here call us right street fighter characters so people who don't know that Street Fighter might just see color stripes here and if you're a fan of the game you might see something different and here we are all game developers and geeks so a fairly homogeneous and niche crowd yet who might perceive this image differently that's why it's important to know your audience their prior knowledge and expectations I make sure that they are what they're perceive is actually what you intended and just like the black and blue dress analy's very trendy on twitter different people going to perceive reality differently because perception is a product of your brain also if you're color blind you don't give a [ __ ] about this slide that 10% of people have some sort of colorblindness and they want to see this image the same

way other people do perception is subjective okay perception of the product of the brain and here's an example of how you can use that knowledge to make your hand move easier for the brain to achieve I'm going to use an example from Gestalt theories Theory applied to perception and it's they got some love that's very super useful for a year any UI stuff they are you doing one of these law is the law of proximity the objects are near to one another in space our time I proceed as belonging together like on the right units perceive like our small groups of items where I don't less you perceive it as a big one massive lock so if you apply it in games like for example League of Legends if you look at the HUD here at the top the elements here are perceived to you don't need to have lines too separate these buckets tarnish and the number is tied to like the six decide to are the icon of the sword because this

closer together same thing with another law the law of similarity objects with our similar attributes is that shape color size the brightness our purses are belonging together so if we keep the same example from me here when you can minimaps we can easily perceive what goes together just based on the shapes and the colors alright so here I'm going to use an example from Far Cry free of do's and don'ts using the cashed out those and before gone without just a precision here it's easy to point out issues after the fact I only take that example because it played a lot of editing and it's just illustrating my point in a great way and I know the UV sauce people okay right okay so so the good practice here is like here in the Box all these elements that I close together are going out belonging together so here you don't need to separate them you really understand that the money which part is the money which parts DX peas so that's

a lot of proximity here they use the law of similarity to show you that this is the point that you have is the point that you need to buy this skill to skill a more like a less good example is here so these are karma points and the diamond icon next to it is part of this yet it's a little bit farther away from the rest so this is this can be weird because it's at the same distance as the skill points that you have so it could it could be harder to proceed so also when you look at the skill tree the first time you look at it you could easily perceive that actually the skill tree is organized in a vertical way because the icons actually have clothes that are closer together on the vertical axis that on the horizontal axis so if we just pick that example of these these skill tree and we replace the icons with my own layup tokens we also add the

little arrows that actually is pretty hard to proceed the game we remove the background okay so here according to the ghetto opera of perception you are likely to just interpret that as a big bucket or maybe more as vertical lines because it's slightly closer together on the vertical axis now if you just apply the ratio of proximity you have a very low hanging fruit here by just doing that by using the same space and applying the gauge download facility it's like the icons on the horizontal line close to each other you make the icons have a shape that interest movement toward the right and you don't need the arrows anymore so sure it's not a big deal on like players understanding in the end this is just a way to facilitate the perception of that skill tree another rule of perception that is a really important to follow is the form follows function and it's really important design ideally you want

to reach affordance what you see is how it works because the less information your audience will have to remember about things are not essential to the extent you want to offer again the better and if an icon doesn't speak by itself then the player first have to figure out what it means then remember it which won't be the case of the icon as affordance that's workload it's very hard to design icons and in RPG games you need a ton of them to convene abilities are not obvious ideally you want the form of your icons to naturally convey its function in the same way for the majority of the audience you also want to avoid noticed ability or in being greedy this is also coming from Gestalt Aksum some things can be perceived differently by different people so you might receive here a rabbit or a duck so you want to avoid that again as people we eventually figure it out but for every little piece that needs to be learned and makes take some work load that could be used for something else and what needs to be learned will need to be remembered and we'll see the

