The Gamer's Brain, Part 2: UX of Onboarding and Player Engagement

[Music] all right here we go good morning everyone thank you for being here today this early and for you interest in us and the brain my name is Celia I had a PhD in psychology and the director of user experience at Epic Games and I had previously worked at LucasArts and Ubisoft this session is meant as a follow-up to my last year gdc+ you talk about how neuroscience and UX can impact design since it seemed to generate some interest I wanted to go to do a deeper dive on one of the critical aspects of the games user experience the UX album boarding and player again Schmidt last to do is I'm gonna speed up a little bit as an introduction I would could be reintroduce some on your science notion as well as UX notions that I tackled last year just to make sure everyone is on the same page so I apologize for the repetition here but the user experience

entails how a person perceives and interacts for the product and the satisfaction and emotions elicited by a decent direction it takes its roots in cognitive science human factors and human-computer interaction you access or DES makes an umbrella discipline whose objective is to evaluate and improve the experience of the targeted users of a product in development includes UX design interaction design user research u.s. strategy etc all those UX should now be the concert should be the concern of everyone on the team I'll just a us a quick reminder about how the brain learns discovering and mastering a video game is a learning experience for the user it requires mental efforts this is why it's important to understand how the brain learns to craft a compelling onboarding experience one worth putting effort into one that will matter to your audience anything the brain processes and learns originated from a perceived

input and changes the memory the subject the quality of the processing therefore the quality of the retention depends highly on the attentional resources applied which are also dependent the emotions and motivation felt by the players and some to improve the experience of the players video game developer reason was taking to account the perception memory and attention limitations of the brain as well as the emotions and emotion motivation felt by the player disclaimer this is highly simplified the brain doesn't work in that sort of buckets the brain is even more complex than game development so imagine so we got a perception I'm going to quickly remind a little bit of each perception Evils involves all the mental processes that allow us to sense our environment and construct our own mental representations of it perception is not a passive window to the world it is a construct of the mind into meaningful

patterns perception is highly influenced by previous knowledge expectations or like in in this example context the input at the center can be perceived as a B or as a 13 depending on the context you read it another example illustrating that perception subjective contrary to all the people like me the save icon doesn't mean anything to the youngsters as they do not have a mental representation based of previous experience with this object from the past until they learn what it symbolizes when using a computer so designers have to keep in mind that what they perceive might not be what their audience will proceed exactly upon memory memory allows us to encode store and retrieve information there are three components of memory have the sensory memory it's part of perception it

retains sensory information for a very short period of time such as a fraction of a second without it being consciously processed for example the persistence of vision is due to sensory memory and allows us to perceive a 24 image for certain display as a uninterrupted animation it requires attention for the invite for the mission to go to working memory which is a short-term component that allows for temporary storage and many of a very limited amount of new or already stored information this system maintains active mental representation necessary to perform a task the working memory requires heavy attentional resources and therefore is very limited it is also easily disturbed so please put your phones in silent mode long term memory is a multiple system component that allows us to store knowledge of events and facts as well as skills the know-how and conditioned responses the long-term memory has known on limits in

space and you can potentially store information for a lifetime however memory lapses are fairly common talking about memory lapse here's the forgetting curve illustrating how memory retention declines exponentially with time retention of information especially if not engaging emotionally or meaningfully can be very fragile some variables have an impact on the strength and quality of the encoding and storage of information such as the level of processing and the amount of repetition over time only the brain is prone to memory lapses but it can also distort memories because of these limitation developers cannot really rely on players memory the student about attention our senses are continuously bombarded by multiple inputs for an from our environments attention Intel's allocated more cognitive resources to process selected inputs while the others

will be ignored that selective attention the brains attentional resource is being very limited we do not methodically process all the invaluable information from the environment we don't scan the environment instead attention works like a spotlight focusing resources to process and retain particular elements and neglecting the other inputs such as and when you're in a party is called the cocktail effect cocktail party effect in a loud party can focus to just listen one conversation and ignoring all the rest and as the fire alarm rings and it's going to draw your attention away from it so when elements are unattended they are likely not perceived at all in a phenomenon called inattentional blindness this phenomenon was best illustrated in the well-known gorilla experiment in which you have to count basketball passes of the white team leading you to not see the gorilla passing by I usually show that video but

