Breaking Open the Black Box

The Secrets and Stories of Game Design

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Positive Reinforcement

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The art of satisfaction is highly volatile. It changes with the audience, their motivation, the situation and even their experience level playing your game. Satisfaction is the result of many little things done right, built on a backbone of one major thing: Positive Reinforcement.

In the Olympics, you don’t just finish the race, get handed a medal and a pat on the back. No, the winners stand on a podium next to each other, decked out in their countries colors and are broadcast across the globe.

That moment of recognition and glory is the culmination of years of hard work, performance and dedication.  Such a momentous investment by not only the individual but also the countries supporting them would be meaningless without this ceremony.

This is the art of positive reinforcement.

Reward Good Behaviour

I was on a first date with a girl, sipping fruit smoothies and everything seemed to be going ridiculously well – but I couldn’t put my finger on why. She mentioned she worked as a child behavioural specialist – essentially a nanny who specializes in reconditioning misbehaving or distraction-prone kids. I asked her what she felt was the most important tool for fixing bad behaviour.  
Crista C. – Behavioral Therapist
“It’s simple, really – reward the things they do right. Be consistent with them and they’ll grow more consistent with you.”
It was then that it dawned on me that she was doing exactly that while we were hanging out. She would laugh and chime in when she enjoyed the topic and go silent whenever she felt bored with the topic at hand.
“You’ve been doing exactly that the whole time we’ve been on this date haven’t you?”
“Huh… Most people don’t catch onto that, but yes, just because it works on kids doesn’t mean it doesn’t work on you too,” she said with a coy wink. 

Players are Human

The toolkit that works to adjust human behavior changes very little from youth to adulthood. In fact, much of gaming is actually a rewiring of the explore, experiment, reward/punishment cycle that helps humans learn and grow. Put this cycle to good use and players will find your game more satisfying. 

Many Faces of Positive Reinforcement

Mechanics & Numbers

Image a boss hurling an explosive boulder towards the player. If they roll away, they completely avoid the attack. Now imagine, if they roll only partway, they take half the damage. Now imagine a player with the same ability – now the precision, timing and sense of skill are increasingly reinforced by the game mechanics. These opportunities are the first line of defense in making a game a fun experience.

Audio

In Legend of Zelda, destructible walls made a different sound when you hit them.  Monsters made wounded noises when you harmed them vs. the irritating tinging noise was made when the attack was ineffective.  Fanfare and sound celebrated your victories in Final Fantasy. Music and Sound can conjure feeling of excitement or fear – just as easily they can make even the simplest of attacks feel satisfying.

Visuals and Animation

In classic games, monsters flashed when hit. In Dark Souls, monsters staggered when hit sufficiently hard. In World of Warcraft, monsters move more slowly when wounded and outside of multiplayer content, play wound animations when spells and melee attacks land. Even removing a plate from Deathwing’s back was reinforced with spell effects and animation.  
When I was working on Pet Battles for Mists of Pandaria, a large number of pet abilities had secondary bonuses when certain conditions were met. As much as possible, I tried to reinforce the secondary conditions with enhanced visuals and sound. This made the player pulling off the combo feel good *and* alerts the victim that something special happened.  

Social Bonding

A powerful item drops that grants you 5% more power. By all rights, you want it and should take it. Instead you pass it to a newer member of your guild.  Another player is being ganked by a rogue alone in Eastern Plaguelands. You could easily run by on your mount, but instead you CC the attacker, buying enough time for the victim to recover and launch a counter offensive.  
Social bonding and the reinforcement of your alliances are often overlooked against the spotlight of personal progression and glory, but often these small acts can be change the way two people interact for a lifetime. During Classic, I was farming for my Doomguard tome in Blasted Lands. I was barely able to fight the Doomguard Commanders who dropped the items and regularly died while doing so. 
On one such attempt, a gnome Warlock (I was an Orc, the opposing faction) ran up and I expected a long corpse run. Instead, he helped me slay the Doomguard and we took turns for the next three days, unable to communicate except for pointing and killing the monsters. 
That Gnome and I eventually got into touch and I joined his guild, one that eventually lead to me becoming Scarab Lord on my server and forming friendships I look back on fondly to this day. 

There’s a million ways to encourage players to do the right thing

I’m afraid I’m getting a little sleepy at this point. What were some unique ways to encourage players that you’ve seen in games?  What do you remember that stands out strongly in your mind even years later?

Lesson 4: Satisfaction

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Your heart is pounding, breathless, as you rush down the court. The game is tied, with only seconds to spare and the ball is in your hands. The defense is distracted by your teammates and there’s a clear, but closing window to take a shot.  You can feel your chest tighten as you pull back the ball and let loose the 3 point shot you’ve practiced every day for the last ten years.

Time seems to slow down as the ball curves gracefully over the tennis shoe scuffed court. The arc is good, the ball rolls around the rim and slides through, securing a narrow victory for your team! You’re going to the playoffs! You rip off your jersey in esctasy and begin to whoop.