problem with our memory limitations later so unless your game is all about playing with perceptions like Monument Valley you want your input to be perceived easily and understood as designed iPhone is still using icons representing a stereotyped mental model we have for email and camera even though this is not really how these things look like today same thing with the telephone icon right the phones we had looked at the stereotyped icon we have on our phone so the form you choose might not exactly be true to the reality but rather true to the mental model people have since easy and common knowledge we'll look at the photos in game center icons this time is fully abstract so users have to learn and remember them also these icons are very similar to each other as well as the music and iTunes or ones although have different functions which makes it hard to differentiate so the form to follow the FFF rule as much as possible to design your icons to maximize icons are

self-explanatory and don't need to be learned and memorize and test them so here's how I've been doing it lately and I will take there an example from fortnight 4 9 is an action build a game with RPG elements so we have a lot of icons like for class abilities for example a little disclaimer here fortnight and is very very early in development its pre-alpha and most crane shots and footages and I see in this presentation is coming from you expressing so very low resolution so we regularly take a list of icons and we ask our audience or you can start for internal people that I've never seen your icons before about their form and function so to explain what you want from your participants give an example on the first page of your survey so you show that here's an example of an icon for each icon you need to describe what does it look like its form and also what you believe it does in the game its function so in the example here the form

of the icon is a heart on an e KJ graph inside and for the function it could be I expect using disability would resuscitate my character so you get that in toggle and then you have for in your survey one icon per page so I just I just took a snapshot like a survey here and make sure the order is randomized because otherwise you could have an effect of order I should also make sure that the icons are but decides it will be in the game so it is going to be slow on the screen you don't want the icon to be huge in your service it's important to do this with a population same poll that represents your core audience there might be a cultural differences for example West Asia again that's why it's important to define your core audiences as some codifications might work with hardcore gamers but not with casual gamers although general is usually what defines common knowledge RPG versus FPS puzzle game etc remember the Street Fighter color stripes not necessarily about

gender age nationality it's more about common preferences your ideal sample size will be 96 the let's faces let's face it most of us can't really access that many people so half of them can give you good enough insight without including too much a margin of error if you're short on time and resources tested with less people anyway is still valuable just make sure the people you're asking you about the genre of the game and that they haven't seen the items before as you want to test our intuitive they are so before we analyze the result it's important that you guys the designer design the icons to answer the survey this will highlight even more the difference in perspective for our designer versus player when it happens so here this is one early icon in four nights that we tested at the sides it would appear on screen and so the UI designer around for the survey so for the forum it's a smoke bomb releasing a plume of smoke the function of that is

it's through smoke bomb and so here the result that we had is just a small sample of the results because it takes too much space here you do not need to read that all but what you can look at it here you can actually all unnecessary in your call line you can very clearly see where the problems are here so here we found that for the icon the forum's here has only 60 percent rate of correct answers and the the problem here is now that they're completely wrong answers but you have a lot of partially correct answers like people understood the bomb part of it but they did not understand the smoke part and so because of that the functionality of this icon is not understood because it's too ambiguous so in this case the icon can be easily tweaked it seems that only smoke parties on the students so you can just create this one I take another example so here

the right designer tell us it's a bomb superimpose on an old-timey alarm clock function here is to deploy the matter collector which actually destroying everything and all the mid materials come back to you so you don't have to scavenge manually everything so that's functionally again as RPG elements sometimes the functionalities are super complex and here's what people answered so this is an example when the form is working perfectly people on this to the forum but the functionality is completely off so this icon needs a complete redesign so the function others icon is immediately very hard to come by the design to try something of course you didn't have high hopes but it's all good also good to try the idea behind the clock is that you gain time harvesting resources other cities who manually break all the stuff but people

usually have a very different perspective about a clock so at that point you really have to change the icon completely not just tweak it and you might need to use a nut strike icon if the function is too complex so at least it's not misleading you really don't want to mislead people so reality of our assets is not was what is really important what is important is how it's perceived by the majority of your audience let's take an audio example here this is taken from the darknet listen to the bat-cycle and think about how it sounds now there is a madman oh what a place so it sounds like it's infinitely rising right what it is in reality for the Shepard tone its overlapping tones feeding me another one end of a cycle and fading out and the other it's

