Hi, hello – my name is Steven Thornton
and I am a Lead Games Designer.
I have 10 years of experience,
2 games design degrees
and I am here today with DevGAMM Online
to talk about engagement.
After my previous talks I got some feedback
that before starting the topic
people might like a bit more information
about my history and experience
so today we're going to start with a short
crash course through my career thus far.
Skipping over some work I did
with a small mobile company
my first studio experience was a hat trick
of summer work placements at TT Games
at the time better known
as Traveller's Tales,
and now best known as the home
of the LEGO video game franchise.
My first placement was on one of their few
non-LEGO titles, Guinness World Records.
My task was to playtest its many, many minigames to
help choose the trophy grades for the high score table.
I went back the next summer
to work on LEGO Rock Band
where my job was to set up the cameras
in the games various arenas
ensuring they didn't clip and rearranging the camera
and band members if they did
I often joke I worked on the part
nobody is actually looking at when they play.
My third placement was on
LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars,
and it became my first job offer.
I joined TT as a Junior Games Designer,
working mostly on level design,
paper plans and asset requests all the way
to hands-on integration in their proprietary editor.
I continued working similar roles on
a variety of LEGO titles,
along the way I took on more
systems design and ownership
and was promoted to Game Designer, Senior Game Designer and eventually Assistant Game Director.
After playing AGD a few times
I didn't see a clear path to Director
so I transferred onto a different internal team at TT
with a different structure and my title became
Lead Level Designer
However, just one project later they lured me back
with a Game Director job after all
on LEGO Ninjago: Shadow of Ronin.
FUN FACT ALERT!
That subtitle was a working name
I used for the project as a homage
to a game from my childhood
magically it got all the way from the page to the shelf
without any intervention from
opinionated publishers or IP holders
the first and probably last game I will name,
and it was a total accident.
There was a time without any projects to direct
so I helped out on LEGO Star Wars Force Awakens
taking ownership of the combat system
and some levels.
My last project at TT was Ninjago again.
I did the initial games design document and
green light pitch for The Ninjago Movie videogame
but before it started development,
I left TT for a new studio.
I moved to Saint Petersburg, Russia – where I now work
at a co-development studio called Sperasoft.
Co-development involves supporting other studios
whose workload has outgrown their internal resources.
Unlike outsourcing, co-development includes
taking some of the creative responsibility
usually ownership of a specific feature
or chunk of the game.
Sperasoft is part of the Keywords group and has over
600 people working across 3 development studios
the one I'm at in Saint Petersburg, plus one in Volgograd,
and one in Krakow, Poland.
Our partners are some of the biggest
and best game studios and publishers in the world
including EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Rockstar,
Riot Games, and Netherrealms, just to name a few.
You may not have heard of Sperasoft, but I bet
you've heard of some of their projects.
My first project with Sperasoft was
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege
where I contributed to the post-launch
seasonal updates,
working closely with the great people
at Ubisoft Montreal.
I joined as a Senior Designer, but within a few months
was promoted to Lead again.
After R6 I joined an existing Sperasoft team
that was working on the wildlife systems
 for Assassin's Creed Odyssey
and was there for a few months
before moving onto my current project
WHICH IS UNFORTUNATELY STILL UNDER NDA!
A real shame because it is one of
the most exciting projects I've ever done
but c'est la vie. Hopefully Sperasoft's role
will be announced very soon,
keep an eye on my Twitter, I will be announcing it
as soon as I can.
As you can see, I've worked with
a lot of different games, teams,
clients, intellectual properties,
genres and types of design.
Making the jump between
such different tasks and titles,
I've had a lot of opportunity to find
the transferable skills and philosophies
that underpin good games design choices
no matter what you're working on.
Also, as I've been in a senior or leadership role
for almost half my career
I have often been tasked with
mentoring younger designers
a job that calls on you to articulate your techniques
and preferences in a way that others –
even those less experienced in the industry,
can digest and apply.
A lot of games designers find this difficult.
I've had many spirited debates
with close designer friends
who argue that games design is inherently
unpredictable and cannot be structured.
Well, I choose to die on the opposite hill
which is that we owe it
to our teams and ourselves
to identify and articulate the reason that things work
and use that to make informed choices.
In my opinion, instinct is just structure
that you aren't fully processing yet.
This is my talk for DevGAMM 2020,
Rules of Engagement.
I'll be talking about my personal techniques
for engaging the player
and how they can be used to train players to interact
with your game the way that you want.
For some of you, these insights may feel obvious –
at least at first,
but the first step is always putting words
to things that feel obvious.
