The Gamer's Brain, Part 3: The UX of Engagement and Immersion (or Retention)

Hi everyone. Thank you so much for being here cuz we honestly we should all be drinking beer at that time. Um so I really appreciate you being here. Um my name is Celia. I've been in this industry for about 10 years now. I've been working at Ubisoft, LucasArts, and I've been at Epic Games for the past 4 years. Uh before I start I would like to warmly thank you for the from the bottom of my heart cuz this is the first the third part of a gamer's brain trilogy. Uh and I would I wouldn't be here without without you all without your feedback, without encouragement, and your support. So I'm really honored to be a part of such an amazing community and that you find my [ __ ] interesting. So thank you very much. All right. Um I'm going to do quick explanation about cognitive psychology principles and about UX that I talked about in my previous talks. So I'm not going to explain any of these, but I just want to make sure that you

have the basic understanding so we can be all on the same page if you haven't seen these talks. Um so what UX is about is all about making sure that your user is going to experience the game the way you as a designer as a developer intended. So you want the image of the system the game to convey truthfully the experience you want to offer. Uh to do that we explore how player perceives, interacts with the game, and the satisfaction and emotions elicited via this interaction. So UX takes its roots in cognitive science and human factors and in human computer interaction. Uh UX principles rely on cognitive science knowledge. So this is why you need to understand how the brain processes information. Today we're going to look into motivation more specifically and motivation is one of the variables influencing information processing. Disclaimer, this is highly simplified. The brain is not working like that. It's not in separate buckets, uh but it's

just a way uh for me to communicate about what we're talking about. Making games is very complex, and so is the brain. Surprise. All right. So, the main purpose of this talk today is to understand better the mechanisms of retention. And the reason why we care uh for free-to-play games uh is that to make money, you need to first retain players, right? Uh paid up front games also care about retention because players who retain are more likely to convince their friends to buy the game as well. Uh so, retention at its core means engagement. Also, if you're engaged in an activity as a player, it's more visual pleasurable. So, not only is good business practice for you, but it's also a good UX practice uh for the player. Owen. Okay. So, the part of UX that is more specifically relevant to retention is what I now call engageability. So, I used to call this part game flow because it's a familiar concept in game game development.

Uh however, it didn't quite encompass uh all what's important to engage players and retain them. Uh this is why I'm now using that weird term uh that some of my colleagues call [ __ ] Looking at you, Ben. Um and it's fair cuz it sounds a bit pompous, but it has the advantage of expressing uh the ability of a game to be engaging, just like usability is the ability of the game to be used. So, I like it, so maybe uh it's going to be okay. Uh so, usability and engageability are not working in silos. Uh they interact with each other. Uh but, just like the the brain, there's interaction everywhere, but we're separating buckets to make it easier to talk about. All right. So, here's how I'm breaking down engageability uh these three pillars. You have motivation, emotion, and game flow. So, please note that this is my mapping of how to make games more engaging. Uh it's based on academic research on one hand and on my own game uh dev

experience with various teams. Um so, motivation is at the origin of all human behavior and ultimately engagement is all about motivation. Emotion and gameflow contribute to motivation. Emotions serve motivation in the sense that they help us uh choose the right behavior. So, if uh you see something that scares you, you flee. Gameflow is a state of deep focus and immersion, which is a concept often used in games. Uh it's also important for engagement. All right, a little warning here. This talk is going uh I'm going to cover a lot of [ __ ] super fast in that talk. Uh the reason why I'm doing this is one, you're an expert audience uh and you should have a good understanding about all a lot of these concepts I'm going to present here. Uh and two, even though rewards and motivation are very popular topics at GDC, it's pretty rare to see these topics tackled um having a bigger picture in mind. And this is what I want to do today by giving you the big picture uh and I will dive more deeply

into a few of these concepts for each pillars uh and more specifically regarding motivation. But the idea really I want you to have the big picture rather than like look just at one thing. Um but it's going to go fast and uh by the way uh these slides are going to be on on my uh blog uh this weekend so you don't have to write down everything. You're going to have all these uh um this weekend. All right. So, motivation is that the origin of any behavior. Without motivation, there is no action. So, it's pretty cool for the survival of organism needing movement to survive. Uh therefore, it's key to understand where human behavior come from and by extension to understand what players uh what make players tick. So, I'm using a tree here because we often talk about meaningful choices when referring to motivation and games often have uh skill trees to offer meaningful choices to players. So, human motivation is super interesting, but the problem is that there are a lot of motivational theories in psychology,

and I mean a lot. So, this is a Wikipedia screenshot, and this is does not list them all, like not even close. Um so, you need to understand this about motivational motivational theories. There are countless theories that have been proposed to explain uh human motivation, but there a solid meta-analysis is still missing to make sense of it all. So, remember that there's no current consensus, nor there is a unified theory of human motivation that can account for all of our drives and behaviors in a clear mapping. Uh so, keep that in mind cuz we always talk about one or two uh motivational theories, but you have to keep in mind that there's a lot out there and there's no consensus at all. Uh so, here is what I propose. Um this is an attempt to organize human motivation in a simple mapping, therefore inaccurate because science is complex, uh but to help game development to again help to talk about these things. Um so, here are the uh four buckets.