now everybody knows it so it's not fun anymore but even though a lot of people now understand that multitasking is a myth there are still a lot of games that fire multiple inputs at the same time during the onboarding my games were an NPC is talking to you while you learn how to drive a car for example when multitasking or cognitive overload occurs it affects engagement focus and therefore hinders the quality of learning which can affect your players engagement so I did my session last year showing some UX Furious 6 or guidelines for Musa bility and from what I like to call the game flow it can help you remember what elements are important to were confusing the players and to increase the fun potential of your game today we are going to look more deeply into the onboarding the first time user experience so what isn't boring important here's a chart showing the cumulative play time in warframe note that the data is compressed on the x-axis so the hours are not linear it

shows that 80% of all players ever kept playing after one hour which means that in a free-to-play game you will lose about 20% of your audience during the first time user experience the onboarding and this is a pretty good example warframe is exists X successful after P game so imagine how this curve looks like for less successfully I didn't want to poopoo on anyone so just to show dramatic chart but I do encourage you to go to steams by to figure it out by yourself if you haven't done so already engaging the audience within the first minutes of play is a delicate endeavor and has become a critical aspect of developments in the area of free-to-play games if your game fails to captivate the audience attention quickly there won't be any retention challenges to even care don't get me wrong a great onboarding is not a guarantee for success after the short term engagements mid and long term engagement will be tremendously

important too but where our focus more on the first hour play here so during the onboarding part of your game you need to get your message right when the players are discovering the game and remove barriers then you have to make sure players can quickly learn the main mechanics of your game and engage them through clear goals and progression paths that you need to take to often the transition from the tutorial part to the real game is not engaging because it lacks meaning so these elements are not really separated and they're not even leaner the player can discover learn and get immersed at any time even long after they are learning part of course so it doesn't mean that you should not be preoccupied with motivation mechanisms during discovery part very first steps or that players cannot be immersed within the first minutes of life also learning is a central part of the onboarding here but it happens in all

these steps all the time because playing a game is a learning experience that's why learning principles are going to be at the core of this presentation that she's developing effective materials that facilitate learning requires an understanding of the principles underlying how people learn which our first one is the behavioral psychology principle it's basically conditioning which affects implicit memory so Pavlov Skinner Thorndike you've heard these names they only looked at stimuli and responses input and the output without really bothering with what happens in mind the black box dominance of behaviorism began to wane in the seventies and cognitive psychology took over they wanted to look into the black box with an information processing approach perception attention memory all the stuff we just talked about they also introduced the notion of an executive control lastly according to the

constructivist viewpoint learning is a process of people actively constructing knowledge so that's people like Jean Piaget if you've heard of them or see more papers research with mobile you remember the liberal programming language with the Turtles yeah I'm not that old I mean I guess you are old like me so that's active learning sorry for the lame picture here would just try to google search active learning there's pretty lame pictures in there anyway so these different learning principles will be used as perspectives throughout this presentation so the first part of the talk will emphasize on one of the most important aspect of the brain with respect to long boring managing the players attention learning to play a new game resuscitates a different cognitive effort and mastering again a new player is not necessarily deeply motivated to play and has many new things to

understand so the game must engage its audience quickly and efficiently every point of fiction can turn the player away at that stage especially again with free-to-play games since they don't require your previous commitment you don't buy the game so to remove barriers you need to manage the players attention to do that you need to understand how working memory works the component that stores and manipulate information it is composed of two slave systems one system is responsible for processing visual spatial and lower tasks another is responsible for processing phonological tasks so it's really impossible to do two tasks from the same size system and usually to show that I bring people from one onstage as this person to sing a song while trying to spot verbs in a text can't do that GDC here but my

colleagues are Ubisoft I've been experiencing that painfully and this is where you can actually see that it's very difficult to do two tasks from the same bucket in that case phonological tasks you can do one of each so I so as a person to sing a song with lyrics but instead of spotting verbs as a person to draw a picture in that case it's much easier but still less efficient as just doing one task it can be trained but only to a certain limit when attention is divided for example when driving while having a conversation over the phone it requires more cognitive load to process the different information therefore leading to more fatigue and mistakes the more demanding a specific task is in terms of cognitive load for example mental calculation the less people can allocate mental effort to accomplish another task in the simple such as pressing a button when a red