annoying so it's very different from what we hear actually and this was a climbing game in the Mario on Super Mario 64 for example so if you're trying to get to a Bowser before you get whe that there are 60 your stars this is what [Music] [Music] [Music] design Tendo messes without perception epitome so when you test your game be careful when asking the players about their perceptions for example many players are perceiving the zombies in fortnight difficult to aim at and the

overall impression that they had that we had was either because the zombies were too small maybe moving to five and this is what they were entering the service so the animation team was wondering what was really causing issues queries we're having to carry the enemies so to test this question we create a gym level about a shooting range it allowed us to test variables in a standardized environment the participants were told to do as many headshots they could in one minute as the husk of the zombies where Auto spawning so here's the video three two one go so this is Howard Allah the Prime was not an animation with our character five months it was mainly due to the passing because they don't have a lot of problems aiming as zombies very young but when they're trying to go around the

obstacles of the problem since the rotational value in the passing because that was to start when the zombies are one obstacle is one very challenging to follow them because they're doing in sinuous turn that are the software to analyze what people are saying don't don't necessarily take it's imprinted then may our purpose is to touch them by controlling all other variables to find out what's really going on so this is it for the perception part so a little reminder here how it works in the shells like input is processed by the brain the limitations just a few examples there are more limitations in that but perception perception is different than reality and perception is subjective lastly applications use Gestalt laws that's not very low hanging fruit you can do here and use form follows function and don't rely on what people

say all right now we can tackle the married part so memory how it works again very briefly it all starts out the senses again so you have sensory memory this is where everything is like it's already pre analyzed this part of perception and importance of attention here if you really want to process information if you want to draw attention to something again I'm simplifying here goes into working memory it's a strong term very short term like I say short terms like talking about a few seconds and minutes not not these very short time easily disturbed and work requires again very heavy attentional resources and lastly goes to long-term memory potentially it's limited in time and space potentially only so this is the encoding part and we

have a storage barn so here we're going to talk about the storage part and talk about how we forget things this is what we call the forgetting curve was made by ending up written psychologists he asked people to remember by heart some pseudo words and what the variable here is the when he asked them to recall all these words so we asked them to train them to remember all these words and then the variation is when he asked them to recall the words immediate recall hundred-percent good answers so no problem there after only 19 minutes it drops down 60% of good answers after only one day you lose about 70 percent of the content learn so the forgetting curve is about long-term memory are things that don't have much meaning or emotions fade in our brains because this was not super meaningful to the people to remember and this is all about the

neural Darwinism law survival of the fittest here we're talking about synapses players are likely to forget a lot of stuff in your game especially since there's a known unknown gap between the two game sessions let's take a look at that in a minute but before you do do you remember the iOS icons I showed you earlier try to remember them [Music] so hopefully you did remember all of them you are likely already familiar with these icons and I made you process this information however I did not show you this house on my own but the camera one I only talked about the Sun one did you catch that because the brain is also good at making up false memories and can you tell for sure which icon is the iTune stolen and which one is the music one maybe you can then you then you rock alright so let's go back to your the forgetting curve and apply to games so let's say again very

simple fine here you start playing game the first time this is a firms game session so I jewelry your mastery grows with the game difficulty level and then you stop playing because you know you need to go to sleep at some point and what's happening that maybe if you played on the Sunday you have to go to word it might be like X days like we don't know how much lag between two game sessions during that time the game sales and level as a computer but us we are under the log forgetting curve so when we resume the game there can be a large discrepancy and the player can feel downgraded so because players want to remember everything there are some trade-offs as a designer it's your role to define what we need to focus on for example in a custom Theory the designers decided that they did not want the players remember the controls so they are always shown on the head so if you look at the top right you'll see that the mapping of the controls match the PS Xbox controller and it's always displayed on-screen and contextual before there's