Um you have implicit motivation and biological drives. Um so, basically it's impulses. Uh you have personality and individual needs. Uh so, you might have heard of one of them a personality model with which is ocean. Um then you have environmental shaped motivation and learned drive drives. So, basically it's behaviorism. And the last one that usually people talk a lot about a lot uh is intrinsic motivation and um cognitive needs. So, intrinsic motivation is when you intrinsically want to do something for its own sake uh because it's inherently pleasurable to you. Another disclaimer here. Um Um Oh, so and yes, as DCT is the motivational theory that is usually named here. Uh so, these are not really separate buckets. Again, uh they're not independent from one another and they're not hierarchical, contrary to what maybe you heard of

Maslow uh pyramid. Uh it's called the hierarchy of needs and actually they are not uh hierarchical. So, I'm going to very briefly introduce the top two, but very very briefly again just for you to have a clear mapping of it all. Uh but I'm move on to the two bottom for the sake of time uh since these are more particularly relevant to us. Okay, so biological drives are very basic needs that we share with other mammals. For example, hunger, thirst, uh need for sleep, pain avoidance, and sex. All powerful innate uh physiological motives aim to satisfy our biological drives. Um there's other implicit that also can influence our social behavior, which is more relevant to us. Um three of these implicit drives have been more particularly studied. You have the power motive, that's one's motivation to dominate others. You have the achievement motive as the motivation to improve on a task. And you

have the affiliation motive as the motivation for close and harmonious social relationships. Um so, depending on the how strong these drives are within individuals, they will influence the pleasure we feel from certain situations differently, which in turn will influence our behavior. So, not everyone is super excited at the idea of dominating others, for example. So, keep that in mind if you really truly appreciate uh to dominate and humiliate others, it might not be the case for everyone. Just a party. All right, moving on to the next bucket. I told you I would just um describe it very briefly. Um So, generally when you talk about individual differences, we mainly think about personality. So, OCEAN or Big Five is about personality differences measured against five traits. You see these five traits here. For example, some people score high in extraversion mean that they are more outgoing than people score low on that trait.

OCEAN model model like all the personality model has a lot of limitations. First, it's not stable during your lifetime. It means that the personality that you have at 17 years old is not going to be the same personality that you have at 65 for example. So, it's not stable over time. Also, it cannot accurately predict behavior. So, it's not because you understand the personality of someone and you have a clear mapping of that clear mapping of that personality that you can predict what that person is going to do. And lastly, it does not explain all of human personality. However, it's the most robust model model we currently have and it's certainly interesting to keep it in mind to account for human motivation. For example, an individual who scores high in openness might be more motivated to accomplish a creative task than a low scorer on that trait. Nicky from Quantic Foundry is using this model to account for gamers preferences. So, you might have heard of that.

All right, moving on. Okay, so This one is really interesting. The reason is it's video games are it's a specific environment that is shaping players behavior. So, these learn drive bucket is really important for us and it's mainly about rewards and punishments. So, here you are. Um I'm going to have to describe this a little bit. It's it's a bit boring but that after that is going to be better. So, responses from the environment the game is the environment. Uh, after players' action, the behavior can either be positive or negative. When it's positive, it means that we're adding we're adding something. Uh, the player receives a carrot or is hit by a stick. When it's negative, it could it simply means that we subtract something from the environment. Well, uh, we subtract a stick, um, a stick or a carrot is removed, uh, from players. So, depending on how this feedback from the environment is

perceived by players, uh, the players' behavior will either increase, be repeated, they're going to do the action again, or decrease, stop. Uh, here are some, uh, examples for the positive reward example, you kill an enemy, you get a reward. So, it feels rewarding, therefore you're likely to do that behavior again. A negative reward example would be you equip a shield, um, you, and therefore you don't get one shot killed anymore, uh, by an enemy. So, we remove the pain of dying, therefore you're likely to keep that shield again. Um, a positive punishment would be you tower dive in a MOBA, you die. Uh, so if you understood what happened here, you are likely not doing that behavior again. And a negative punishment would be you commit toxic behavior in a MOBA. Uh, for example, you get banned from the game, so we remove the game from you. Or you did not manage to retrieve your souls and you lose them all.

By extension, uh, a negative punishment could happen if you collect, say, 100 flags in Assassin's Creed and you do don't get any meaningful reward for that. Um, so even though it's not really something that we remove from player technically, uh, if an expected reward doesn't come, it can be felt as a punishment. So, yeah, I love you, Ubisoft, but that traumatized me a little bit. Getting these flags. Okay, so this is just a mapping of these these rewards and punishments. Now, you have different types of rewards. Rewards can be given either continuously or intermittently. So, continuous rewards is when player action is always rewarded. So, that's really important for learning and for game feel, which we're going to talk a little bit later. Intermittent rewards is when player action is sometimes rewarded. So, that's

more important for sustained engagement. So, let's dig deeper in this kind this one because it's a very frequently used in game. All right. Rewards can be intermittent either based on time, it's called interval, or based on player action, it's called ratio. Both of these reward types can be given expectedly, so at a fixed interval or ratio, or unexpectedly, at an uncertain interval or ratio. All right, let's use some examples from games because I understand it's getting a bit complicated. Okay, so this is an example of a fixed interval reward. So, in a game like Fortnite when you have daily rewards, like every day you come back in the game you have a reward that's waiting for you. That's a fixed interval reward. Another example would be Clash of Clans when you're starting building something or you're waiting for your reward, you have a clear timer on it. So, you know that after that time you can come back

and collect your reward. So, this is good to lure players back in the game. But once they're here, you need to have something else for them to do. So, either multiple rewards happening, so like in Clash of Clans, or once you're in the game in Fortnite, you have a quest that's waiting for you, or you have a message saying, "Hey, your friend is playing. Do you want to join um, join him or her in that game. Sometimes it can be a fixed interval, um, before removing a reward. So, this is an example you have in stores. Uh, it could be you can get that thing, um, rented to pay for it, uh, but it's going to be removed in, whatever, in 24 hours. Uh, so this this is creating, um, uh, a you know that you not, uh, going to have the opportunity to have that uh, reward at all times. Uh, so you you don't want to see that window of opportunity, uh, closing. So, it brings you motivates you to try to get that thing, uh, before it's gone. Okay.