One benefit of the online format is full control
over the talk length and timing,
so sit back and relax, this is the last talk
on the last day and we're all at home,
so I assume most of you
already have a drink – I know I do.
We're going to talk about some of
the games I worked on
as well as some of my favorite games
from the last couple of years and beyond.
There's going to be case studies and videos,
even a chart, if you're into that kind of thing.
Hopefully you hear something
that benefits your own work,
increases your appreciation for some of
these games or just resonates with you.
Either way, if you like games design,
this is going to be a fun 30-40 minutes.
In this talk, we consider engagement
to essentially be a measurement of how much
attention the player is giving your game
aka how much of the players total available brain power
is consumed by interacting with your game
and how much is left behind in the real world.
High engagement is when the game demands
a state of intense focus, total attention.
Leaning forward in your chair, watching closely,
tongue out of mouth,
palms sweaty, mums spaghetti –
you are the ball, be the ball,
there is no spoon.
Low engagement is relaxed, you are giving the game
a portion of your attention
and you're happy to leave it there,
but are still able to hold conversations
and your heart rate is unremarkable.
So if we're considering engagement to be a
measurement of how much brain is taken by the game,
the first question when we're
talking about engagement is simple:
what is the player thinking?
Video games are about interaction,
and interaction is all about choices.
Why do players make the choices
that they do – what goes on in their heads?
My breakdown of a player choice looks like this:
OBSTACLE > ANALYSIS > ACTION > PAYOFF
Players encounter an obstacle, something
that requires an action from them.
Using the information they have,
they decide on what action to take.
If they choose the correct action
and execute it successfully,
boom – they are rewarded, there is a payoff.
That part is very important, but I won't be
spending too much time on it here
as the rewards can vary massively
depending on the action and type of game.
Nonetheless – all the variables that affect a players challenges, that create friction
and thus frustration or satisfaction for the player, they
happen at some point during this 4-step breakdown.
All interactions in a game fit inside it,
from the micro to the macro.
The "obstacle" that starts the process
might be a gap to jump,
an incoming attack, it can be a wall to climb,
or to smash,
it could be an outpost full of enemies
or a single enemy with a specific weakness.
A tight bend in the road of a driving game, a certain color
of gem rushing down a track towards you,
a wire that needs a pulley,
or an exit you seemingly can't reach.
Players find that answer by comparing the information
presented to them about the obstacle
with all the information they are carrying
from their previous experiences,
sometimes from previous parts of that game,
sometimes from similar games
they have played or even from real life.
This is the analysis stage, and it can both boil extremely
complicated assessments into a single moment
or turn simple recognition into a victory.
It can be as simple as finding the right key
for a locked door.
The rush of "oh! I know what this is for" can be enough
to whisk your player from one task to the next
because they know when they get there,
they're going to win – just a little bit.
The levels in a LEGO video game are essentially built
on a drip feed of these little satisfactions.
What are sometimes referred to in LEGO games
as "puzzles" – even within TT –
almost always amount to spotting
the next interactive object,
swapping to a character that can interact with it,
pressing the use button
and enjoying whatever happens next.
Usually a shower of studs, a big animation
and access to the next interactive object.
Players are carried through the game with a constant
stream of simple interactions and big payoffs.
You might consider LEGO games to be
a low-engagement series,
it rarely gets players leaning forward in their chairs.
But LEGO games offer the basics of engagement:
they get players reading and reacting to the world,
keep asking them questions, and maintain their desire
to keep playing, one obstacle at a time.
I used to say if LEGO games were a type of music,
they'd be easy listening.
There is very little pressure being exerted on the player
during the analysis or action stages,
the analysis is easy as the objects are paired
directly with abilities, like locks to keys,
and the actions are rarely more complicated
than a single button press
but it is just asking enough, regularly enough,
to keep most players engaged.
There's always another lock in sight and the key
is always in reach, so why not turn it?
So how does the player know
what to do in a LEGO game?
In any video game level, you can divide all the objects
into two categories: interactive and non-interactive.
The majority of the level will be static geometry,
and within that environment sit the objects
that the player can interact with.
One thing that designers need to do is to teach players
how to identify which is which,
by establishing a visual language.
Helpfully, in most LEGO games all the interactive objects
immediately stand out from the non-interactive
because everything interactive is made out
of bricks and everything else isn't.
Almost every LEGO mechanic is as simple
as a special object
that only a particular character or ability
can interact with
When players see that object, they should know
immediately what ability they need.