no need to remember this here's an example from fortnight where the search key is always displayed when in reach of a searchable objects but beyond these obvious visual help prioritizing the learning is crucial freeing so you can decide what you truly want to play to remember this is how we started doing it on fortnight game very early in development pre-alpha the screenshots footage from you expressing so for tonight is an action building game with with RPG elements you are the commander of your home base and by growing your home base you unlock bus and hero classes and you send your heroes out on missions during the missions is scavenge for resources craft items build defenses then combat the zombies so to put together the onboarding plan I ask designers to list all the things the player has to learn in the game and to prioritize what are the most important things for fortnight you'll end up with a massive list of course here I'm just

going to show you some of the most important features for four nights you do not need to read that but once you have the list you have the designers to prioritize it regarding the game's pillar then define the order in which this tutorials have to be topped and the level of depth needed to teach them for example teach core movement in combat is very important of course but it's something that it's usually picked up naturally by gamers so it's going to be taught early but only through dynamic tutorial texts that you won't see if you already started to move there's no need for deeper teaching teaching for that element building is something really important in the game it's one of the pillars but it's harder to pick up so once you establish these elements know if it's easy medium hard and when you know when we should have this tutorial or depending on the weight you can rearrange the list ok so let's look at home base 1 here so is the first all the first one once you do this is in

order you have to decide what's the unborn for each feature you need to adapt the player's perspective and understand why learning this alignment is important to them so home base is going to push persona it's medium difficulty because and some many RPG games your persona is actually the hero you control those not the case here so it could have some difficulty learning that and for the player when he needs that this is me in the game so put I and that bucket put in put you in the shoes of the player I start by naming and choosing banner from my home base and you do that for every feature of the game this methodology will allow you to make faster decisions and build hypotheses about the game and it's experience that you will be able to test with plate as an analogy playing on the last thing you do is building narratives that will bring all the pieces together if you start with a narrative which is tempting because all love stories you actually take the risk of needing to adjust your own boarding to the narrative which could hurt the experience of the game narrative should

be at the service of gameplay and should transcend the unborn clan so you do that less so here's an example I only this process helps us to make a faster decision regarding the feature order in our early onboarding process so we had a choice to make at the very beginning of the game should we start with boots on the ground I have the player like incarnate and hero and start breaking stuff the pros up that's exciting action whether way the columns that player can actually run we believe the first hero is the persistent elements where I actually is holding or we could start with home base the pros of that as we said the expectation currently and gives medium turn motivation because starting with home base send a mission to get something for your home base so you know that you got to have that shortened reward the cons of that is the longer society action but home base is a place for soon in the game what they grow what is persistent so it's a very important feature for us so that's why we decided so far to go with home base first as

fast as possible so at least expectations are set currently for the player we know we're making trade-offs here but it's really important for the experience that players identify themselves to their home base as soon as possible we decided to go through home ways very quickly women's pop and basically show the players our base they can expand now that it's theirs so they have just have to name it choose a banner and then they start a mission to gain rewards to start growing their base so prioritize the learning you have to define peripherally learning means you have to define what trade-offs are the least damage of all to the experience you want to offer because there are no perfect solutions and then to verify the players got your intentions and we ask questions about the perceptions about after game play but in a way I can validate any validate our purposes since our goal is to make home based meaningful some questions I'm going to find out this is how are the proceeds on base of course the order of these questions is randomly generated and we also ask questions right after

the mission to check they understood the concept of home base at the score we don't expect them to know all the details at that point well you check to see if they understood what we try to convey and afterwards when you can actually have analytics you can verify it's actually like in our case people are using home base and building stuff in their home base and we went on with all the features for example we do we need to teach about scavenging actually in a in our play test so far including 13-year old players immediately started destroying stuff with the stick so it was not essential to have a proper tutorial for that on the other hand many players and tests were not seen crafting guns or making doors soon enough problems as they were just building walls and then they were stuck in the in their box and they were entering one wall so actually it's important to know how to craft it out the door so we did tutorials for this mechanic since the