So, now a variable, uh, interval example would be the cherry, uh, bonus in Pac-Man, for example. It comes at a certain time, but you don't know, uh, you don't know exactly when. You know that it's going to be here at some point, but you don't know when. Um, same thing in MMOs, uh, when you know that a certain mob can spawn at a certain place, but you don't know exactly when. It's unpredictable. So, the reward appears over time unexpectedly. And, uh, fixed ratio example. So, this is all about, uh, when the player is doing a certain action, certain actions, um, uh, certain amount of actions. So, quests, for example, skill trees, uh, are examples of fixed ratio. You need to do a certain number of actions before getting the reward, or gaining the next, uh, skill. Um, progression bars are kind of, um, fixed ratio. It's not exactly fixed. It's fixed because you you have a certain you know, you have a certain, uh, number of points that you need to

collect in order to get at the next level, uh, but the rate at which you're getting these points is is not always predictable. So, it's a sort of, but not entirely. And the last one is variable ratio examples, it's of course gambling, uh, slot machines. You want something valuable to you, but you never knew exactly when you're going to get it. So, it's loot crates, card packs, chests, and all, etc. All right. So, now that we've seen all of these different types of rewards, let's see um how it can differently impact behavior. How can impact player action? So, you see that uh this is this is how this is the response rate. So, this is all the actions that the player do. Uh if you look at the top left one, uh it's a fixed interval, so you know that at some point you're going to get the reward, so you don't really do anything until you had that window that you knew that the reward is here. When the window is open, then you do the action, and as soon as you had the reward, you stop doing that

action until the next time. So, this is what these uh graphs are are saying. Um so, if you look at this, you look at all the fixed uh type, and um you see that the behavior pauses after you get the reward. Um and if the reward stops coming, this is really when you have a fast response extinction. If you look at all the variable ones, uh they're are the most steady response rate, because you don't really know when it's going to happen. Now, if you look at the ratio one, uh when you the player needs to do something, it's not just about time, you have to do uh something, it's creating a higher response rate. And the highest response rate and the most steady of all is variable ratio. So, as you can see, uh these different types of reward affect player uh behavior very differently. Uh so, when researchers say that extrinsic rewards can deter intrinsic motivation, yes, but really it depends

on many things. It depends on the type of reward, it depends on the context whether or not the person was intrinsically motivated to do the task without consideration of any rewards to begin with. If the reward is money or if it's a verbal pat on the back, is it a night in that I receive, etc. So, it's really hard to anticipate what's going to happen because it's depends on so many variables. Also, usually you see a decrease in intrinsic motivation and behavior when a reward is introduced and then removed. And that doesn't happen that often in games. So, I don't know if you were the session from Travis Day from Blizzard yesterday. And he mentioned in his in his super interesting talk that when players reach max level in wild, for example, then it seems that the rewards stop arriving because you reach the highest XP level or the highest level and so XP don't really matter anymore. But it's not really that rewards stop arriving.

They're still, you know, you still receive stuff for doing what you're doing. But it's more that you have reached a nameable already, the max level, and you might not have another meaningful goal to work towards. So, hence the importance of community events and new quests and content because you always want the player to be looking forward something. This is why rewards are highly related to goals and both must be meaningful to keep players engaged and a reward must be not an end goal, but it should be a means for the next goal. Okay. So, these are not mutually exclusive the list I'm going to give right now and these are really broad guidelines. In practice, like I said, there's a lot of subtleties depending on the context, but consider all rewards and punishment in your game provide because everything in your game, all the feedback that's happening in your game are either going to be perceived as a

reward or as a punishment. Always give feedback to all player actions. We're going to talk about that in game feel. But, uh, give consistent reward for most meaningful actions. And remember that the most the more time and effort it's taking for the player to accomplish a task, uh, the greater the reward, um, uh, is going to be expected. And an absence of these rewards, um, will likely be felt as punishment. Also, use rewards at intermittent intervals for player habit formation and player strategy. You can use rewards at fixed ratio to create a sense of mastery. You can use rewards of variable ratio for some chests, uh, to create excitement. And remember to mix it all. So, this is the reason why it's complicated because there are so many different types and so many different, uh, contexts that, uh, and variables are, uh, that are at play here. All right. So, the last bucket, uh, we're going to talk about, uh, intrinsic motivation about SDT, so self-determination theory,

that you probably have heard a lot because there is minimum two talks per GDC, if not more than that, that talk about SDT at some point or another. Uh, so I'm pretty sure that you know what this is. Um, so you have competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Uh, intrinsic motivation is all about the need for these three things. So, competence is about a sense of progression, a sense of being in control. Autonomy is a sense of volition, having meaningful choices, uh, and being able to express yourself. And relatedness is a sense of meaningful social relationship sh- relationships, either through cooperation or competition. And when we talk about undermining effect of intrinsic reward, it can take place when they thwart one or more of these three, uh, needs. So, this is why, for example, we give the illusion of control to gamers so they can feel a sense of autonomy even though the outcome is ultimately completely random.

