TBM: Ep 6 EXTRAS

I like thinking about player motivation because motivation is a pre-cursor to emotion (more or less). When someone finally gets around to writing a full textbook on experience-focused game design, motivation deserves a chapter. (I will not be writing this book.) 

I was dinged in a book review for not critically examining Reiss's list of motivations. I hope readers here know by now that I'm trying to describe concepts with the intention to get you thinking more deeply about design, NOT trying to accurately label all of human experience. I like the list because it has a number of good places to start when considering player motivation. I don't really care beyond that. 

I only include part of Maslow's needs because the rest overlap somewhat with Reiss's list or don't feel relevant. But there are way too many survival games with oxygen mechanics to ignore the need to breathe as a strong thematic motivator. 

If I were writing this episode now, I would have spent longer talking about each item in the list. I was just starting to struggle with morning sickness when I wrote this one. 

I think the most important point here is about playtesting. Knowing that players are motivated by pressures beyond just winning and what those pressures might be can help craft better game experiences. 

TBM: Ep 6 script

In an attempt to transition out of hiatus, I will be posting the scripts of my Thinking Beyond Mechanisms segment. I don't plan to edit them, so there may be some differences between the audio and written versions. Take the audio as the correct version. I also plan on offering some additional thoughts in separate posts—commentary on the episodes, if you will.

Motivation

Welcome to Thinking Beyond Mechanisms, an in depth look at some of the other aspects of game design, the segment that looks at some of the theory of board game design that goes beyond what typically gets covered when we learn how to design games. My name is Sarah Shipp and today I want to talk about what motivates players during gameplay. 

Much of the time, when we talk about player experience we discuss how we want players to feel when playing a game. Player emotions occur as a result of stimuli provided by a game. Player motivation, on the other hand, is something that players bring to a game.

Steven Reiss, an American psychologist, developed a list of sixteen basic human desires that make up human motivation, often referred to as intrinsic motivation. Those desires are romance, curiosity, honor, acceptance, order, family, independence, power, social contact, physical activity, status, saving (defined as the desire to collect), eating, vengeance, tranquility, and idealism.

This isn’t a list of everything that can motivate us, but rather a list of universal things that motivate all of us. I will refer to the traits from Reiss’s list as motivators because they are sources of motivation. 

Right away we can see how the motivators are relevant to thematic design. Mechanical design requires us to look a little deeper. If I were to make two lists, one for motivation within game mechanics and one for motivation within game theme, the list for game theme would include every motivator from Reiss’s list. We can also add some of Maslow's needs to round out this list for thematic purposes: specifically physiological needs (such as breathing and sleep) and the need for safety (which includes protection from the elements or injury). 

My list for motivators that apply to game mechanics would include the following: curiosity, acceptance, order, independence, power, social contact, physical activity, status, saving, vengeance, and tranquility. Remember that saving means collecting in the sense that we can define a savings account as a collection of monetary value. Here’s a cursory look at why I think these motivators apply to game design. 

Curiosity is a good motivator for exploration games, push your luck games, and sandbox narrative games. Order and saving are standard motivators in strategy games. Physical activity is a motivator for dexterity games and some types of party games. Twister, for example. Social contact is a general motivator behind why many people like to play tabletop games but also a motivator specifically for party games. Acceptance might be a motivator for party games like Green Team Wins or could be a motivator in negotiation games. Similarly, independence could be a motivator for why someone does not want to negotiate for a shared victory. Vengeance is a motivator in games involving direct player conflict. Power is a motivator in games that have leveling up mechanisms or direct conflict. Status is the motivator that pushes us to try to win the games we play. Lastly, tranquility is what motivates people to seek out cozy games. In this instance, cozy refers to the play style and not the theme. 

How does this list help with designing games? We become invested in the action of a game 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 our avatars. 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.

Often when we are play testing, players will want to take actions that are contrary to the goals of the game. Your players will tell you that they want to take certain actions because those actions are fun. We should assume, however, that something is motivating them to take those actions. Most players will be motivated by progression in a game, but what they consider progress and what you consider progress may not be the same thing. 