Depending on the IP, these abilities
may be iconic to particular characters
or divided by character category,
other times they can be seen on the characters
as tool they are carrying.
Either way, a relationship is taught –
this object requires this ability.
The object will either be exactly the same every time,
like a twirl pole or crawlspace,
or something that can be attached to other objects
to extend their influence,
like the grapple plugs or electric battery.
Other times the object can be
a different shape every time
but with a specific color or material
to define its type,
e.g. Silver LEGO objects can only
be destroyed by explosives,
Gold LEGO objects can only be destroyed
by lasers or heat weapons.
And these rules tend to be consistent
across the entire franchise.
It's almost insultingly simple, right?
Sweeping statement #1:
All games are LEGO games
(a little bit)
This is obviously a very "gamey" approach
and thus easier spotted in bright childish worlds
like the LEGO games or the Nintendo catalogue,
but it's still pretty overt in massive AAA blockbusters
like Lara's tools in Tomb Raider,
Batman's gadgets in Arkham City
and in the extensive platforming of DOOM Eternal
and Jedi: Fallen Order.
Most games have an object-based language.
It's always more obvious in games that have
an expanding skillset for the player,
particularly those with Metroidvania elements, 
because they need especially clear object relationships
in order for players to internalize what new map routes
have been opened when they gain a new ability
(which is actually pretty similar to how
Freeplay works in LEGO games)
However, it's no less true in games that stick true
to the players natural set of abilities:
climbable walls, shufflable edges, grapple points,
smooth walls for running on –
all of them are styled either
with consistent elements or materials,
or in contrast to the surrounding environment,
or, in some cases, easily identifiable spatial clues
and environmental shapes.
Just like how LEGO games have their brick trick,
all games must find their own way for the gameplay
space to stand out from the artwork around it.
Most of these examples are binary pairings,
one lock to one key,
but of course, games can teach the player more
versatile rules via types and categories.
These can have wildly differing visuals,
but share common traits and common rules.
Recent FromSoftware masterpiece –
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice –
categorises attack types such as
projectiles, thrusts, grabs, and sweeps
with different player counters for each
that work against all attacks of that type.
It also introduces weaknesses
for certain categories of enemies:
firecrackers stun animals,
the axe shatters shields,
the umbrella hat blocks projectiles,
divine confetti buffs your sword
against the supernatural and creepy.
Both the designers and players need to work a little
harder to teach and learn what fits in what category,
but it still forms a very strong language
between the game and player
and ultimately, more effort in the analysis stage
generates value
that translates to more satisfaction later.
Essentially, step 1 is the process
of creating affordances.
Affordances are the properties an object has which
implies or shows how a user might interact with it.
Such as the handle of a cup,
or the sharp end of a knife.
For the game designer, this can be showing
that a natural affordance applies in this game world
or creating an artificial affordance from something
that doesn't have as strong a place in the real world.
Rules in this case are the interactions
that each object supports
and the action the game expects (or accepts)
from the player.
I mentioned earlier that players bring in expectations
for how things will interact
that are based either on the real world,
like – don't drink that
or – don't touch that,
or from long-established game rules
like – red barrel go bang.
Keeping in mind not everyone has
the second type of knowledge.
This is why one of the fastest ways
to establish rules within your game world
is to base them on the rules of the real world, so players
can answer the games questions with real world logic.
Some of Sekiro's relationships
fit these expectations also.
By far the popular example of this are the elements –
everyone comes in with an expectation of
how those elements will interact and behave:
fire melts ice, water makes grass grow,
extreme cold plus water creates ice.
LoZ Breath of the WildТs development team did an
excellent GDC talk called "Breaking Conventions"
where they talk about when creating
the simulation elements of their world
by building not a physics engine,
but a "Chemistry Engine":
every element had a way it interacted with the others
and the different object types in the world.
Systemic designs like this allow players to learn a set
of global rules rather than individual relationships
and make predictions about how objects
will interact based on their properties alone.
Rainbow Six Siege is also built on a chemistry set –
a network of interactions between
the operator gadgets and their environment,
all of which are governed by types and categories:
Mute's jammer gadget cuts off remote
controlled gadgets from their masters
disabling drones and activation triggers,
Thatcher's EMP grenades can destroy
or disable electronic gadgets,
Jager's ADS can auto-destroy projectile threats
including grenades and thrown or fired gadgets.
Reinforced metal walls can only
be breached with thermal weapons.
Reinforced metal, electronic,
mechanical, remote-triggered –
most of these are categories the player can understand
using real-world common sense.