So, the thing with, uh, with SDT is it alone cannot account for all human behavior. You have to take behaviorism and individual needs and drives into account. Undermining effect of extrinsic reward on intrinsic motivation depends on the context. Some self-determination theories moved away from the intrinsic extrinsic motivation dichotomy and talk now they talk instead about they have focus on distinction between autonomous and controlled motivation which with different types of reward. So, I'm going to talk about that right after. But ultimately it depends like how you perceive how Ultimately what the reward is going to be if it's going to be a more intrinsic, more extrinsic, controlling, or not controlling. It really depends on how the player is going to perceive it. And the most important thing you need to remember is goals and rewards must be meaningful to players. So,

the autonomous versus controlled rewards. So, you can have different types of rewards that are either controlling or of felt as more autonomous. Let's see the different types of rewards. See there's a lot of different different types. You have one the non-contingent rewards. So, these rewards are not related to any particular behavior from the player. So, you have a surprise gift just because the player did not do anything to get a reward. Now, you also have task-contingent rewards. These are the rewards that you get for doing something. So, either you get a reward for engage in an activity. For example, you're in the world you just accepted a quest or whatever and you find stuff in the world. It's rewarding your engagement. They can be rewarding completion. You have to finish a mission to complete a mission before getting a reward. Or they can reward performance. So, you have to complete a mission, but you get

a different reward depending on how well you completed the mission. So, as an example with the stars, you have to have a high performance to get all the three stars, otherwise you get less stars. So, um the performa- performance-contingent rewards that are given specifically for uh matching some standard of excellence excellence are likely to be experienced as the most controlling cuz you really have to perform something at certain level to get uh the reward. However, since they also can act as a feedback on competence uh and give you a powerful sense of mastery, the negative effect on the of the control can be counteracted by the expressions uh the expression of a sense of progression when there is such progression. So, in the end, rewards that are task-contingent but simply given for completing a task might be felt as less controlling on one hand, but they also do not offer any perceived increase of

competence and could therefore ultimately be the worst kind of all as far as intrinsic motivation is concerned. So, this is just an illustration that it's a complicated and not easily predictable. There is a lot of stuff happening and it's it's really not easy to have a clear understanding of it all. You need to have all these clear mapping in your head and there's no there's no just one one recipe that you can apply everywhere. Um so, try to uh make sure that uh the incentives are not trained to at least make sure that the player doesn't feel controlled uh by these incentives. Which is not easy to do, but anyway. Um swimming in rewards uh again, Travis Day yesterday mentioned that making players swim in rewards, being generous with them, and giving them a lot of um rewards was increasing uh increasing engagement, uh which I totally agree. Like they It was taking the example of Diablo III, and they were saying that if they're giving more rewards, players

were actually more excited and felt more rewarded and were engaging more. I totally agree with that. The problem is if it's only if these rewards have a meaningful value for players. So, I'm going to take the example from Paragon here, and you're going to see what's happening after the first match that you play. So, it's a match against bots, and you get a bunch of reward after your first game. It looks like that. All right. So, you you saw here that the rewards are flowing. So, the intent was to um make the player feel rewarded. But, the pri- the problem is that the player at some point you're just dismissing all these rewards. So, it could actually be perceived as more punishing or overwhelming than

truly rewarding because at that point, the player doesn't know what all these rewards are for. He doesn't have the need for looking into these rewards. He doesn't understand the value of these rewards yet. So, it can be really tricky to do that. You have to make sure that the rewards are meaningful to the player because if you receive all these rewards, it can be a bit um it can it can raise his anxiety cuz you can feel like, "Oh, [ __ ] I have to learn all that stuff at some point and what it means and what I can use them for." Uh so, you have to be careful with that because giving a lot of rewards, it's cool only if players understand what they're for. So, show the lock, show the purpose, show the goal before giving them a key or giving them rewards, which are means to an end. Okay. So, just to wrap up this part because I know it was a a big part. I know I apologize to go through that very quickly, but again, I really want you to have a a big a big picture of it.

Um so remember you have to give clear goals. Um so yeah, short-term, mid-term, and long-term is really important. Uh offer non-controlling rewards that give feedback on prior competence. Goals and rewards must be meaningful, uh which means that players must understand their sense of purpose, value, and impact for the game. And uh receiving a key reward should not be perceived as an ending point, but as a starting point for a new goal. So this is really important. If you're receiving a reward and it's the end of it, then you don't need to engage anymore. Uh the reward note must be perceived that you get something and with that you're going to do something else. So meaning can also be a sense of purpose greater than yourself. And this is why being parts of being a part of guilds or factions, it's really highly meaningful. Um so in For Honor, for example, you have a faction war that's persistent

cross-platform that's conflict between knights, Vikings, and samurai. And you're part of one of this faction, so whatever you do in the game, it's not only just going to impact you, but it's going to impact your faction. So it's it's a meaning that's greater than just yourself. Same thing in Pokémon, you have the different teams. Um there's another game that maybe you you played. It's called Noby Noby Boy. Uh so in that game, the player controls the character called Boy and and it's just you have to stretch its body on the planet. Uh and the player accumulates points by how much they stretch uh Boy during gameplay. And these points that the players earn at the end can be submitted online to grow Girl, another character that goes out of space. The points submitted online by players to girl are added cumulatively across all players causing girl to stretch into the Milky Way. So, girl starts on Earth and the more players are doing their stuff and and and winning in their own games, it's growing girl.