One common place this comes up is in games with pvp combat. Players will not be motivated to attack other players if other actions have stronger motivators or if the results of combat don’t yield a good enough progression toward victory. As designers, we can either make our core game more motivating and engaging or we can align gameplay with what players are already motivated to do. 

Another way to use this list is when you are deciding on the type of experience you want your game to provide. Instead of focusing only on how you want players to feel when they are playing, you can design around what types of motivators you want to be present in your game. A game that inspires curiosity and status will be very different from one that inspires acceptance and saving. 

Intrinsic motivation helps designers understand player behavior and in turn motivators shape that behavior to fit the desired experience of a game. For more ways of thinking beyond mechanisms, you can visit my blog at shipp board games dot blog spot dot com or catch future episodes of thinking beyond mechanisms on ludology. 

TBM: Ep 5 EXTRAS

This episode betrays how much I want designers to change how they think, and by extension talk, about game design. 

Fortunately, we seem to have moved on from an obsession over mathematical balance. I think we're getting there when it comes to efficiency. 

I see these changes as a move from gamer-brain thinking to designer brain thinking. 

But, yeah, let's also stop demanding designs be elegant (and innovative and immersive). We need to move beyond gamer buzzwords to mature understanding of design. 

TBM: Ep 5 script

In an attempt to transition out of hiatus, I will be posting the scripts of my Thinking Beyond Mechanisms segment. I don't plan to edit them, so there may be some differences between the audio and written versions. Take the audio as the correct version. I also plan on offering some additional thoughts in separate posts—commentary on the episodes, if you will.

Ep 5: Designing Opposites

Welcome to Thinking Beyond Mechanisms, an in depth look at some of the other aspects of game design, the segment that looks at some of the theory of board game design that goes beyond what typically gets covered when we learn how to design games. My name is Sarah Shipp and today I want to talk about how designing games involves thinking in opposites. 

There are a few ubiquitous traits that designers strive for that are nonetheless difficult to achieve. A few of these are balance, elegance, and efficiency. Designing games that exemplify these traits can be a daunting task. I believe this task is made more difficult by misunderstanding the role the designer plays in these traits. 

For instance, if I am attempting to design a balanced game, I may already know that the perception of balance is more important that the underlying math to the play experience. But whether I am trying to create a balanced experience or a balanced game engine, I may end up with a game that feels flat and boring. If I see my role primarily as creating an even playing field, the gameplay may be so smooth that nothing interesting happens. 

On the contrary, it is my belief that a designer’s job is to determine the correct amount of imbalance for their design. How off-kilter should players feel? What sorts of decisions arise from having more or less imbalance? Balance is a single platonic state; imbalance is a spectrum that can be dialed up or down. 

Imbalance adds uncertainty and tension to designs. If player’s feel that the stakes are high, there is likely a decent amount of imbalance as well. However, too much imbalance can leave players feeling as though their decisions don’t matter. Imbalance can be added in the form of randomness, asymmetry, or even unequal player skill. The types of imbalance you choose further shapes the play experience. 

Thinking in opposites, such as imbalance instead of balance, is essentially a mindset shift that allows you to focus on an area of design in a way that feels more actionable and is more true to the role of the designer. Additionally, by viewing a problem from a new perspective you may discover new solutions. 

Efficiency is even more important to consider from its opposite. Efficiency is a player goal. The design goal is to create obstacles to efficiency. A designer’s challenge is to incorporate inefficiency into a game in order to create obstacles for the players to overcome. A game’s rules will almost always prohibit the most efficient option, which is to let players collect whatever they want whenever they want it.

Rules introduce inefficiency. This inefficiency may or may not be compounded by the players getting in each others’ way. As designers, player dynamics are as much in our purview as mechanics. When determining the right amount of inefficiency in a game, we must consider how much inefficiency will be added by player interaction versus how much is added by the rules.

Inefficiency is about ensuring that certain things do not happen or do not happen quickly or easily. The danger of too much inefficiency is that the game will feel as though nothing happens and the players do not achieve anything during play.  