game uses it's fun when you don't know how to do that I'm going to show you some examples from a crafting building later in the presentation fairies for memory in a nutshell its encoding and storage limitations for getting curved as the reason why the GDC piece is always reminding you that you need to answer the survey to give you a sticky feedback because we don't remember this stuff an application reduce memory load and prioritize learning all right I'm hoping it's to have your attention here because this is what we're going to talk and essential resources and again I'm not going to talk about other factors here just the attention but before we do that let's take a brain breaker love it I'm going to ask you to pick one card choose one card and remember that card pick one all right I bet I can guess which card you picked and make it disappear did it disappear

yes but actually I changed all the cards right yeah sorry it's a very light would be but the magician's know very well how to trick your attention this is how they do their magic tricks this is called change blindness as the failure to not is an obvious change is another pendulum and the attentional blindness the filler to notice the existence of an unexpected item so this is the example when you have to count the back table passes and you don't see the gorilla and while you do that so you have to find a way to ensure you have the plays attention if you're conveying important information by the way did you notice that I put a gorilla under sandwich early sorry so we are not carefully scanning all of an environment so this is not what we doing this is a reason why I find model is it's pretty difficult instead our attention works like a spotlight you can

which these processes are killing me from so we need to make sure that the player is not overwhelmed by multiple inputs and draw his or her attention to the important information you want to convey multitasking is a myth and it's actually not that simple to draw the players attention to something however when you learn attention is a key component to successful including so you have to find a way to ensure you have the players attention if you're conveying part information it's not easy so even though a lot of people now understand that multitasking is a myth there are still a lot of games that sorry multiple inputs at the same time making games or an NPC is talking you while you learn how to drive a car for example here's an example in fortnight onboarding so there's a tutorial text about health regen that pops up at the moment to get the first enemy encounter sorry slow rezian you have that gameplay tip but at that moment the player is really not paying attention to that

because he's got to freaking kill the enemies so we cannot really see that at a moment so it's not when the brain has enough attentional resources to - it's when you want to show something trying to get my train of thought you want to make sure that the brain is going to be able to draw tend to pay attention to that very thing so it's difficult because in the game there's multiple things you need to pay attention to and this is where it's actually hard to me so true the good thing in that example is that were trying to cheat to teach at a meaningful moment about regen health but it's actually not a good call to try to do a plays attention when under threat right after filming you film the player you can actually pay attention and do it is the way to go no multitask so another example of minimum workload

and during attention is what I call the red overload problem so red is a great color to draw attention especially in the West to draw attention to dangerous critical things getting hurt critical health etc the problem is that red is often all over use and what that happens it loses its attention drawing advantages if too many things are red then the red element stops to stand out so as we are developing the new Unreal Tournament we did the UX test on ut3 to check the problems the game had and so we don't do the same mistakes turns out that there is a huge red overload when you on the red team your head is red everything is red so it's harder than to spot the red feedback telling you you're getting hurt and you need to react so here because everything is red it's actually it takes more time to see to proceed that thing which is actually the important information here so many PvP games have blue versus red teams and gamers usually

like this convention however most of them don't realize the red team is disadvantaged versus the blue team actually analytics and Gears of War 3 showed that the blue team overall has 5% better win rate than the red team since we sold gears I don't have the data anymore so we're actually allocated data on unreal and we'll see if it's confirming this thing but scenario to me would be to always be on the blue team and the enemy team to be orange not red so red can be saved for the critical as Eden so on fortnight we used to have enemy bars in red and the red damage feedback the red damage feedback was too far away from the right people who we removed nearly all the right signs and feedback except for critical information for the player getting hurt and from where and we put the red feedback on getting hurt closer to the reticle whereas attention usually is to the enemy bar is now orange and we saw unnoticed death rate getting much lower