When a brand new gadget is added to the game,
its properties decide how it should interact
with the existing systems
in a way that is consistent with those expectations
and previous examples of those types meeting.
Consistency. Players only adopt these relationships
when they can completely trust them.
A single exception and the analysis phase
will be tainted by doubt:
players may hesitate, get confused,
make bad choices.
In his GDC talk "An Approach to Holistic Level Design"
Steve Lee also talks about affordances and
that the level designers in Dishonored
were forbidden from using the same mesh
of a door that can open in one area
ever be used as a non-interactive door in another area.
Similarly, in my LEGO teams,
it was a capital design crime
for a smashable object that provided a build-it
in one place, be empty somewhere else,
but when time gets tight or teams get big,
mistakes like that are easy to make.
This does mean that the more systems and rules
you create, the more limited you are.
Once you say that white cloth can burn, you can't have
a white cloth tent in the environment art.
If you say all energy shields can be overloaded
by your plasma gun –
well, you shouldn't have one that can't.
You shouldn't.
The larger your games rule set becomes,
the more design decisions are made
by what is already in the game.
So! What has all this to do with engagement?
Well, if it wasn't obvious – this is how you train the player
to engage with your game world
comfortably, confidently, quickly.
If a player is ever lost or confused, it is because
they are stuck in the analysis phase.
And if that is the case, it will almost always be
because one of these steps have failed.
The player can't work out
what they are meant to be interacting with
or the thing they need to interact with is not being
clear enough about what type of interaction it accepts,
possibly because the related rule is being broken
or was broken previously,
or because you didn't teach that rule well enough.
Assuming they navigate those pitfalls
the player has chosen their action
and now they have to execute it.
Although some actions can simply be a button press,
others won't be successful until
players pass a skill-check.
Example skills that games might check
at the action stage are:
Precision – aka the action must be executed
within a certain window of time or space
(parrying is a good example);
Accuracy – your action may miss
if not aimed correctly,
making it hard to execute the simplest
point-and-click puzzle of all –
use gun on head;
Dexterity
– or "FINGER FU" –
this action is demanding on your fragile human body,
see also, pro player finger grips and button transitions.
The bigger the skill check on an action,
the more friction it creates
and thus the more value it brings
through the flow to the payoff stage
but as we know – skill checks are tricky to balance,
because every player brings their own
skill floor and ceiling.
Designers can work to check and raise
these levels within the game,
but ultimately some players who find the skill checks
on the edge of their reach
or simply outside it
will be alienated and not reach the payoff
stage enough to stick around.
Most games don't really have huge skill checks
on individual actions
or indeed ask for particularly challenging analysis –
instead they allow players to master simple analysis
and action pairings
and then exert external pressures
that increase the challenge.
There are a few major types of global pressures
that are exerted upon the 4-step flow
and make both the analysis and action phases
harder to pass through successfully –
they cause players to fumble their metaphorical keys.
LEGO games keep these pressures intentionally low
which is a big reason their engagement level
stays quite low also.
Pressure example number one – Time. 
Think fast! This is by far the most common pressure.
Risk – How much will a mistake cost you? The more
riding on each choice and action, the more pressure.
Chaining – a variant of time pressure, where you need
to make multiple choices in a row without a break;
over time, this will likely lead to
a slow analysis or failed skill check.
Multi-tasking – Several obstacles
are active simultaneously
Since players literally can't think of two things
simultaneously, this essentially creates an extra choice
that of choosing what obstacle to react to first,
aka prioritization, that must be completed
before any individual obstacle gets a chance
to enter the choice flow.
Good games with good level design will introduce and
teach rules in isolation, with very low pressure on top,
then gradually increase the pressure
in its future appearances
and allow it to mix with the other rules,
leading to mastery of that rule.
This is how players absorb the rule into their repertoire,
allowing them to pass through the analysis
and action phase much faster
and pass the skill checks more easily.
Crucially, different obstacles require,
different responses from the player,
ensuring they are constantly engaged with the game;
checking for identifiers and reacting
with the correct input
rather than finding comfort
(and thus eventually boredom) in routine.
Originally this talk was called
"The Bop-It Theory"; which I changed
because most people don't know what a Bop-It is.
This is a Bop-It. It's a toy where there are
multiple possible actions to perform.
It tells the player which one to do, and then you have
a limited amount of time to do that thing or you fail.
It's easy to spin it, to pull it, to bop it.
The actions themselves are very simple
but you don't know which one is next,
so you have to give it your full attention.
It's a perfect engagement machine.
SWEEPING STATEMENT #2 –
ALL GAMES CAN LEARN FROM THE HUMBLE BOP-IT
Players become un-engaged when they aren't thinking.
