When designing a game, what is the first thing that pops into your mind? What story are you going to tell? How will the main character behave in the world? The look of an enemy? Skills with mind blowing effects and impossible-to-skip cutscenes? How much money will you make in your first month of sale?
All of these aspects are valid, but as it is an interactive media that only gains meaning during this moment of contact between the product and the user, there is one aspect that is even more important: your player’s experience.
Early career gaming professionals aren’t very good at thinking about this, which is no shame as it goes through our maturing process, especially today that the gaming industry has been close to us from a very early age. Usually, it’s common to think about what was listed at the beginning, about artifacts rather than what those artifacts do, something that was discussed earlier in Parts 1 and 2 of this series of texts.
But there is an area that specializes in thinking about Experience. An area whose main objective is to work to design the interaction of users with products, generating a positive relationship between them and exploring aspects such as Emotions, Cognition, Memory and Ergonomics to obtain the best possible result in this interaction, given the interests involved.
That area is User Experience Design.
Also read: The Design in Game Design – Part 1
Derived from Human x Computer Interaction (HCI), UX Design is very closely related to Usability Design and both complement each other in the creative and productive process of an artifact, seeking to weigh the Ergonomic aspects (the functional quality of the product) and Hedonics (the reflective and post-functional quality of the product).
I usually define Game Design as a derivative of User Experience, although this sounds almost offensive to some professionals in both areas, but the parallels are undeniable, which makes me understand Game Design as an Ultra Specialized UX Designer Playful Design.
For starters, both professionals must initially understand what kind of project they are developing and, based on an initial proposal (the Design Thinking iteration or an Experience Proposal), design the artifacts with an experience focus.
It is important to emphasize this point: in both cases, THE EXPERIENCE is never projected. Being clear and objective, you as a Designer can never say that you will project fear in your game or you will project adrenaline, you cannot project empathy and even less the feeling of revenge that your user will have when losing to the same enemy half a dozen of times.
What happens is that the Designer designs FOR AN EXPERIENCE, using artifacts from the media he is working on (in this case, Games) in order to make an established idea come true. You don’t project fear, but you can project the soundtrack, the lighting, the severity of the challenges your user will encounter and the design of the environment and enemies, all with the aim of extracting fear, which is a reflection of the your user for your product, for example.
Also read: The Design in Game Design – Part 2
Pulling a quick hook from Part 2, did this example make it clear the importance of having a clear Experience Proposal? Something that you can follow and think about what you will build to generate your goal in the game? Or why we call it EXPERIENCE PROPOSAL and not Experience What the Game Will Have?
Excellent. Moving on to the next relationship, both professionals must have a multidisciplinary profile to perform their function with maximum efficiency. Regardless of what Technical Courses and even some Higher Education courses have in their curriculum, multidisciplinarity is not just knowing how to program and design.
Multidisciplinarity, when it comes to Game Design and UX Design, permeates much more diverse areas, such as the humanistic fields of History, Geography, Anthropology, Philosophy and Sociology, but also works with Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, Engineering(s) and, of course, Psychology.
Understanding all these areas to some degree and, above all, understanding the relationship between them in the product you are developing is what separates a Game Designer (and a UX Designer) who fulfill their role for those who really excel in what matters most: your ability to solve problems.
The larger your toolbox, the more you can explore the rules of the media you’re using, and later on you can subvert them at your leisure.
And then the questions come to mind:
How does your game’s random roll stats impact your user’s sense of frustration or reward? How will your project’s core demographics react to your choice of aesthetics, colors and iconography, based on your historical and social background? How is the game flow creating adrenaline peaks and valleys and how does this influence the average usage time of your product? Is your narrative managing to work correctly with aspects of Attention and Memory derived from your user’s cognition?
These questions can be asked for both a Game Designer and a UX Designer and both must be able to understand the elements that need to be analyzed and considered from them within their knowledge.
For some people, being so interested in such diverse areas generates “Useless Knowledge”, but for Designers these are precious opportunities to better understand their product, their consumer and, above all, the world around them.
And what else is there?
And finally the last (?) relationship between Game Design and UX Design is in the most interesting aspect of their attribution and which, for me, makes Game Design an Ultra Specialized UX as I said before: the project focusing on Hedonic aspects.
Hedonism, as I had briefly explained in parentheses a few paragraphs ago, is the idea of seeking personal satisfaction in a wide range of physical, psychological, biological, etc. possibilities.
The Hedonic Aspects, therefore, are the satisfaction aspects generated by the interaction with a product. They can be considered Opposite/Complementary to the Ergonomic aspects, which value the quality of use and precision in the fulfillment of a certain objective.
UX designers reading this, don’t beat me up for talking about “Opposite/Complementary”. What I mean by that, within the Games sphere, is that at various times Ergonomics needs to not reach its peak in favor of the Hedonia of a project.
When designing a playful interaction, Ergonomic quality goes to the point where it is needed to give the tools fairly for the user to interact with that product. After all, for the sake of Ergonomics, it would be easier to call the police to rescue a princess trapped in a castle than to traverse an entire kingdom with mushrooms, plumbing and giant bullets. But what would be the Hedonic satisfaction of that?
Or even clearer, if the objective of the Game of Life is to reach the end of the board with the best results for having landed on the right squares, why not always place the pawn on the squares you want and then put the pawn on the square “Final”? It’s not funny, right? We can go really deep into this and discuss the basics of Ludology, but the focus here is to understand that the optimal solution for games is not the most interesting solution.
And both Game Designers and UX Designers need to deal with this on a daily basis. A fine balance between offering the essential tools for your user and at the same time creating an engaging interaction (and complying with your Experience Proposal).
Read all our Games Design Posts
In both cases, there are several hedonic variables that need to be thought through and weighed to understand how they will affect the final product. Reflective Aspects (how the user perceives the interaction with the product at the level of past experiences, expectations, preferences) need to be taken into account, as well as the psychological elements triggered by each type of interaction, time spent to carry out an activity, visual effect, told narrative, etc.
We can expand on this, discuss for a few hours and write some articles on the topic, in addition to the many that already exist, but for now this is the contribution I would like to make to close Part 3 and the collection of texts “Design in Game Design” for you to understand that there is much more to Game Design than simply having a cool idea and wanting to get it off the ground.
Many of these aspects seem complex and, in fact, require study and attention. Likewise, they may seem useless or overdone at first glance, especially for early projects, but considering these elements in your game, and a few others that we can brainstorm later on, is what will really define your project as just another one of the thousands that fall onto Steam’s shelves every year for that game which, even though it’s hard to explain why, engages, holds and captivates its users in such a deep and special way that it makes it a masterpiece.
If you want to know more about this, just give a shout :3
