Breaking Open the Black Box

The Secrets and Stories of Game Design

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Negative Reinforcement

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The other side of satisfaction is dissatisfaction. It can be a useful tool.  “Now, Alex, why on earth would you ever want players to be dissatisfied with your game? Isn’t that defeating the whole point of a game? Games should make people happy!”

Actually, that’s completely wrong. Games that only make people happy have a short lifespan. Eventually, the amount of positive stimulus you have to give the player eventually exceeds the production capabilities of your game. Bayonetta is a wonderful example of this.

I greatly enjoyed Bayonetta. However, the game grew linearly in both difficulty and epicness. The reaction times required to beat each incoming boss also increased.  The result was that my hands were seized up in painful cramps that forced me to regularly put the game down. Furthermore, the story events that took place in the game keep accelerating into absurdity. Youtube “Bayonetta Final Boss” if you don’t care about spoilers.

Useful Uses for Negative Reinforcement

If you consider the pacing the macro level of a game, dungeon or encounter, you don’t want players to be going balls-to-the-wall nonstop for the entire experience. To cater to their human nature, you want luls, breaks and breathing periods between moments of intensity. Players, however will continue to naturally seek higher and higher levels of intensity until they breakdown from exhaustion. 
You need to give them a hint that pushing forward harder is wrong. 
The first use of negative reinforcement that came to mind for me was attacking the walls in Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Early into the game, you learn that bombs can destroy walls. 
Some walls have obvious cracks which indicate they can be destroyed. Other walls cannot.  To reinforce this, when you stab cracked walls with your sword, the wall makes a hollow noise. However, if you stab an indestructible wall, it makes a high pitched, unpleasant tinging noise. 
This generally discourages you from stabbing walls randomly to check for hollow spots but allows you to confirm you suspicions of a cracked wall without randomly spraying bombs everywhere.  
That unpleasant tinging sound carried over into other places.  When you fight bosses in the game, the same sound is used to indicate you are attacking him or her in the wrong way.  
This negatively reinforced sound thus shifted from an exploration tool to a boss fight feedback mechanic.  In general, Nintendo games are filled with these kinds of small polish point, which dramatically help players learn the boundaries of the game faster.
Dragon’s Dogma similarly uses cheap deflecting noises and not the deep, visceral sounding wound audio effects when you’re attacking a boss in a non-weak spot. 

Higher Level Uses for Negative Reinforcement

Early on in WoW’s development, the design team wanted to penalize players who spent a lot of time grinding in the game and ignored the story-based nature of the questing. Similarly, there was a strong desire for players to not play endlessly. 
This lead to several systems. The first, was the rested system, where players eventually got 50% of the experience they would normally gain through killing monsters.  The hope was that players would be encouraged to do quests (which were decoupled from the rest system) and stop the endless camping of Owlkin in Winterspring. (I am looking at you, Zaibach)
The next system was the introduction of durability. Early on, without a durability system, players would zerg difficult camps of monsters endlessly, exhausting themselves, frequently getting frustrated and eventually giving up out of rage instead of looking for a different objective.  Bosses in dungeons were regularly kited to the entrance of the dungeon, where players would zone in, suicide on the boss, then corpse run back repeatedly. 
Durability made that strategy expensive, added an upper limit to the effectiveness of that strategy and generally served to be a very cheap death penalty.  Keep in mind that in this era, death penalties frequently consisted of XP and level losses.
Over time, durability became an increasingly smaller penalty, as repair bots, vendor mounts and geeves became prolific. The psychological effect remains in place – with many players leaving groups and quitting after a long series of wipes.

Negative Reinforcement can Backfire

You need to be very careful where you  use negative reinforcement. In small, well-placed doses, it is highly effective.  Used too often, players feel like their freedom is restricted. Too harsh and players feel punished for honest mistakes.  Too visible and players will constantly rally for its removal. 
Players hated the original rested system, complaining it did all of the above.  Some design teams would have panicked and removed the system. However, resistance to an idea doesn’t always mean the idea is wrong. Instead, they rebuilt the system to give a 100% bonus while rested, rather than a 50% penalty while exhausted.  
This lead to the blizzard catch phrase “Make it a Bonus”.  Generally, the concept of taking a systemic penalty, baking it into the system, then periodically granting players the ability to bypass that penalty.  It’s a rather ingenious philosophy.

The LFG/LFR/LFD systems all use it – granting you a ton of rewards for the first completion of a dungeon, raid or battleground. Then far smaller rewards for continuing to play.

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.