To keep players thinking, you need variety.
They need to not know if they're gonna be
spinning or pulling.
If players can win fights by mashing the same attack
or can avoid every enemy attack with a block,
they will start to skim or skip the analysis phase
and slip into a routine,
no longer engaging with the games visual cues
and likely neglecting some of the features
you want them to use.
Note that the key word here is CAN,
because if players CAN succeed at your game
using a boring gameplay method,
they will sacrifice fun for victory nearly every time.
In the promotional interviews for DOOM Eternal,
Creative Director Hugo Martin
talks about how he saw many
gameplay videos of DOOM 2016
where players were able to succeed
with boring playstyles,
neglecting most of the weapon wheel or using
the same solutions to every problem.
Eternal was thus specifically tuned
to push players to their "fun zone",
to think constantly and use all the weapons
and abilities at their disposal.
If you want players to stay engaged and
play your game the way you want,
you need to make the boring play styles obsolete
and after the incentivisation in the systems design itself
the rest of that is about mixing up the obstacles
so players have to keep reading the game
and changing their strategy
instead of finding a comfortable but boring zone
where they are acting, but not thinking.
If you think again about the Bop-it,
the player's attention and engagement is maintained
in the vacuum between actions,
because they need to stay ready to react
to whatever happens next, as fast as possible.
They know that an action will be demanded any
moment, leaving them in a state of perpetual readiness.
Readiness is a very high engagement state during which
players attempt to give their maximum attention
only to spike it even higher
when the actions actually arrive.
Most video game set pieces and bosses
also put players in this state of readiness.
But – and I shouldn't need to tell you
game developers this –
staying in your maximum engagement state constantly
will eventually lead to burn out,
so as well as applying pressure, you should be aware
of how to release it.
Give players beats where they can relax
from the heightened state of acting
and reset to the baseline readiness state,
ready for the next obstacle.
Even high pressure video games
often provide short escapes.
The most obvious example is slowing down time
during some of the games actions.
Non-interactive animations such as finishers,
cinematic transitions or automated platforming
are also times the player can briefly relax
and reset their mental chain.
Done right, these can create the right rhythm of pressure
and venting, engaging and disengaging
that allows players to handle high engagement
for longer periods of time.
In order to keep players at max engagement, you need to
let them dip out of it sometimes, like micro pacing.
As they say in jazz, sometimes it's
the notes you don't play.
It's like games designer jazz.
Equally, they will get bored if they aren't
being asked for any choices for too long,
such as in those annoying parts where characters
put their finger to their ear and walk slow.
But over-stimulation can be just as dis-engaging.
If the game exerts too much pressure on player choices,
asking them to react too quickly
or bombarding them with obstacles
either simultaneously or really close together,
players can't complete one choice flow
before another arrives.
There is too much on-screen stimulus
to pick up on the language,
and players very quickly lose track
of what is going on
and subsequently, they give up or stop making informed
choices and begin making actions randomly –
the very same shortcut to boredom and
disengagement as a game being too easy.
You will need to find the right balance
of information, skill checks and pressures
to keep your intended audience in an engagement
sweet spot.
That is a key part – you need to understand
how much your demographic of players can handle
before their engagement turns sour.
One players zen state is another player's nightmare.
Observe, this chart. I know, you didn't think
this was one of those serious academic talks
but I did promise a chart, and here it is.
This shows the games intensity of challenge,
which here is a combination
of the difficulty of the required skill checks
and the amount of pressure on the player during
versus the player's capability,
which is their natural ability
combined with the information and practice
you give them in the game itself.
If their natural ability is too low, no amount of
information and practice offered by the game
will allow them to travel any further
down the capability line,
which means they will be unable
to handle any more intensity.
The balance is ensuring that the intensity
stays aligned with the capability of each player,
keeping them in the sweet spot –
where the intensity demands engagement
and pushes players to use their capability
without going beyond it.
If you take the popular pacing graph for intensity v time
and imagine that it does actually apply to games,
then it basically has to fit inside this this zone,
for millions of different players,
which is ironically, a pretty intense challenge.
When talking about game difficulty and player capability,
I think it's important I remind everyone of a few things.
Natural ability may be impeded by health issues,
not just a lack of what we often call "skill".
We almost always simplify "skill" into one commodity
when actually there are various different types of skills.
I'm guilty of that here, but it's a talk for another day.
A lower level of traditional skill does not prevent players
from achieving a high engagement state –
it just means it happens at an intensity
lower than it might happen for you.