And it took for example 7 years for two newbie players to make girl reach Pluto together. So, that again is another example then whatever you do in the game has has a meaning that is greater than yourself. All right. So, you need to consider motivation as a whole with with all its complexity to maybe be able to anticipate your players behavior and project it engagement. So, please if you hear a simplistic one-fits-all solution about motivation, be dubious. Yes, it might sound so juicy to get a magic pill to solve all of your problems, but it doesn't work that way and ultimately you could it could mislead you if you don't consider all the complexities of human motivation. Yes, I know it sucks, but that's the way it is. It's complicated. Okay. So, now I'm going to briefly talk about motivation and game flow. As I said earlier, these both elements are

contributing to motivation. So, emotion serves motivation. When you detect a danger, you feel an emotion, fear, and that gets you to run away. Like you know, I'm sure emotions are critical to learning and survival because they guide us through our interaction with the environment as we seek pleasure and avoid pain. But emotion is also influenced by cognition. So, top-down processing involving prior knowledge, expectation, and judgment like appraisal of the situation is it changing the way uh the emotions that you're going to feel. Uh that's why presentation is important. If something looks good, that is nice bottle of champagne, uh you expect to have pleasure and indeed you're going to get a greater pleasure by drinking from that bottle of champagne rather than drinking for a one that doesn't look that good. Um so this is how your cognition, your uh expectation, your prior knowledge is going to impact

uh your what you feel about uh about something. It's going to impact your uh emotion. Similarly, if you experience something frustrating in a game for example, such as losing a PvP match, you might attribute your frustration not uh not to just the outcome of the match, but to the whole experience, to to the whole gameplay. Uh so you have to be careful with uh frustration to the players because they can uh generalize uh what they feel, uh but not to just the element that make them felt that way, but to the whole experience. And so that's the appraisal of a situation. And the interesting thing is what we call reappraisal. So appraisal can modify how we feel about a situation, helping players to reappraise their cognitive feelings might also have some benefits. So for example, instead of letting them feel bad as they see in big red letters that their team has lost and that they suck, uh you could instead emphasize that they did better than the winning team in some metrics or that

despite losing they have improved on some of their personal metrics. Overwatch is an example that is particularly good at that. Um and whenever you finish a match, you uh you see all whether you win or you lose. I tried to log to lose before going to GDC and and get the picture. I couldn't lose. Uh but anyway, it's Uh um but it's you see the same the same screen. Uh you see all these badges that you get whether you win or you lose. Uh and it's telling you whether you beat your career average um on different metrics such as number of kills, like here elimination, uh time stayed on the objective area, healing that you did, weapon accuracy, etc. So, this is helping you even if you lost and you feel bad, well, makes you reappraise that negative feelings to look at, "Oh, okay, it was not all bad. At least, you know, I did that stuff good and oh, I'm getting better at this." So, think about

ways to do that because in multiplayer games, there's usually half of the players that feel miserable at the end of the match. So, if you find a way to make them reappraise their judgment of their negative feeling, it's really it's really all win. Okay. So, in games, in game design, usually when we talk about emotion, we talk about two things. We talk about game feel. So, how it feels to interact with the game. And when we talk about that, we mainly talk about the three C's, so character, control, camera. We talk about presence as the presence experience when players have the illusion that there's nothing in between them and their virtual world when they perceive that there is they're simply inside the game without mediation about physical reality. So, it's all about it's it's it means it's it seems real when you shoot on something because you have particle effect or you have like some some visual effect and sound effect and feels real.

So, all that contribute to to the player to feel emotions when they when they play. So, it's a big it's a big bucket and that's the reason why I'm not going to really talk about it, but it's really really important. The other one is all about bringing discoveries, bringing surprises because this is going to impact the level of engagement and engagement and awareness. The brain uh, usually is is as when we see something surprising is going to wake us all up because it might be dangerous. Um, so just overall this is this is helping awareness uh, to have surprises and not it's not everything all the same. So just to illustrate uh, game feel a little bit. Um, this is why our direction animation, music, sound effects, all that is really truly important uh, because it's going to make the the game feel good to interact with. Um,

and so in Fortnite what we do when you open card packs, we actually doesn't look like card packs. It looks like a pinata which is uh, really close to the environment that the game world uh, and you don't just click on something. You have a stick or a uh, sword in that case to beat the [ __ ] out of it. Uh, so it's really compelling. Uh, you really you really feel that you're going to do something interesting. Um, I'm going to show a show you a video of that and you're going to see that uh, the the eye of the pinata as uh, of the llama is actually following the mouse and as soon as you click on the button to uh, to like hit it uh, the eyes are retracting. It's a lovely day for loot. Have at it. Ooh. Oh, I am feeling lucky. Hey, check out this nice loot.

Super loud. Um, and so what what you saw here um, is that you it it's so the red circle by the way it's eye tracking. That's where the the players are looking at. Um, it's it's really making this part of the game like a toy uh, within the game itself. So, it's it's helping game feel. Also, just like the lever in slot machines, it gives you the illusion of control to a pinball machine. So, you we would see players trying to hit the lever in a certain way because they might believe that they're going to get an upgrade if they do that. They don't. But, they believe they they do and this is giving you the illusion of control, which brings bring you some autonomy and it's good for intrinsic motivation. All right. Here's another example of game feel. So, in Fortnite, it's an action building game and you you need to harvest a lot of stuff to build later on. There's a lot

of RPG mechanics in that game. And so, you spend a good amount of time harvesting in the world, especially if the you're the Outlander, which is the hero that goes out to harvest everything. And uh when you harvest, we actually have a again a mini game when you harvest and you see you're going to see that you have a little target which is called a weak point and if you hit that weak point, it's actually harvesting faster the the item and it's also each time you hit one of these targets, you hear a very nice rewarding sound and it goes up in tones. So, it's we don't not going to be able to hear it that well, but it looks like that. Yeah, the sound is not great because all these videos are coming from play tests. Also, it's pretty compressed and the sound is not is not terrible, but this is giving you an idea when you harvest, you have the mini game that it's included in there.