again this is just about adding clarity in the UI to reduce the attention workload think about the green gulf low priority illusions what is important for the experience and remove all potential friction points and think about your worst case scenario sure it might not feel like red overload when one or two enemies but it could later in game when it's getting super challenging and so one important thing here to remember there's one thing you have to remember that would be it people learn and remember way better what is meaningful to them and emotional that helps to draw attention so the the thing is the deeper we process information so the more you focus your attention on something the better you're going to learn or retain what it means that you have to give context of learning make sure that the player is always learning while doing it and you have to give meaning I have to be worthwhile now for the player fourth

mission for his life and this is different from the narrative so just I'm going to give three examples of whatever I mean here so one of these example is far for three Blood Dragon it's an example where you have no context and no meaning that's made on purpose to its and Larry's so it's okay that it's example when you cannot actually do the things that you're taught and there's no deep meaning loading more training hints from the ABCs of war

I [ __ ] hate tutorials and that's what is terrible of the game so anyway here's another example so called gd2 again I'm using these examples because I play this game obviously and it's just because it's it's illustrating one point I'm actually not you know pointing fingers here Call of Duty 2 here you have convex because you learn by doing but the meaning is weak very good comrade always remember to use the star on your compass to reach your

current objective ok Vassili let us see how good your aim is aim for one of those two teddy bears good not fire good now fire at the other one for short-range omelet but for long-range targets our rifle is better okay so here uh when you talk you can actually practice it right away so you have context the meaning is a bit weak this is the teddy bears are not super threatening and also you cannot really experience why why really it's meaningful you cannot experience it right away one that's example or some uncharted 2 where you have context and meaning so what I'm going to show you is right after the introduction cutscene and you start what you see here is when you actually start to have [Music]

so the player starts moving there's no tutorial types about movies Oh so you talk to jump at the moment and is really meaningful to you so of course this is scripted so it's more easy to do but we can actually apply that for all games so you want to avoid the learn then do because having a lot of text you you won't remember it even if you're a hardcore gamer if you're not going to remember it and what you try to do is

have learning by doing and so you have deeper process when you're in content and you have greater motivation there's meaning so that just improves the way we can remember stuff so of course early on use whatever is already in your game to start building the onboarding and that's why even though you know it's not that I'm word great you do whatever you can at that supplement stage you are so if you have your publicist ready you will actually get much more insight from the early plato which will allow you to prove the game faster and better so this is the example of building in for night so back in the day what we did for for a 9-2 we we knew we had to teach building because it was more complex and so we had that sort of tutorial mission where you had to protect a tractor and build around it so I notice that they have a countdown likes one one minute one minute forty and the thing is because in fortnight and everything is destructible

the first thing they try to do is destroy the tractor and here we actually tell them to protect it because it's counterintuitive so the player is like okay I can't really destroy that so what do I need to do protect it so they actually have to you know build defenses around the barn or close the barn to protect it from the enemies so because the the opening of the barn is not really matching the wall the players a bit confused I'm editing stuff we're not going to go through the old minute so here it is is trying to figure out what can I do and we saw that over and over again so okay place is one wall here and oh god I don't have resources to build another wall and it's only 25 seconds left before the hospice arrived so this is an example where the player is still to protect a tractor this is misleading because everywhere else in the game you have digit or e of the thing so you don't want foreign boarding to change the rules of the game also

building the protection abroad the barn around the bar is unintuitive and players in a stressful situation because there's a timer and set for failure it's never fun to fail at the very beginning of the game so you have context but you have poor misleading needing here so we changed it and now what's happening and we place the player in the pit and it has to build either her way out so there's a lot of resources in the best repair you can choose to destroy all the things or just build is way out in the using there's no time pressure but you want to get out of here because for knives without exploration so you like okay [Music] way to build you got out of that pit so so in that case the fairies told to be wings or her way out the player has all the time needed yeah is motivated to get out of it and we're set the players for success here so here you have greater