This location is not more engaging than this location.
Not all games are striving for maximum engagement.
Personally, I am happiest in this part of the graph
and I like games that take me to that place.
But many players enjoy hanging on
the lower end of engagement
where it's relaxing and rewarding
in a more meditative way. Like LEGO games.
I've come back to the LEGO series a lot in this talk,
usually to show what they aren't doing,
but most of those absences are totally intentional
design choices intended to maximize accessibility.
As I said earlier, they have a low ceiling and a low floor,
but that low floor means anyone can get on board.
LEGO games do everything they can
to get players on board
and are extra cautious not to push
or shake them out after that.
Maybe you want to use these levers to do the opposite
and tune down your engagement requirement
so that players can get to that chill place,
the relaxation that occurs just short of boredom.
However – if your intended audience is
the "core gamer"
looking for high pressure,
big traditional "skill" checks
and you want to turn that engagement dial
to 11 for them, here we go.
All those highly stimulating videos from earlier may look
insane and overwhelming to the untrained eye,
but to the people who have played and mastered
those games already can see through the noise,
they can focus in on their avatar and the individual
choices they need to make each moment.
You are training your player, giving them the information
and practice needed to turn analysis into instinct
and skill checks into skills, so they can read your games
language even in the most manic of situations.
This is what prepares players to ride along with your
games most engaging and memorable moments,
its biggest set pieces, its most intense fights,
its tensest boss battles.
When your player is in them, and winning
that's what you're working towards,
that's the maximum engagement zone.
So – let's take a look at what it looks like
when this philosophy is in full swing –
big blockbuster bop-its.
I absolutely love Rayman Legends and think
it is one of the world's most perfect games.
If looking for big finales that call on the player's
accumulated knowledge and skills,
it has a number of chase levels,
bosses and set pieces to choose from,
but I'm going with the first music level, Castle Rock.
This is early in the game so is a lot less intense,
but near the start of the game, with
the capability and skill I'd picked up so far,
this is what maximum engagement looked like.
Obviously here we can see a lot of
time pressure and chaining.
You can also see the venting moments,
where Rayman is sliding or bouncing –
the pressure drops and it creates a break in the chain.
So far, the Rayman bop-it
doesn't have too many actions,
but even the 2 options are enough to create variety.
Genichiro is widely regarded to be one of the most
outright enjoyable battles in Sekiro,
and I believe it is because
he arrives at the perfect time –
right when the player is ready for him.
Just like a good level design, a good boss is
a collection of obstacles,
all of which the player has faced before.
Genichiro's moveset features all
the attack categories we discussed earlier:
projectiles, grabs, sweeps, thrusts,
along with a set of combos that test basic parrying.
Players can quickly learn his particular dialect
of the game's language,
the way he telegraphs his different attacks and such,
and after that they can approach the battle
with complete confidence.
As in all FromSoftware games, the risk pressure is
extreme and heightens the tension around every choice.
Only a few mistakes and you'll be dying
the titular two times.
Genichiro has pretty short startups
on his actual attacks,
but he does provide a lot of warning
that he's going to do SOMETHING,
allowing you to know when to enter and exit
the readiness state, rather than being stuck in it.
Here I use those times to strike back at him,
which is another reason this battle is so fun –
the push and pull and back and forth
between acting and reacting.
Whereas many Soulsborn-ekiro battles
revolve around trial and error and surprise,
Genichiro is a clean skill check machine
who never asks players a question
they don't already know the answer to.
Well, in his first phase, anyway.
Id did what they set out to do, they made
the right way to play, the only way to play.
They did this with extremely overt obstacle
and action relationships –
in their case, they paired weapons with specific enemies,
or specific enemy categories,
and they paired resources
with specific player actions.
They call this "toolbox" design, and it means
that when players see a demon,
they always know exactly what to do.
As you can see, there are the slow motion moments
on the weapon swapping
and on my aiming, thanks to an optional ability
I have equipped,
but any good review will tell you that the major
punctuation beats in new DOOM are the glory kills.
Pressure on player choices is
very high in DOOM Eternal,
which squeezes out players who aren't coming in
with enough natural affinity for the genre,
but if you can find a difficulty mode
that gets you in on the ground floor,
then Eternal can strap you on a rocket
to a high engagement state
and keep you there in almost every battle.
Not sure it would make
a very good Bop-it though.
A lot of work went into preparing players
for these moments.
It isn't just about creating a big challenge –
it's about bringing up the players capability
to match the challenge you want to give them.
Players feel most engaged when they are hanging on to
victory but feel they might lose their grip at any second.