light goes off by the way this is the real experiment from Kahneman in 1973 succeed subsequently the more attention is allocated to a task or information the better it will be retained so if you want to teach the players something you really want to avoid divided attention all right so here's an example divided attention or when we try to require it if it divided attention prior from fortnight for an eye is an action building game with RPG elements it's currently in live alpha stage disclaimer the footage shown in this video is from UX testing so it's super compressed because we don't need to have high resolution images and of course it's very early in development and in all the videos I will show you you will see a red red circle overlay this is eye tracking so it's showing where the players are looking at which is super important for attentional resources so

in this video I'm going to show you the player chose to play as a constructor so his role is to stay close to the fortifications to repair them and reinforce them however he's running around because we're all smashing the zombies it's pretty fun so you'll see an important message popping at the top telling the player that the fort is being attacked that it should go back to repair it but the player does not even look at this information which is a Newtonian mechanics should be successful in the game he is not dividing his attention with he's dealing the enemies is taking all his attentional resources expecting the gorillas experience therefore it is critical during the discovery part of the game to draw the players attention to the elements that they need to learn to enjoy their first steps given that all of our mental processes are using the same limited attentional resources the developers must mind the cognitive load the game demands from the player

especially again during the onboarding part when the players have a lot of new information to process so according to the cognitive load Theory learning can be hindered if it requires cognitive resources exceeding the working memory limits the working memory span is three more or less items on average an item and B an action or a thought process that requires effort it's very vague I'm sorry I cannot be more specific than that but three items processed at the time at the same time is really the maximum when in learning mode so discovering everything because new tasks has a much higher cognitive load that familiar or automated ones think that about the efforts it took you to learn how to drive the first time you have you really had to mentally process everything to fill a lot of attentional resources but once trained like later

when you really have that going and you can just sing along while you drive it's automated so you don't have to really allocate too much resources in there so the same thing for the player the first time he learns about a mechanic it's gonna require a lot of cognitive load loitered down line when the player really had that gone it's trained to doing it it's more automated it does not require as much cognitively so three items could be one using an ability to react to an enemy attack recognising enemy movement while three dodging enemy poaching tile that's what are you sorry so the controls of your game are peculiar that would count as another item so to this year UX test video from Paragon so Paragon is our new MOBA again very early it's UX test footage and check out that so this is the very first

game that the player is playing and so it starts it's entering in the arena right away even though we had that big flashing red thing telling the player hey you should you know you can't actually have an ability right now you can upgrade one here but the player doesn't even look at it it just jumps right into the arena it's fashioning we're really trying to draw attention to that and is trying a few things all different than me there who's running towards the enemy trying to figure that out aiming dodging and attack minions sometimes gonna pop down we were looking at the thing that's going I just not even gonna process so during onboarding mining the cognitive load is straight on so the challenge will not be seen as mastery by the player somebody seen as an audience or words the player would be put in a failure this is likely going to three

stress that now we can capture with biometric controls and that can lead the player to simply stop playing and he's gonna blame it on the game so f2p game must mind the cognitive load in working memory there are many ways to reduce the cognitive load here such as distribute learning over time which we're gonna see you later you can also use affordances to limit the cognitive load what is intuitive does not need to be learned therefore requires less attentional resources to process in design and affordance gives that provides something that helps a user to do something now four kinds of affordances in your design I'll give an example of it right after you had a physical affordance that's a feature that helps users and doing a physical action in the interface for example a button that is large enough so that you just can click on it accurately you have cognitive affordance it enables thinking learning

understanding knowing about something for example a button label that helps use your know what will happen if they click on it form follows function is the cognitive affordance you have sensory for this has a design feature that helps users send something for example label font size large enough to be discerned and you have functional affordance the design feature that helps users accomplish a task for example a sort functionality in an inventory there's a salty the perceivable part of an affordance is a signifier so as a designer you care about placing signifiers to enable the players to perceive the affordances so physical affordance facilitates physically doing something such as a handle on the door physically helps you operating the door so you want a button to be large enough to tap on it to click on it or you want two buttons to not be too close to each other to avoid miss clicks see the fit slow for these things or on mobile interactive areas to be