And an example of surprise. So, in Fortnite, you you gather you run around in the game in the world and you sometimes find some chests and it's always a pretty exciting. But, at some point in the game, it's fairly late in the game, this is what can happen. Not a chest. So, the first time that happens to player, they usually pretty surprised and they're like, "Okay, what I'm going to get in loot?" They sometimes, you know, like take a sip on their uh whatever stuff they're drinking. And then there's, "Oh, no, it's actually an an enemy." And they need to do something about it. That makes them feel that actually they cannot take everything for granted in Fortnite. And so, it's

raising it's raising their awareness. So, surprise like that only work once, but you can do that across different stuff in the game. All right, that's all for emotion. I told you it would go fast. Uh let's look at game flow. Um Game flow is all about putting the player in the zone where it's not too easy, not too far not too difficult. Uh I'm sure you know that already, so I'm not going to describe this in detail. Um but, there are three components to game flow that are really important. Uh so, the first one is difficulty curve. Um you want to make sure that the challenge is not too easy to not difficult. Uh it's all about pacing as well. Uh you want the rhythm of the game not to be um the pressure not to be too strong uh and the stress not too strong, not too low. And it's all about the learning curve. So, learning curve is really really important. It's all about onboarding. Uh you want to onboard the player in a meaningful way. Uh you want to distribute learning over time. It's not

like too compacted everything in this and the at the beginning. Uh I had a whole talk last year about onboarding, so I'm not going to talk too much about it, but it's really really critical. And so, you know, I'm pretty sure you've seen that graph um many times, but one thing I want to emph- emphasize here uh is you don't have like in the flow zone, it's not a straight line uh because if the challenge increases at the same time as um the the player um a mastery is increasing as well, it never feels that you're getting better. Because if it's really growing uh in a straight line, it's it's not working that well. So, you need to have some times when you feel extra challenged and sometimes that you feel like super powerful and you're destroying everybody. Uh so, that's the reason why it goes in waves and it's not a straight line. So, you need to approach game flow like a um wave. You need to think about it as a sawtooth difficulty progression as uh game designers call it. And to create situations where old ability can be

compared to new ability and makes a player realize that progress was made. Uh it makes them feel competent and it's really important for motivation. Here's an example example from Shadow of Mordor. Um so, you have these nasty Uruks captains that are pretty difficult to beat at the beginning and actually some most of the time they're the ones who will kill you. Uh but they had all that Nemesis system that you can remember. Uh you can see clearly who killed you. It's not great for uh for appraisal of uh of feelings because they're all like boasting that they killed you and they're like, "Yeah, you suck." Um but on the other hand, at some point you're getting super powerful and you can kill these [ __ ] Uh and then it feels really Yeah, this is really how it felt when I played that game. And it's really um compelling because you remember how difficult it was to kill them. So, now clearly you you've become super powerful and at some point you can even control their minds. Um so, anyway.

You got that. Um so, you really need to give players a reference point to make them feel their growth because if it's growing always at the same level, you're never going to feel extra powerful at some point. So, you need to have that sawtooth challenge. Um pacing. Pacing is all about stress. Um you need stress. Stress is important. Uh if there's no stress at all, it's not meaningful. You're not willing to learn about anything. You're not willing to pay attention to anything if don't you don't have any stress. Um so, the problem is that if it's if it's too stressful, the situation is too stressful, um you might be less efficient because you're losing your [ __ ] uh because it's so overwhelming and so it impact your feel of competence. So, you need to find the nice balance. All about balance in games. Um not too stressful, but not low on stress, either. Uh to do that, for example, in Fortnite, the first time that you actually have to uh the introduction, the first time that

you can play uh the game, we place you in a situation where it's a little bit stressful because enemies are just spawning right away. So, you don't you don't have to, you know, you can't just like hang out like that. Enemies are here. However, they're behind a low wall, so they can't really get at you right away. So, you have a little bit of pressure, but it's not too much. Lead the way, Commander. Take him out. Did you see that? No. All right. So, you get the idea. Um so, you really need a little bit of pressure, but not too much. Another example on this one where now we're going to talk about onboarding.

Okay, I'm going to talk a little bit it, but not too much, I promise. Um but it's really important because if you don't onboard the player um well, if the tutorials are not made properly, then the player is not going to feel competent because he's going to get his ass killed. Um so, you want to make sure that this matters way more than you think. And um when we did did we look at the analytics in Paragon, uh we showed that the most impactful factors for churn were related to actually lack of competence. Like people dying from towers, for example, or not equipping cards were the most uh impactful factors correlated with churning early. Uh so, we would see in play tests a lot of core players that would tower dive. So, it looked like that.