meaning now another example about crashing tutorial again apologize this screenshot is like from November 2014 wait does the low res I still wanted to show you that so at the very beginning of the game we teach about crafting and at that time we're just telling the players okay you have to gather resources to craft a pickaxe and after we say that we just tell them to destroy rocks to collect for and so we had that very step by step things player well as to do with a clear and depending the interpreter craft a pickaxe so it's in context with poor meaning and they had to do things in certain tall order and there will not really didn't know how much rocks they need to collect on a lot of wood so we changed that again and what we did here is very screenshot if

we just give clearly the purpose for the tutorial you have to craft the pickaxe and to craft a pickaxe you need to collect or and you need to collect all planks the wood and you know how many of each in each collect and the player does it and whatever order you know he or she wants so this offers more freedom it's clearly tool variously told the purpose for that thing so it's going to mean so that's it that was last bucket attention so how it works in nutshell to spotlight limitations she has an attentional blindness slow attention span and hoping that not too many people are sleeping in here and application examples its minimum or code and context give context and means and again this is just a few examples and a few mutations let's again more complex than that so all these brain mutations are actually had the core of user experience heuristics and this is why it can help

you because it's all based on our brain mutations so the brain is extremely good at making a quickly a quickly making sense of the world with little information as power survives our predators so all the mistakes the brain makes our insecurities are insignificant Rita's in the scale of evolution however it can help you gain precious time and avoid great cave yet if you are aware of the brain limitations and can remember all of them you won't remember all of them so the to conclude to remember that the gamers brain is heavily biased and so is yours the problem with the brain is that not only is heavily biased but we strongly believe it's not the case we believe our senses are actively cuz a reality when in fact what we perceive as a construction of our brains we believe that we have a good memory when research shows that we can easily forget and even

that we are very prone to false memories we believe we can efficiently note the task when research shows that we actually suck at it most gamers will set the hell in your game is clear but then they will fail to explain it accurately when asked to describe it you might believe you have a great design intuition but are you sure you can rely on it and what about when different people of your team has different opinions we can make the right choice so all the brain limitations we talk about are the core heuristics which you can use as a checklist to help you make faster and more enlightened decisions of course there's no precise science as the brain is complex and if there was a recipe for cooking great games we would know about it and I would be out of job heavily trained pilots use checklists - it's not because there aren't good at their jobs it's because they know they cannot efficiently rely on their brains creating the video game is not as risky as piloting a plane but it is

nonetheless a very complex endeavor next time you're fine think about this I hope that you learn new things about the brain and that this will help you I'd be very interested feedback on all this and thanks so much for attention [Applause] we have about nine minutes maybe less than that because I'm guessing I need to all give the place so if you have questions you can go up to these mics hi hello thank you for your a great talk I really enjoyed it um at one point you mentioned asking the players how they felt about the game you know do you feel you understand it do you not feel you understand it how important do you think that is compared to testing them to find out if they actually understand it both are important because you want to test the reality you want to test you know how

they behave and what's happening but you also wanted to the perception because maybe on paper everything is all good but they did not perceive it in that way so you want to test those but you have to be clear on what you're testing with what method thank you thanks great presentation you just barely touched on the role of emotion in learning and I think that there's a whole topic in there but I wonder if you could just take a little bit of time just to talk a little bit more about how games engage the emotion and therefore improve learning yes I just talk a little bit of that when I say that when whenever you teach something it has to be meaningful if you put the player in an emotional situation of course is going to raise your awareness it's a very complex subject implicit motivation is really important you know your drive this is all very in your very inner side part of the brain

music is also a great way to convey a lot of emotions so I are like in one minute to describe all this like I need a whole new topic to talk about that but just showing you have meaningful environments to teach players as really like how emotions can help you focus on things all right all right thank you so much for your attention I know as it's a heavy load so thanks again and have a great GDC you you