comfortable to reach a cognitive affordance if we saw facilities or enables thinking about something they help users to know what to do so the pull handle offers both cognitive and physical affordance because it provides a physical means for pulling as well as a visual indication that proving is the required action and for tonight you have three different symbols representing three types of materials remember you can build and craft and how many of them of each the player has so that helps players understand what they can do with it cognitive of forints can go wrong and basically false affordance it is when the perceived affordance is not the one intended given the functionality here's the example of the acts in for tonight so you had a lot of weapons and tools you actually have one tool that is really effective for harvesting just one

is to pick ax but you have all the other elements we can have our melee weapons so the axe is a miller weapon of course originally it was not the intent the design intention to put an axe and the player's hand and say no you cannot actually chop off trees with that initially they wanted to have one specific tool for each specific thing we can harvest like the axe for the tree the sledgehammer for a wall and stuff like that but it was too demanding reason like that it was not really Sun so they removed that functionality and there you end up with a false affordance because of that because now players can have an axe but it has to be used for mailing and not for Chavez trees so folks cognitive affordance misinforming measly the players and then it makes it much harder to teach them the right thing and it's frustrating for the players on top of it so you really have to pay attention with that and then that's leave the sort of things that happen just it happens because the

design change so have to stay focused on that sensory affordance using one helps players since in something seeing hearing feeling this is what we call the perceptibility of finds and feedback it includes no disability discern ability legibility in case of text and audibility in case of self so in that case of course that's a bug it's not by design the you when you die you can click to respond the the text is hidden behind a health bar and so the fire dot cannot receive it also isn't more someone and for tonight you had the home base and you had buildings and these buildings increase your stats and see more you can even more increase your stats by slotting workers in there so when you click on the plus button near to style worker it's so it was showing the workers you could slot including the ones already slotted elsewhere subtly indicated by that red

corner mark I'm sure you saw it right of course players didn't see it and on this video you can see you'll see the player going back and forth in the two buildings tranches slot worker not realizing he's sliding unloading the same one over and over Oh worker there the fine oh there's I I had one in the hospital so we have to pay attention to that hmm functional or affordance this is one that is huge its usage to usefulness this is when you add a functionality such as sorting and categories to have the player find something filtering and

that isn't for you while there's filtering but there's also a painting mechanism so it can help player craft something faster you want something and pin it on the head so you don't have to do that again again so designers have to make sure that this is really useful but you have to make sure that the functional affordance you're designing is really going to be useful to the player and not just add noise of complexity refer you to the Pareto principle is like the 80/20 principle 80% of the time people use only 20% of the functionalities so be careful not to add too much stuff that peers are not going to use some interfaces feel easy to use why all this drives us nuts and requires manuals are sticky notes in that example it will greatly help remove barriers for your players first steps in your game if you have good affordances or should I say good signifiers because if it doesn't you'll need tutorial texts

our players will have to make an extra effort which they often don't go and do it to figure out on forums how to use this or entering certain functionality so the key takeaway here for discovery is you have to mind the attention the attention limitations and the cognitive load for the player your main objective is to make sure that your games going to be easy to make sense off and to remove barriers and as this is my design if it's not by saying remove all the barriers at that moment use and this is an example the usability principles we saw a lot of UX design principles actually the affordances for example all right so learning although learning by doing is recognized as being one of the most efficient ways of learning especially when it comes to an interactive experience tutorial texts are still frequently used to teach them in components of the game that's easier

research suggests that we learn best when we are cognitively engaged and active when learning experiences are meaningful and socially interactive and when learning is guided by a specific goal so let's take a look at active tutorials so we saw that last time like it's really really important so I put that here again but I'm using onion opal the deeper you're going to process an information focus your attention the better you're gonna learn and retain so that means you need to give context to the player means the player should be able to learn by doing and you need meaning it has to be worthwhile now for the player for his life for his mission for his goal all right so here's an example where you don't have any context you cannot do the things you're taught at that moment and there's no meaning so this is again from Paragon alpha this is the loading screen so look at the the eye tracking so the player is waiting

