I'm going to lead into this topic by saying, yet again, that I am not qualified to discuss psychology or neuroscience. In fact, I've been too intimidated by the psychology of emotions as a topic to do more than gesture vaguely at it in the past. (Except when I lean heavily on the work of others.) But I think I've found an angle that will allow me to grapple with emotional resonance and not get myself in trouble.
Often, when we talk about designing for player experience we focus on how we want the players to feel. However, emotional responses are the end result of our design choices, not a starting point. There are many different ways of crafting experience depending on what type of game you are designing. It is possible to guess at the emotional experiences your players will have based on how your game is structured. (I have covered that here.) In this post, I'm going to look at one approach to crafting experiences for thematic games.
When attempting to create emotional resonance within a theme, my design goal is to create player investment in their in-game actions. Player investment gives me wiggle room with regards to particular emotions rather than attempting to design for a specific set of emotions. If players are invested, the game actions will take on an importance beyond what is needed to win the game. In other words, they will be motivated by their investment to play in the game world. All I need to do is supply the motivation.
On the surface, motivation is as sticky a topic as emotion, but I'll explain why I think it is more actionable. Emotion is the end result of an action; it is responsive. Motivation is the trigger to take an action. I can playtest my way to desired emotions in a design, but that doesn't help guide my initial game idea. Different people will react to stimuli in different ways, and not everyone finds the same emotional experiences enjoyable. However, there is some evidence that we all operate with similar motivations.
Steven Reiss, an American psychologist, developed a list of sixteen basic human desires that make up human motivation. Those motivations are romance, curiosity, honor, acceptance, order, family, independence, power, social contact, physical activity, status, saving (desire to collect), eating, vengeance, tranquility, and idealism. We can also add some of Maslow's needs to round out this list for our purposes: physiological needs (such as breathing and sleep) and safety (protection from elements or injury). How does this list help with theme crafting?
We all experience similar drives. If the characters we play also exhibit those drives, we will become invested in the action. We become invested because the action is comprehensible to us; we know why someone would want to act and what drives them to action. This is true even if we don't agree with the actions taken by the characters. To be believable, it is enough that we understand the motivation. We would not declare war on our neighbor, but the desire for more power is comprehensible to us, which allows us to become invested in a combat game.
In order to be effective, motivation must spring from the game itself. We cannot simply tell players their motivation and assume that will be enough. But how do we show motivation to players? Motivation is a more nebulous version of the overall game goals. And as a type of goal it should be paired with an obstacle. The desire for independence springs from my autonomy being threatened. The desire for order becomes stronger when there are restrictions on how I can create order. Ex Libris presents the desire for order to great effect by putting restrictions to how you can order cards then making the characters librarians. Many games have tableau building with restrictions on where you can place cards; this is not innovative. Ex Libris makes its tableau building both comprehensible and emotionally resonant by providing player characters whose job is keeping books in order. Players can get upset when a card they need to fill out a shelf is taken by another player, even if the points that card would confer wouldn't help the player that much. This is because players become invested in the alphabetizing aspect of the theme as it is the most thematically accessible to players who have been in libraries but are not librarians, but also because filling in a row fulfills our innate desire for order. I imagine that professional librarians would find the curation of types of books to be equally thematic, but this mechanism puts less pressure on our intrinsic motivation. It is the combination of motivation based in the universal human desire for order and a rationale for that motivation (you are a librarian) that produces the investment in the theme.
How do we build motivation into our characters? First, we must ask what type of action and goals are present in the game. Then we have to identify what drives a character to seek those goals and take those actions. We must apply obstacles to the goals which will reinforce the motivation. (Conversely, we could select a motivation that is reinforced by the obstacles already in our design, and build out the theme from there.) Finally, we can signify our characters' motivations by labeling the actions, goals, obstacles, and characters in a way that further reinforces the theme established by the design itself. Ex Libris would have a less accessible theme if the characters were not librarians.
When I play or design a thematic game, I am quick to ask, "Why should I care?" What is appealing about the action of the characters? Would I find that action satisfying in play? Does that action make sense in the world of the theme? You don't need to do a lot of world building to create player investment in theme. You just need to align character motivation with action in a way that resonates with players.
ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.
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