Then everyone in the stands instantly falls silent and quietly, patiently files out of the stadium. Not a teammate says a word, carefully packing up their things and leaving. The referee makes a note on a sheet of paper and then turns off the lights as everyone leaves.

You stand there in the middle of the court, stunned in the darkness. You saw the opportunity, you cared about pulling it off, took your shot, you succeeded and won the game. You did everything right… but everything feels wrong.

You were denied the satisfaction of your victory.

Satisfaction is More than Winning

Winning the game is great! Throughout history people have created games, invented mechanics and solved puzzles. However, very few do sheerly for the exercise… so why do you do it?
I was sitting in the living room of the apartment I shared with my roommate Tom.  Tom had been working long hours, driving up to LA and back for months. Usually he’d hole up in his room, talking loudly on Skype or Ventrilo while I played Persona 3. 
Tom: “Hey Alex, do you have like an hour?”
Me: “Uh, sure, what’s up?”
Tom: “Come here, I want your feedback on something.”
Me: “Okay” 
I sat down and looked at what was a pink and purple blurred mess of colors and a wannabe candyland. 
Tom: “Give me your first reaction to this.”
Me: “Uhh…. you either have a very strange way of coming out of the closet or you have a secret fetish for Rainbow Brite.”
Tom snorted as he laughed, “yeah, its pretty out there.” 
Me: “What the hell is it, some kind of RTS?” 
Tom: “Sort of… why don’t you sit down and play for this next match. Then we’ll discuss.”
The more astute of you may have already realized this was an early beta for Riot Games’ League of Legends. While I played, I did what I do best: complain a lot.  For those of you who don’t know me intimately, pretty much everything in existence annoys me. I commented on everything from the weird control scheme to the targetting cursor color, you name it. But what really matter is what happened next.
Things have gotten a million times better since then.
After a few minutes, several members of the enemy team quit the game, my allies and I destroyed the crystalline fortress… and the screen went dark. The game turned solid black and the word VICTORY appeared as a flat texture, replacing the game world.
Me: “Uhm…. what?”
Tom: “You won. Unexpected, Yoshi-san! Even though they did technically quit.”
Me: “That… was like… the biggest let down ever. Granted, I didn’t do jack shit to earn it, but what the fuck, Tom?”
Tom: “Hahaha, that’s true. What would you do there?”
Me: “Hell, I don’t know. Blow shit up, show a scoreboard. Pretty much anything but end the game like that.”
Tom: “Yeah, we’re going to fix that. It’s surprising, but when I first saw that I had the exact same reaction. You *did* win you know….”
Me: “Yeah, but… it just felt… wrong.”
Tom: “What you’re feeling is what I call the expectation of ceremony.”
Me: “… what?”
Tom: “It’s not enough to just win. It hasn’t been for a very long time. When you win, you want to be rewarded to reinforce the fact that you succeeded.  The athletes who win the olympics don’t just grab their medal out of a bin.  There’s ritual, ceremony and celebration to backup their accomplishment.”
Me: “That seems like it would apply to a lot more than just winning.”
Tom: “Fascinating. What were you thinking of?”
Me: “Like, when I KO someone in Super Smash Bros, the match isn’t over, but there’s this sharp sound and the opponent goes flying into the screen.”
Tom: “Hehehe, yes! The simple truth is that you can make even the most minor of victories feel like a major one, if you sell it sufficiently well.”

Satisfaction is composed of many little pieces done right

It’s easy to take a single major event, like the end of a game and talk about whether it satisfied you. Just like the ending of a movie, it’s often the part that sticks in your mind. Unfortunately, its a sad fact of humor nature that we quickly overlook all of the minor pieces that got you that far. 
Take a closer look at the next game you play. What do they do to make even the smallest of things satifying? The sound of opening of a door, the scorch marks left behind from a stray fireball, or even just the way that the critical strike damage number stick on screen for a quarter second more. 
They all add up to making you feel good about what you just did. 
Next time, I’ll be talking some more about satisfaction, specifically on the topic of feeling satisfied by game mechanics. 

Preparation and Recuperation

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In addition to reaction, there’s two other major forms of gameplay responses: Preparation and Recuperation.  Preparation is where you perform an action before the event begins. The most common example of this in WoW is assigning crowd control targets before a pull.  Recuperation is the act of recovering after the event has occurred. Healing frequently falls into this area, but so does running back to a monster after being knocked away.

Preparation

Preparation is an interesting response type – you coordinate, plan or otherwise setup for the incoming event. 
In the outdoor world, you might face a creature who can knock you off a cliff. Preparation is pulling that creature away from the cliff so you aren’t easily knocked off. 
In larger group content, high level planning is often assigned to a group or raid leader who communicates what’s happening and helps his team plan out what they should do. At a higher level, the act of gearing your character properly, picking the right items, bringing reagents, food and supplies are further extension of this gameplay type.  Even something like picking the right hardware to handle the machine counts!