for the game to load is not really reading all the things and is especially not ringing the match basics it is really the most important information frame is the first time we're going to play the game so you need to understand what are their the subtlety of Paragon it's just like going back and forest not really reading music you're just gonna look at a few controls and that's it here's another example when you have context so it means that you can do it while you'll talk but there's no meaning so in four nights you can build and what we saw is like figures we're building goals all around them and then we're like oh I can't get out you can edit doors and for tonight but they didn't know how to do it so they were just like sliding down a door and so we really needed to teach them how to edit doors because it's really important to enjoy the game and so this is what they team did the

beginning so you have context and new meaning listen to what the narrator says in that example so you found the gate let's close it press e to deploy your atlas of storm suppression device don't like it when you start closing that gate you might want to build up some strong defenses around it to slow the enemy down then just this one time I'm going to protect in an area you should build in to protect your Atlas good wall is it thing of beauty but don't forget about doors yes doors when there's a wall away choose doors raju by the building submenu we're in a society and the letter g' he heard it it looks like they know we're here until check your mini-map to see what direction the enemies will be coming from build your differences accordingly of course you didn't do it you build

that box around the thing he had to protect and then when the house the enemies are coming is actually like oh I cannot really see what's going so what he did is he placed a stair stair well so you could climb up vanities a lot of players we're doing that so we're like it's not working still you have context here that's not a really meaningful and there's a lot of information going on here so when the team did afterwards they tried to impress me and this is how it looks like now [Music] [Music] it's just beyond this wall let's use edit mode to add a door hit G [Music]

success so now we know that the player do it and so II really process information it was actively doing it so this is when you actually have meaning so you want to avoid that as much as possible of course you cannot avoid that all the time and you want to try to have more learning by doing and if you can add meaning even if Samin better but sometimes it means that you have to put an obstacle in front of the player and it has to overcome it and usually players they hate tutorials in the length this is but the promise if they don't have these tutorials there are more likely to to leave the game so even if they don't like it you might you have to not make them happy but at least they're gonna learn the mechanics of the game and keep playing another thing to remember here please please avoid punishing States

during on boring during an importantly and I'm talking to you blood-borne and Dark Souls lovers out here if it's not clearly the main pillar of the game punishments you should never punish while they are learning about something you can finish later it's really fine but not while they are learning it why because players who die or have are having difficulties during the onboarding and less likely to retain this is actually what we found out looking into analytics data from fortnight's alpha without hardcore gamers out there so if they were having too much difficulty dying too often they were actually more likely to leave the game again your hardcore players might whine if they find the game too easy in the beginning still they will more likely keep playing so don't get crazy with your difficulty curve learn about the game learning about the game is already challenging enough for the brain but sometimes you just cannot provide context for example in loading screens

if you use loading screens to teach which you should because looting screens are boring there are ways to make it easy on the cognitive load this is a screen again very very early a PvP prototype and was the first time the team was actually trying to do that you access with it so they put a loading screen there to teach about have to do within that mode but the first building streaming it was way too much information to read and it was going too much into details that didn't make sense really to the players or didn't know anything about this mode it was too much about the what not enough about the why or how fairs are actually looking more at the cool art then about the text so you want to have like so again they just like hide that in last minute to make to remove some text and trying to make it easier to understand because of the curse of knowledge we have a tendency to explain that getting

too much into details probably doing that myself today apologies for that so explaining more about how to do all the things instead of mining the cognitive load explain more about how to do the things because you have to mind the cognitive load of the player they are discovering all these things so they care more about the why they're doing it not all about the details so if you are using the loading screens do not explain more than three things remember the working memory and try to focus on the why rather than how what using loading screens to occupy player is a good thing though because waiting is painful and it also it is also a matter of perception for example waiting times will seem shorter if there is a progression bar that has animation on it if this progress bar accelerates rather than decelerates or stops us that's dreadful so if players have something to do while waiting it's better instead of looking at the empty screen so do use the