Elegance is a more challenging concept. Avoiding inelegance is certainly easier than setting out to design an elegant game. However, we often confuse elegant with merely being simple or uncluttered. While those traits often contribute to elegance, I would like to put forward that the spectrum of clarity to obscurity is more vital to creating elegance. 

I am using obscurity to refer to player confusion rather than hidden information. A lack of clarity in a design is more easy to identify than a lack of elegance, although additional clarity will usually add elegance. Removing player confusion can involve removing unnecessary mechanisms, changing the graphic design, eliminating edge cases in the rules, etc. I referred to this in my previous episode as removing the chaff in a design. Removing or changing the elements that create player confusion will add a measurable amount of elegance to a design. 

Too much clarity may leave players feeling as if there is nothing more to discover after a single play. A small amount of obscurity or uncertainty can intrigue players. This could be implemented as imbalance or inefficiency, both of which can be said to be inelegant in the absolute sense. 

There are other ways of implementing elegance, efficiency, and balance to a design, but thinking about their opposites will get you eighty to ninety percent of where you want to be. One mistake designers make is focusing on clever solutions before implementing simple fixes. Thinking in opposites encourages designers to look at the underlying issues, rather than adding clever work arounds on top of a system that may not be serving its purpose. 

I encourage you to explore other areas of design that can be viewed from the opposite side.

For more ways of thinking beyond mechanisms, you can visit my blog at shipp board games dot blog spot dot com or catch future episodes of thinking beyond mechanisms on ludology. 

TBM: Ep 4 EXTRAS

You know what? Maybe skip this episode. Not sure why I felt the need to walk people through how my thinking diverges from Made to Stick. 

I got really into the idea of resonance after I explored immersion. This is what I came up with. I've pretty much decided that resonance only caught my attention because it was a buzz word in the hobby for a while and that we've all somewhat moved on from it. 

I mean, I stand by my formula. I just don't worry much about resonance compared to immersion or thematic integration. Basically, I'm tackling this problem from other more fruitful angles these days. 

TBM: Ep 4 script

In an attempt to transition out of hiatus, I will be posting the scripts of my Thinking Beyond Mechanisms segment. I don't plan to edit them, so there may be some differences between the audio and written versions. Take the audio as the correct version. I also plan on offering some additional thoughts in separate posts—commentary on the episodes, if you will.

Resonance

Welcome to Thinking Beyond Mechanisms, an in depth look at some of the other aspects of game design, the segment that looks at some of the theory of board game design that goes beyond what typically gets covered when we learn how to design games. My name is Sarah Shipp and today I want to talk about what makes ideas resonant. 

A few years ago, I had been working on my own ideas of what it means to be resonant, when I ran across the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. The concepts in Made to Stick both validated and helped clarify my ideas around resonance. The book outlines a number of traits that make ideas sticky—more likely to be remembered or acted upon. These traits can be applied to marketing, but also awareness campaigns or even urban legends. Together, these traits spell out Success: S-U-C-C-E-S. 

The first trait is Simplicity. Sticky ideas get to the core of the matter quickly. The next is Unexpectedness. Surprise helps keeps an audience’s attention. The next trait is Concreteness. Ideas that use less abstract imagery, but are instead stated in terms of human senses are more relatable. The next concept is Credibility. Ideas may come from someone with authority or may express their own internal credibility. The next trait is Emotions. Tapping into people’s emotions gets them invested in an idea. The final trait is Stories. Stories allow an audience to experience a situation without having to actually live through it. 

There is a certain amount of overlap within these traits. Stories generally contain emotion and are a good way to harness emotion. Stories also generally contain concrete imagery. Stories may also have internal credibility. Additionally, the order of the traits in Made to Stick is merely for the sake of the acronym. 

I wanted to borrow some of these ideas but adapt them to be useful to board game designers. The first thing I did was throw out credibility. External credibility is more about marketing than design. Some designers have credibility because of their past designs. Some because they have expertise in the theme they are using. However, most first time designers don’t have the experience needed to establish credibility. And those designers are the future of the hobby. So, I don’t wish to place too much emphasis on external credibility when it comes to design. 