The Burden of Preparation is High

Preparation is a very difficult mechanic to use. However, the difficulty with preparation mechanics is rarely in the actions required to handle or setup the event.  The difficulty with preparation is the burden of knowledge.  
Write that one down and keep it somewhere safe. 
In order to prepare for an event, you need to know it is coming. How do you know it is coming? Someone must have seen it before. That fact alone is one of the largest blind spots designers have.  
“How will he handle this?” 
“Oh, easy, he’ll step to the side, flick the switch and stop the blade moments before it impales him.”
That’s great on paper, but what it really means is you’re going to die at least once, if not many times, before discovering the trick.  I’ve frequently sifted good games from great guys by the degree to which they sufficiently feed you the information you need to understand what is about to happen.  
In Diablo 3, there’s a creature who explodes upon death, unleashing three grub like carrion worms. There is no way to know prior to killing one that it will do this. The animators did an incredible job of making the creature swell before it explodes. However, this alone wasn’t enough.
If you fight one carefully, you’ll notice that not only do they explode upon death, their normal attack is a highly dangerous, but not lethal, point blank AoE with a warning animation.  What this means is that before you’ve ever slain even one of these guys, you’re taught to hit it for a bit, then run away. 
This way, there’s a good chance you’re already performing the correct behaviour before it’s actually a threat.

Reinforcement

If you want players to use an ability in anticipation to an event, you need to be encouraging them constantly to use it, even before the right situation occurs.  One of my favorite examples of this was the Freeze ray in Metroid for the NES.  
I had a huge crush on a girl who reminded me of Samus.
The Freeze ray let you do some very cool things – stun enemies and use enemies as platforms, weaken Metroids for the killing, etc. In fact, the final act of the game is highly dependent on your ability to use the Freeze ray correctly. 
So what did Nintendo do – wait until the final act where you needed it?  No, they gave you access to it early in the game, so you knew what it was, played with it for a while, used it to solve a few puzzles, then moved on to more powerful upgrades.
When you eventually came to a place where going further isn’t possible, the memory of that tool kicks it and you pick it up again when you need it.
If you want players to use a tool – they need to be already using it. 

Recuperation

Sometimes bad things happen. In those situations, you can give up and run away or try to recover. 
Growing up, I often went with the former. Whenever my brother started to get the better of me in a wrestling match, I ran away.  Whenever my homework started to get hard, I ran away. When the girls on the track started to catch up with me, I … well, I guess actually they ran away from me.
However, once you’re behind, all is not lost. It just requires a different kind of mindset. 
One of my favorite kinds of experiences is when I’m forced to stop what I’m doing, take up a defensive posture for a time, then go back to my normal behaviour.  Fighting games are frequently built around these sequences.  
In fact, one of the most thrilling moments is when you make a huge comeback.
When they interviewed Daigo afterwards, he asked what it was that made him capable of this incredible feat.  What did he say? “I just didn’t panic.”  

Recuperation is a change in mindset

Recuperation is my personal weakness. I’m an aggressive, tunneling, red-blooded American boy. When I’m forced to take up the defensive and patiently wait out a opportunity, I often get impatient and try to deliver the finishing blow prematurely. 
League of Legends is one of those games that is a great example of recuperation. Tonight, I was playing around with the new “Pulsefire Ezreal” skin. For people who play league, you’ll immediately groan because you know what happened. 
For non League players, Ezreal is a very difficult and fragile character to play. My ally and I lost our lane badly. So badly, in fact, that the game was in peril because of how badly we played. 
However, in an unusual show of courtesy, they didn’t rage or get upset at me. After a pivotal battle was lost, the enemy team defeated Baron Nashor and gained a significant advantage.  My team was highly upset and I could feel it. The enemy constantly attempted to lure us into into a trap and my allies started to fall for the bait.
I don’t know why, but for whatever reason, I started typing.  “I know this is my fault. But please, just be patient. Don’t engage them, just stay back and wait here by our tower.” Then I counted down the minutes until the Baron’s power faded each time my team started to get antsy…
… somehow it worked.  We waited until the danger passed, despite the enemy’s attempts to lure us into their traps. 
After the game ended, the enemy team’s Ezreal player, who had massively outplayed me the entire game, boasted that I should be ashamed for my poor play. In an incredibly humbling moment, my team, who I had never met before, told him they would gladly choose my ability to inspire teamwork over his higher skill, but selfish playstyle any day. 
Such is the power of my team’s patience. 

Recuperation is built upon Opportunities

Drinking a health potion is an excellent example of recuperation. However, recuperation is meaningless if you can always do it and without risk.  In early WoW PvP, the Paladin was an incredible recuperator. His ability to heal, bubble and otherwise protect himself was so potent that all of the other classes were incredibly frustrated attempting to fight one. 
To combat this perception, many abilities were given exclusivity or otherwise limited. The result was that it created windows of time where Paladins could be defeated. Not particularly satisfying for the Paladins, but it greatly improved the experience for everyone else.
Next time, we’ll talk about the most important and most difficult aspect of game design. So hard, in fact, that once you’ve done it right, it’s even harder to do right the second time.
Post in the comments below if you have a guess.