loading screen to give information to players but they won't read it if there's too much or they do read it they're not going to remember it so remember the working memory limitations start to stick to three elements to process and focus on the why the why why do want to do that the purpose of these things is really meaningful to to us as humans so think you on boring and tutorial through player's lens it's more important to tease to the player the the why the purpos'd rather than get into the details if you motivate players enough then they will pay attention on how to accomplish a certain goal then they're gonna look at more into the details and look at the interactive elements they need to play with to get to that goal and so when you test your game also try to see the players get to the why so sure what I already do for example at they they play the onboarding

and in the survey at the end of their experience I show a screenshot of the game with an interactive element so you know for example something the players need to activate to do something in the game so I show an image of it and I ask them so what is this how did you use it why was it important for your mission so I also asked the players what was the objectives of the mission did they get why they were doing all this don't just ask them did you find the objectives clear because they're usually gonna say yes but if you ask them okay so what where the object is they usually don't get it all right so always ask them about the purpose of completing a mission to verify that they actually got it always make sure that the players get to the why that's really the most important thing so remember for all that you will teach the deeper the process the better the retention numerous studies in

psychology showed that learning is not simply a passive registration of information learning that sticks requires active minds on learning simply put the more the brain puts efforts into something the more it remembers and understands it so it's nearly scientific but overall the more you process information so if you really practice by doing or teach there's about something you learned it's going to be way more easy for you to remember three 1090 formation that if you just read about it so even with all that the players are gonna be forgetting about stuff so we need to understand better how a memory lapse works so if you remember memory ELO's allows us to encode store and retrieve or recall information therefore three factors can

detail oblivion it can be an encoding deficit this is when the information was superficially encoded because of the lack of attention or because of a failed elaboration process so workaround for that is all attention maybe the player process information and do it be emotional it could be a storage deficit the information was correctly encoded but it weakens with time so you need to give to repeat all the mechanics and try to make them repeat in different contexts it's even richer and lastly you can have a recalled deficit this is when the information is available in memory but it's momentarily inaccessible we have a broken link so to avoid that you can give reminders to have the player remember about something so here is an example from for age deficit so for the encoding deficit here's an example in from for tonight in for tonight by design you cannot repair weapons and so

we had we're alive right now in early alpha and many players in the Alpha population are asking how to repair with us they pushed him down the forearms all the time like how the hell'd he repair weapons you can't so the team decided to put the player in a situation where the weapon breaks right at the beginning of the game so we can tell them hey you cannot repair weapons so this is what you need to crack so that's the video of it but your guns broken your drone can't repair crafted items so we'll need to craft a new gun let's search the cave for the resources we'll need to craft a new weapon all right so the prior experience that the weapon is breaking you hear it you see it you can't repair it here's what the player was saying after that experience on the surveys the

light I'm confused about you know how to repair objects and forty nights there was no easy way to find how to repair weapons sitting like no work and this is because of an encoding deficit again it was not asking the player to put too much not enough kanji loading to that and so they didn't really include it it was a beautiful sound that just made the storage deficits at painting functionality for example allows the player to not store the information about what he needs to craft I just said always have it on the head so you avoid the storage deficit that's a functional affordance and we move from the remove memory load when it's missing you don't have that pinning functionality there's actually have difficulty storing the ingredients even if it's just that one ingredient is just a few numbers to remember period it's just hard to just remember one number is not you know just

one so of course it's not that design again it's something that the game the dev team is hacking through so we can test it but here's what happened so that's a very new feature it's ugly it's gonna be way better but all right now is only for the dice that's the outpost it allows you to upgrade your pickaxe which is the harvesting tool so it's super important for night and so to do that you need to have ingredients and we don't have the spinning right now so the player has to actually hidden there's a lot of problems here and you need to look at these fields get it is goes back it's always a third time and looking at that you know it's not that much it's just one you just needs one degree does that get it that's me

so you can see like even this is just one information to retain it's not too much I know how to use that it's still very difficult to retain the information because you're running around you're doing a lot of different stuff so this is really showing how impactful it can be to have these sort of reminders like on the head to have the player not store information about recall so and for tonight in the first level we teach players how to craft in a deep way we they have to do it so it's learning by doing a video of it let's craft a better gun for Ramirez matter open your inventory and flush the gun submenu exit learning good permission is encoded I'm graphing reward um and then this is