Dead. Uh so, I don't know if you know that in a MOBA, you need to destroy towers, uh but the towers are you're going to get aggro from the towers if you don't let minions get in first, or if you're trying to destroy the tower to destroy actually try to um aim at some uh enemies while within the radius of the tower, then you get the aggro to you. And this is something that we would happen over and over and over again. We had players that were core players that would do these things because they didn't know exactly all these rules that the tower aggro rules. So, what we did later on is uh we uh had a tutorial level where we uh teach a little bit about the towers and tower aggro. And when we once we did that, we saw that retention uh got a little bit higher. So, it's really really important, and this is where you know, the top five issues that we saw in UX testing. So, what all about understanding the game, all about you being competent in the game. These were actually months before

launch where identified as later on as the most impactful factors for churning. So, keep that in mind like it's really important to nail your tutorials. All right. Yeah, that was the gameplay part. So, this is all that we saw today. I'm going to wrap this up really quickly. Um I'm going to try to at least So, retention and engageability is all about motivation which entails managing goals. So, quests, events, and rewards, but not only. Motivation has a lot to do with moment-to-moment emotions. So, this is all about game feel and surprises. It's also mostly about feeling competent and I have feeling a sense of growing mastery. So, gameplay and especially onboarding is really paramount. And for all these things, usability has actually a critical impact on all of the above because it impacts the level of friction and the sense of being in control. If

you have too many usability issues, it's likely that players are not going to feel any sense of mastery. If they don't understand the value of certain rewards, they actually don't even see perceive that they're receiving a reward. They don't see that there's a new goal or they don't understand why they need to do whatever. It's certainly not going to help their motivation. So, please do not neglect usability cuz usually a lot of problems are actually there. It's not that the there's motivation a design missing, it's that the players don't understand it. So, it's really critical to engagement, too. Um and if you I don't know if you notice, but the commonality here is you always have to think about what is the meaning for players. Like really truly there's one thing to remember is always think about the meaning for the players. Why would they care about your goals that you're setting for them? Why would they care about the reward that you're giving them? Is that a Is there a purpose for them to get it? Do they understand the value

um to get it? So, let me take one last example to illustrate this. Um and it's also illustrating how to find out what's going on in your game. So, when you identify an issue in your game, for example, when your design uh for uh the loot, all the nice math that you're doing, it's actually not really perceived the way you intended by the players because when they uh say about, you know, how they felt about the loot, if there was compelling, not compelling, uh it's not necessarily um working the way you intended. So, a few things can happen here. You have three main possibilities. Either something is missing in the design, uh one system has not been implemented yet, so it's [ __ ] everything else, the balance is off, etc. Um so, this is when it's difficult because until the system is here, you can't really see how players react. Uh or it could be here, but it's not yet balanced well. The last uh possibility is the systems are all in well balanced, but they're not conveyed properly to the players, so they cannot

really perceive uh the true value of it. And so, when that happens, you need to figure out what's going on and where uh where is the where is the problem coming from? Um do you remember when I was talking about the mini game when you harvest and you you hit this little uh weak points? Um Actually, I'm going to talk about that first. Um so, in in Fortnite, we have a one of the feedback that we get from players is they feel that it's too grindy. Um you have to harvest all in Fortnite, but they really have that strong feeling that uh it's taking too much to grind to uh to get all the stuff, etc. And if you look at just the design and feedback when you uh harvest, you see that each time you hit something like a car, for example, you see that there's one material popping. It's metal. So, you get that you um are getting metal from the car, but this is the biggest thing that you see is the closest to the radical and you just see one piece of metal. But, in fact, you are actually just with one hit, you're actually getting like 13 of these pieces. So, it

might be that just the players are not truly understanding that each time they're harvesting something, they're getting way more than they actually perceive just because it's not clear on the feedback on screen. And we also had another problem for a long time with the weak points. So, when you saw the player like hitting the weak points and was actually rewarding, it actually took us a while to get there. At every beginning, the weak points looked like that and was yellow. And this is what we would see players do. Not hitting the weak point. Don't care. Nope. So, what I initially thought was okay, it's just probably just a usability problem. It's not perceived as something you need to hit because it looks like a feedback. Like, yeah, you're destroying [ __ ] and it's the same color, you know,

it's yellow. It's usually the color that you show like you're damaging something yellow orange. So, what we did is we changed the color of it. We changed how it looked like to make it feel more like, "Hey, you need to hit that stuff." And so, it changed and now it's blue. It's way more in your face and this IS WHAT HAPPENED. STILL NOT HITTING IT. AND SO, THIS IS LIKE, LIKE, "What's going on? Like, it's right in your face. It's blue. Why don't you hit it?" And when we are asking players, we were just showing the little hit point, the weak point and we're asking them, "What do you think that is?" And they were saying, "Well, it's just saying that I'm targeting that item when I'm harvesting." And we're like, "Oh, okay." So, in the end, what the designers did, the team did, is instead of having that weak point from the get-go, you would not actually have it at the very beginning. You would have to unlock it in the skill tree. At some point, you get a mission and you

need to unlock this thing. You see it in this in the skill tree, you pay for it, and then you see what happens. And then you get it. And this is only when that the players truly understood the value of this thing because they experienced what it is to harvest before getting that thing. We made it more meaningful to get that thing. And so, therefore, they immediately understood what it was for. We gave meaning to the weak point. And this is when we solved that problem. So, you always need to think about the purpose, and you always need to give a reference point to the players before giving something that is cool. So, the real challenge usually in games is to find the real issue before you can actually solve the problem. So, having a clear overall mapping of player engagement, know all these ingredients, and have hypotheses at the beginning which you can test as you develop the

game will help you identify the real issues and fix them appropriately. So, we always think we always talk about players' motivation. But, what about game developers' motivation? Intrinsic motivation is important for creativity. Guess what happens when you are given a motivation recipe that you have to follow. One, games end up being all the same, so players can now see the matrix, and everything is too predictable. The brain likes some change and some surprises, and so you don't have that emotion if it's too predictable. And the other thing is developers feel less volition creating the game. Uh therefore they don't put their heart and soul in it. Um so even if there was a secret sauce or perfect recipe for game engagement, there isn't. But even if it were uh existing, game development is mostly a creative endeavor. Uh so developers need to find their own recipe to be motivated and ship quality. So the ingredient approach works better for uh innovation.