I'll end with one of my favorite pearls of gaming wisdom,
from when the Simpsons was good.
Lisa: I can't do this Bart.
I'm not strong enough!
Bart: I thought you came here looking for a challenge?
Lisa: Duh! A challenge I could do!
Thanks for listening! Hopefully you didn't find that
too boring or over-stimulating.
We have a bit of time left on the clock,
so before I relinquish control to real-time Steve
in the chat for some Q&A,
(hey Steve)
I want to devote 5 minutes to some alternative takes
on the topic of player engagement.
When researching this talk, I came across
a number of neighbouring philosophies,
many of which I loved
and really got me thinking.
I didn't want to change too much of
what I had planned to say here
or replace my words with a mish mash
of other peoples words,
so instead, I thought I'd talk about them
here at the end.
Firstly, my philosophy here
is extremely geared towards REactions –
the ways that we can push players
to do things by throwing stuff at them.
Well, I read an article by narrative designer
and overall cool Twitter guy Doc Burford,
where he talked about reactive and PROactive play.
Proactive play is somewhat
accounted for in the analysis phase,
but no doubt, this talk is disproportionally
focused on reacting
rather than arming players to drive
and control encounters,
which is especially important
for conflict engagement and combat design.
Doc linked to a Gamasutra article by Thomas Grip,
Creative Director at Frictional Games,
that blew things wide open for me.
While my approach revolves around the flow of CHOICES, Grip's philosophy revolves around PLANS.
You should read the article yourself as it's great and I'm only going to paraphrase it in a very reductive way here,
but essentially it puts forward the idea
that the most vital element of engagement
is the player's ability to make plans
about what will happen,
and then attempt to make reality match that plan.
Grip suggests you imagine players as having
a second version of the game in their head –
a mental simulation of the games' rules
as they understand and expect them to behave –
and a plan's success is based on how closely their simulation matches how the game actually works
after skill checks and such.
I love this concept, and have immediately absorbed it
into my own approach.
If my flow is a good guide for reactive play,
his is the perfect guide for enabling
the even more advanced, proactive play.
Grip also draws on a theory neighbouring his,
which is the Player Experience of Need Satisfaction.
It's a big article, but the part I liked most
was a commodity it identified
as vital to engagement and satisfaction,
that they call competence.
Aka the players sense
of being good at something.
For me, this is the primary satisfaction generated by
the high engagement zone
as Todd Howard said at his DICE 2012 Keynote:
the emotion that games can give players
that no other media can, is Pride.
Finally – I think it's worth talking just briefly
about subversion and disruption techniques.
There is material for a whole other talk in here,
but keeping it simple,
you may have noticed that during the final stages of this talk, analysis and action became instinct and skill
and you might have thought,
"Is instinct even thinking?" – alas, not really.
When a rule becomes so internalised
the player can call on it at will,
it can slip into routine and no longer
generate engagement like it used to.
When this happens, it can be necessary
to introduce a new feature
that twists, breaks or invalidates
a certain choice flow,
if only temporarily, to shake players out
of their routine and generate new play styles.
Of course this is a delicate process
and taking away the player's favorite toys
can backfire very easily.
Alright, now that's really actually it.
It's goodbye from me, Steve of the past,
I will let the newer,
slightly worse dressed Steve,
answer your questions.
Hopefully you found that engaging. Eh?
Eh?
– Okay, our first question is from Oleg Pridiuk:
When I was at King, once the management came to
a decision that we don't make variety anymore.
We don't invent new mechanics,
since our data shows
that our players' attention drops
on the levels with new mechanics.
So we at King were inspired to make more of the same and perhaps innovate with old, well-known mechanics.
Do you think your players' sloth thinking advice
is more for the core player audience?
– Hey Oleg! First of all, thank you for the nice comments – good to know what people think during the video.
One of the answers, I think, about the audience,
as I mentioned towards the end of the video,
Some audiences aren't looking for maximum engagement and looking for something a bit more chill,
And, obviously, new mechanics force you
into discovery and analysis zone,
that is more intense,
and that spikes intensity
and may bring you higher engagement
than you want –
because having maximum engagement
is not always the best thing.
Also, though,
what I didn't really talk about
is that whenever you get players
who have been using the game for a long time,
towards the end of the game –
or, perhaps, DLC, or service game, or an update –
once they get accustomed to the current flows and get good at it – and they feel good at it –
I think they start to feel that they are entitled
to their mastery,
and whenever you bring in the new mechanics
that they have to learn,
you kind of reset them to the starter flow,
and they're like – it's not fair, I'm good at this game!