what happened like about 20 minutes later the players furniture is out outpost he loses all his ingredients because he's what heroes but anyway so this is how it happens he doesn't have anything and so we drop because well it's in flux your outpost is vulnerable to attack so be ready to defend it but this you can craft a lot of cool the players just taking the greens not protecting anything if combat still

and so this is what the player said at the end the student said I could not remember how to get to the crash screen he knew he could do it it just did not recall how to do it so we should have given a reminder after like even dropping all the ingredients we should have tell told the player hey remember like press I to get to your inventory craft and 11 so we sell that repetition is important to remember something remember the forgetting curve so this is projected forgetting curve so when you teach a feature you actually don't need to give repetition at at the same space you can't actually space it out with feature a you can give a reminder bit later because each time you reach about something the forgetting curve is getting smoother so of course in between these lapses you can teach another feature this looks super ugly but you

get the look at the point so reminders are more efficient with spaced out but also when the context does not stay the same for example to teach your players how to use a new weapon first teach how to shoot steel targets and then moving targets and party included targets then moving targets for dodging etc you need multi contextual repetition and you combine with more mechanics to learn all right we talked a lot about country psychology and active learning principles so let's briefly tackle behavioral psychology here to give you an idea of how you can use it we're talking about classical conditioning it's when to evens have happen close to each other repeatedly over time so you hear the bell and I said food going on and you repeat your pizza then you salivate only when you hear the bell so that's good associate learning you've been conditioned so you learn two movies how about this zone

[Applause] if you're conditioned so there's a lot of examples of classical conditioning game usually with the musical sang exam for example the music stops in some games when there are no more enemies left to kill conditioning can be very powerful to teach some mechanics it can work very well like really too deep like all especially by associating sound with another event so be nice you're some designers cuz you need them alright so mind memory load mind memory lapse main objective is to make it easy to learn to do that deep context and meaning and use running principle alright let's part to truly immerse your audience beyond removing the barriers need to mind the game flow never too easy you know too hard mind emotions including the game feel and motivation today I only talk about motivation since game studios are increasingly interested in motivation

mechanisms so motivation is not only cool because you're engaged and like you want to do something it also helps attention this is I'm from cognitive psychology development psychology and Jean Piaget is a development psychologist who is trying to understand how children learn and how you know some cognitive mechanisms come to children one of these examples is how number comes to children so he was using a bunch of tasks to test the kids one of these tasks were to put like two lines of tokens one line with more tokens but it's more compressed and another line with less tokens but more spaced out anyways asking kids so which which row has more tokens until 6 to 7 years old children actually choosing the bottom line because they say it's it's longer

so they think they have more numbers in there so John page was like ok kids are a bit stupid icon 67 years old that don't really have a concept of number until another psychologist called nether changed a little bit the task intent instead of tokens he used Candy's exact same thing he said to the kids hey there are two lines of candies which line has been more candies and what you're gonna take that line for yourself surprise it succeeded at two years old so we learn better when we are motivated because we pay attention more so that's one of the main reason why it's super important to get your place motivated into learning one of your mechanics of your game so how does motivation works it's complex of course like anything but you have explicit motivation and implicit motivation exclusive motivation is you have extrinsic motivation the rewards we

know about that you do something get something but you have intrinsic motivation as well so fires engagement is typically driven by extrinsic motivation but players because players want to achieve external rewards and avoid the apposite typically the absence of reward however intrinsic motivation is even more powerful for long-term engagement research seems to indicate that games that satisfy basic psychological needs for competence autonomy and lateness this is a self-determination theory will more likely be engaging so people and players are driven by an increase of their competence a sense of progression autonomy meaningful choices and self-expression and relatedness the social aspect intrinsically motivating experience are known to be deeply engaging for children and also like as in the experience of flow in which a person loses his or her sense of time will engage in activity rings animals but there's also implicit motivation how

a dirty little secrets such as life and death drives and power seeking you surely also have heard of the brain pleasure centered triggered by learning another novelty among other things and the brain reward circuitry well known by casinos so we need to buy all these things and it's again we're just scratching the surface of them but here's example have you can do that Nintendo is super that you can tease the players because it's more motivating motivating to get a meaningful we will reward than just a pat on the back or to unlock it out of context achievements tutorial completed Congress so an example of Zelda this is from Phantom Hourglass MTS before even learning about the existence of a grappling hook the player starts encountering these poles everywhere sometimes you even see a pole next to chest you cannot reach and then get the grappling hook and then you have that