And so as UX practitioners, we're here we're only here to provide guidance. We can provide game developers with a methodology like user research and guidelines such as these UX pillars, the ingredients that are important for offering great user experience. But in the end, it's going to be up to you to make your own recipe. And that's it for today. Thank you. All right. I talked a lot, but there's still 5 minutes for uh questions if you want to come up to the mics. Hi Celia. Hi. Great talk. Um I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about Hm, how do I want to phrase this? Difficulty adjustment in a game that applies to like a wide audience. So an example would be like an Uncharted, if I'm wandering around and I'm lost, it'll put like a little tip on the screen and say, "You actually have to go over here." Um I'm just wondering like when a game apply applies to a wide audience, like

how do you make that decision when you're developing the game like to actually like improve the level design versus actually like pointing out stuff to the person that's struggling? Yeah, that's a great question. Um so overall, it's usually a good practice to have uh contextual tips. Uh so you don't necessarily depending on how complex a certain behavior uh it is for the player to learn, uh you can just like get away with it not have a cool big tutorial about it, but just give a contextual tip. Uh so only the players who are lost see it. Or it could be you had a tutorial about it, but at some point later in the game you forget about it. Um so having a contextual tip is helping. So usually if it's done well, uh it is cool because feeling lost and not knowing where to go can be very frustrating. And so you feel that sense of autonomy and control. You don't feel in control of the game. On the other hand, if it's happening too early, uh it can feel controlling. Um so the problem is that everything in games all about balancing. Uh so you

don't want players to be lost, but you don't want them to feel controlled uh by some pesky comments. So it's all about if you can make it more subtle, you know, try to uh draw the attention to something rather than just having a text, it could work as well. It really depends on on the context, but if if really that they've been wandering 4-5 minutes, uh it's it's better to give them a solution so they don't stay stuck, for sure. Hi there. Uh you talked about the motivation that having things like uh clans or teams like like For Honor with uh I can't really hear you. What can you Sorry. You talked about the motivation that having things like clans can add to the game. For using For Honor as an example, the samurais and the watchers and all that. Um how do you manage the balance between the emotional connection to losing that battle uh with providing that motivation for the player? Yeah. Um it's all about trade-offs uh yet again. Um

So yeah, if you're in the clan, it's it's always losing. Uh it can be feel a bit hard. Um so you have to make sure that you have ways to help the player to like I was talking about earlier praise uh what's going on so that negative feelings just like, "Okay, your guild sucks, but hey, you're the best of this guild." Um so it could be either that or making sure that the the the team if there's one is really overpowered, you give them like more difficulty, like you increase their difficulty or give them that's That's the reason why we have handicap in games like golf, so everybody can be at a certain level. It's not You You don't feel like you really You're really a loser or like games like Go. Um you have a handicap, so it's it's balanced. So, we can think about doing stuff like that, but it's There's always trade-offs for everything and like you say, we we need to design for it and to think about it. Thank you. Hey. I I would like to ask you

uh to give me the analysis of an example I give to my students. When you play Shadow of the Colossus, when you kill the Colossus one after the other, you understand that you are making something which is wrong. You There is a guilt feeling of guilty who goes all around the games. Yep. And after a certain time, you understand that you are going to be punished for what you are doing. Yep. But if you want to know the story, the end of the story, you have no choice, you have to kill the Colossus. Yep. So, it's very strange motivation. It is narrative motivation. I give this to show the long-term motivation in the game can be purely narrative. It's But I How you put it in the analysis of the motivation of the player? So, it's a little bit different uh because like you said, it's it's

really about narrative and it's about making you feel guilt, which is the point of that game in that in that case. So, if it's the point of the game is if it's the experience that you intend for players, then it's fine. You have to think about the trade-off, but you really you feel that towards the end of the game. Uh it's also a paid up front game, so you don't necessarily need uh retention as much as in free-to-play games. And it's uh so there's another great example from Brenda Romero, like she's remember the game like train and you you have to make sure that you place as many people as you can in the train and to make the space efficient until you realize that it's the train's going to Auschwitz. And that was the whole point of the game is to make you feel guilt. Uh, and only games can make you feel feel emotions like that. You don't necessarily feel guilt from watching a movie. So, if it's your intent, you know that maybe the player is going to not feel super motivated to finish the game, but it's you're playing with

that feeling of of of guilt. So, when it's the point of the game, then go for it as as long as you know the trade-offs you're making. Now, if it's not the point of the game, you should avoid it, especially if it's a free-to-play game. Uh, hi Celia. Thank you for the talk. Happens that I work on the math model of slot machines. So, it turns out slot machines all the rewards come from the real money that that is the payout. So, how can we apply all the theories of the rewards and events when the payout and the hit rates are all fixed in the math model? Yeah, that's a whole different beast. And like I said, there's no real recipe. I I'm it's hard for me to just like give you an answer just just like that. It it takes it takes a lot of different variables. Uh, any tips on the visuals

or the game flows? Yeah, yeah. And and that lady here maybe would have some tips for you. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. All right, one last question. What No, if there are no more questions. Okay. Are you good? thought we had all the time, but the Game Audio Awards are What do you mean we have all the time? We want drinks now. It's Right, exactly. Thank you very much, everyone.