Perhaps, entitlement to mastery is part of the problem.
Also, I think, you nailed it with the audience:
some people want lower engagement,
they don't want you to bring them mechanics
that force them into the space of learning.
The variety can come from the mechanics
you already know,
in fact, as in the final example of Rayman, I used, etc.
The mechanics being tested, the variety
they're using to test your engagement
is actually used as a readylert –
not learning new stuff.
So the active learning new stuff ads
to a section of rediscovery that I removed
but essentially learning something can be satisfying also, it can be in itself a little loop of choice.
But it also has a cost, it can also have its own frictions,
and perhaps that audience wasn't willing to have
that friction of learning a new thing
in order to get good at new thing – they want to continue to be good at the thing they already good at,
so I hope that answers that question.
– Okay, the 2nd question is also from Oleg Pridiuk:
Brace yourself!
:wink-wink:
The dispersion of fun-boring zones
across different audiences:
how do you make game trailers appealing enough?
– Although I edited this video together, I don't consider myself to be a video editing expert.
But trailer making is kind of its own art form. But certainly the concept of pacing can be applied here.
There's been a lot of talks, essays and books written about pacing at a higher level.
I was trying to talk more about micro-pacing
in a moment of gameplay,
but I think you can take the same lessons
and apply it  to trailers or the whole game:
you need a spike and then vent the pressure.
I think, different audiences going to
bounce off trailers more easily.
Usually you can get away with a short, fast opening that gives a big hint on what's the game or movie is about.
And that hits the audience with low attention span.
I noticed recently – Hulu started putting these
weird little montage openers on their trailers
to make sure no one looses interest during this slow
"In a world..." – and everybody turns off at that point.
And they're immediately:
"Oh, there's the zombies!"
And for me that can be over-stimulating,
ruining the pacing of enjoyment, if you will.
In terms of fun and boring zones and trailers I watched a brilliant video on Game Maker's Toolkit about that.
I thought it had good tips on how
to pace a trailer in terms of, like,
big opening, bit of it slow, bit of art, gameplay, etc.
For me pacing is always going to be
an up and a down.
I am a core gamer myself and I might think that
I want a game that keeps me at max all the time.
But the truth is if that happens,
I probably going to burn out.
So I do need to be given little breaks,
even if I don't necessarily think that I want them.
That was more of a cluttered answer,
but I hope it nails the major points.
– We also have a question from Viktor Kurochkin:
Hey, thanks for a nice talk. How do you evaluate
the easier game on this chart?
How to evaluate intensity and capability?
– In terms of intensity, you can build up a combination of skill checks and pressures –
if you ask a player to do something that has a skill check with no pressure, it's obviously very low intensity.
If you ask them to make an accurate shot,
that makes it a little bit more intense.
And if you ask them to do it in a little amount of time,
and you're saying that if they don't do it in time,
they're going to instantly die,
and they have to do that 3 times in a row –
these things and the intensity stacks up,
and you count that in a more clear way.
The issue with working out evaluation
of the player's capabilities is
that the player's ability and skills can't really
be measured as easily,
because natural abilities are
much harder to measure.
It can go very separate – the whole method of study
is a separate discipline.
But evaluating and reading the game's difficulty and quality – people do surveys,
making sure people are doing the test and reveal their experience with the genre and games of that type.
Also, people tend to be quite honest about their capability, I think, when they're coming onboard.
You can kinda see it as well – if you're a core gamer, you can judge by your own performance vs. someone else's.
For example, we had a platform-y section in a level once,
and I was completely nailing it.
And then we brought someone more of a PC gamer.
They didn't have that skillset and they were just falling
on those jumps I sought were very easy.
So again, with the quality thing it's less clear
what the player's capability is.
You have to ask a lot of questions. Do they come with previous experience with the games of that type?
I think one of the best ways
to allow players to mind their own capabilities
is with difficulty modes and difficulty modifiers,
disability options.
But evaluating it is kind of the same way
you evaluate any game's quality:
you have to do testing. You have to bring people in.
You have playtest, focus groups,
and there is a lot of different scientific technics
in terms of laboratory testing of that stuff.
So I think those are the only ways you gonna read the player's capability.
But intensity you can get a better idea of,
based on your stacking.
Hope that answers your question.
Thank you for your nice comments as well.
– I see there isn't any new questions or comments. Thank you very much, Steve, for your superb speech!
It was great and very informative. And thank you for being here on DevGAMM Online. Bol'shoe spasibo!
– Spasibo!