Eureka feeling yeah this is what the bulgar for now I can use that new tool - you've reached the chest I remember from so that's really important in design and this is the locks and keys show the locks before giving the keys the locks will tease and model big players to figuring out give them agency and once they get the key it will feel way more rewarding because it's a more meaningful and intrinsic impact here's another way you can simply choose your players let's take a look a fortnight's head here so that's the new head the previous Hudson from a year ago you could actually do anything on the head you can place your weapons and abilities and gadgets anywhere you wanted but we saw that players they were gaining a new ability or new gadget and there were not even using it so what the

so what the designers did they redid the head and they compartmented the different elements you have so you usually don't see the names it's just when you open the inventory but you see you have one slot for harvesting tool because this just one horizontal and you have it for your weapons and stuff for gadgets and slots for abilities and this is where you can actually see that hey there is another slot as empty it means I can get something soon and once you see that the slot is now full you are more motivated to actually try this try this new gadget so that's that it's an easy way to get the players motivated because you can see that it's empty then you see that's full until you try it so to get engagement and notaire motivation you also need depth so this is an example of character midterm and long-term motivation with pokiman so you

see that at the beginning you need just to win the match that's your short-term goal catch more pokiman then midterm goal is going to be to beat the next trainer and to involve your postman and you always have that long-term goal you know we gotta catch them all and be ble for so that's really important if you had these to convey all these depth but the risk is you don't want it to be too complex and overwhelming so fire so that's a bit complicated when you do want to show the depth and the long term goals last year to do a quick digression on social impact on learning humans are highly social creatures this is how we get we got to survive overwhelmingly research and education has found that cooperative and collaborative learning environments are optimal so games in general and multiplayer games in particular can really benefit from social learning but simply having a social partner is not enough though the social interaction has to be the high enough quality that is does not detract

from the learning situation so a good way to do it is mentorship in mentorship in games such as Eid and Team Fortress 2 so think about how you can meaningfully enable social learning in your game or even outside of the game after all social learning with Minecraft happens when the outside of the game on YouTube on Twitch so to get to immersion mind the emotional response the complexity versus depth their main objective there is to teach the player to show the progression path and you can use motivation principles again sorry I'm just going through all that very quickly but just to give you an overall understanding of this so let's wrap this up research research and science of learning I would suggest that there are three kinds of engagement behavioral engagement it's like following the rules destruction so in our case is very close from removing the barriers to making sure the game is usable car leaving havens investment in learning active

learning an emotional engagement effective reaction which is at the core of motivation so each type of engagement is critical for learning because they all foster staying on task stay engaged that's why you need to keep in mind these elements as always keep in mind also the limitations of the brain and you can use York skylines as a checklist but this is just a checklist these is just ingredients it's not the recipe I'm sorry sadly all this knowledge can only get you that far what we saw our ingredients again it's not the recipe the recipe this is what you gonna have to figure out by tweaking the ingredients supercell recently said in an interview that it killed 14 games before it was able to successfully launch its fourth game clash Royale 14 this is another example this is showing League of Legends beta versus now you can see like they had a very huge and

awesome uux team there and you can see all the iteration that went through to get there so at least with these ingredients it's gonna save you time and had the right message to right mindset to progress faster through iterations to good luck that's it I hope this stuff was useful to you and pulls these flies on my blog ASAP and you will find the references to all the research I was talking about as well I like to warmly thank the 49 appearing teams following me show their rough design and artwork special thanks to Peter Elias our our director on for tonight who I know is dying a little bit inside each time I'm showing your own the artwork yes he lets me do it a big thank you for you all for waking up early in to share some lyrics love with me so thank you thank you very much you [Music]