Additionally, I find that internal credibility naturally arises when the other traits are well-executed. A simple, surprising, concrete, emotional story does not need additional credibility in order to be resonant. When thinking about considerations beyond resonance within design, credibility becomes more important. But I wanted to distill resonance down to something easier to remember than the Succes model. 

In my formula, I combine Concreteness and Emotions with Stories, under the heading of Familiarity. People respond to the familiar. Have you ever heard a familiar song on the radio and your first thought was “I love this song” only to realize after the first few seconds that you hate the song but your brain was temporarily excited because the opening notes were familiar? Our brains seek the familiar. We place stories into genres because we want to know what sorts of things will be familiar about them before we read, watch, or listen. 

Concreteness is also about familiarity at a human scale. By including elements that are viscerally familiar, we can better transport our audiences into our stories. In board games, this means that when laws of nature are represented simply but viscerally, players will become more invested. For example, SuperSkill Pinball represents gravity by having players continually moving the pieces down the board, where “down” is toward the player. Another example is in The Coldest Night, players feed fuel cards into a central fire to keep it from going out but must play cards that won’t smother the flames.

Emotions are not something we add into a design, but a by-product of the elements that we add. Visceral imagery and compelling stories can create a whole range of emotions. So, in a sense, I leave emotions out of my formula, but I acknowledge that they are a part of fine-tuning resonance and must be considered during playtesting. 

I won’t speak too much to stories here; that may be a later episode. While stories and emotion fall primarily into my category of Familiarity, they also impact my next category for resonance, which is Unexpectedness. Yes, I am borrowing the term directly from the Succes model; it’s the most straightforward word. A twist in familiarity keeps ideas fresh and hooks in audiences. My main caution here is that the ideal ratio of familiarity to unexpectedness is 90/10. Too much unexpectedness will make ideas feel random, hard to follow, and lacking in credibility. 

Lastly, I reframe Simplicity from a design perspective and call it Removing Chaff. If you aren’t aware, chaff is the name for the outer husk of wheat berries that must be removed before the grain is ground into flour. An idea will not be truly resonant if it is bogged down by lots of extraneous, unrelated elements. For a deeper dive into this concept, refer to my previous segment on unity. 

Finally, I put my concepts together in a formula for resonance, which is: Familiarity plus Unexpectedness minus Chaff. This concept can be applied to themes but also mechanisms. Most games build on other games but with a few twists. We’ve all heard complaints about kitchen sink games that don’t feel cohesive. By my definition, those games are not resonant. It turns out that resonance is a surprisingly simple concept, but often difficult to execute. 

So, remember when designing that games should to feel familiar with a twist and uncluttered by elements that distract from the main experience. 

If you’re interested in a more detailed discussion of my formula for resonance, I gave a talk at GDC in 2021 that is now available on YouTube. For more ways of thinking beyond mechanisms, you can visit my blog at shipp board games dot blog spot dot com or catch future episodes of thinking beyond mechanisms on ludology. 

TBM: Ep 3 EXTRAS

Yay! Everyone loves talking about Aristotle and some random Renaissance guy, right? Just me? 

Unity is why some things feel well-designed. <- point I should have made in the episode. 

Now is a good time to complain that Wikipedia has something weird going on on the design principles page. Instead of Lauer and Pentak or some other well regarded source for structuring the ideas, it looks like it might be some professor's personal work getting shared? Not sure because I can read all of the cited sources to find out. But the list is super weird. (I'm also not checking to see if it's still this way, because who has that kind of time.)

I really love the classical unities in spite of the fact that they are: 1) not classical, 2) not used much in theatre anymore. I'm not a big fan of plays that get a little too disconnected from a sense of time and location. 

A lot of people who want to apply narrative rules to their projects (games or otherwise) will bring up learning about screen writing. I think that makes sense for video games, but not board games. Let's learn more theatre because the crossover traits make the pairing more natural. 

Hobbies or interests mentioned: theatre history