PLAYFUL DESIGN Game design is a sibling to software and web design, but they’re siblings that grew up in different houses. Yet these two disciplines have much more in common than their perceived distinction typically suggests. In Playful Design, John Ferrara shows how user experience practitioners can achieve great things in the real world through game design. by JOHN FERRARA by JOHN “For UX designers eager to go beyond simple points and badges, it’s been hard to find resources that truly bridge the worlds of UX and game design. John Ferrara’s thorough, thoughtful, and practical book is just what we’ve been waiting for.” JESSE JAMES GARRETT Author, The Elements of User Experience “Playful Design is a brilliant beyond-the-hype book...a must read for anyone interested not just in games, but in designing engaging and meaningful human experiences.” JAMES PAUL GEE Author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy “This book couldn’t be more timely: Playful Design delivers a concise introduction to the theory, experience, and design of games for nongame designers, blended with fresh personal takes.” SEBASTIAN DETERDING Designer and game researcher, coding conduct “John Ferrara cuts through the hype and provides a concise, practical, and insightful summary of issues every designer needs to consider in venturing into this challenging yet promising field.” SCOT OSTERWEIL Creative Director, MIT Education Arcade PL AY F U L DE S IGN www.rosenfeldmedia.com Creating Game Experiences in Everyday Interfaces MORE ON PLAYFUL DESIGN by JOHN FERRARA www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/game-design/ foreword by Sunni Brown CONTENTS How to Use This Book iv Frequently Asked Questions vii Foreword xiv Introduction xv PART I: PLAYFUL THINKING CHAPTER 1 Why We Should Care about Games 1 Why Do Games Matter? 3 Why Us? 9 How Can Games Benefit Us? 10 Ready, Set,!.!.!. 13 CHAPTER 2 Understanding Games 15 Defining Games 16 Games in the Real World 22 Finding Useful Models 26 CHAPTER 3 The Elements of Player Experience 27 Motivation 29 Meaningful Choices 30 Balance 31 Usability 31 Aesthetics 32 What about Fun? 33 x CHAPTER 4 Player Motivations 35 Common Motivations 38 Games Are More Than Just Having Fun 47 PART II: DESIGNING GAME EXPERIENCES CHAPTER 5 Ten Tips for Building a Better Game 49 1. Games Need to Be Games First 50 2. Playtest, Playtest, Playtest 52 3. Games Don’t Have to Be for Kids 52 4. Action Can Be Boring 54 5. Fit the Game into the Player’s Lifestyle 56 6. Create Meaningful Experience 58 7. Don’t Cheat 59 8. Skip the Manual 61 9. Make the Game Make Sense 62 10. Make It Easy to Try Again 63 Play to Your Strengths 64 CHAPTER 6 Developing a Game Concept 65 Your Objective 66 Your Players 67 The Conflict 69 Duration and Lifetime 72 End State 73 Linearity 74 Player Interaction 75 Genre 80 Putting It All Together 80 Keeping Your Priorities Straight 84 C!"#$"#% xi CHAPTER 7 Creating Game Prototypes 85 Paper Prototypes 86 Electronic Prototypes 95 Prototyping Saves Time and Money (Really!) 98 CHAPTER 8 Playtesting 99 Classes of Problems 100 General Guidelines 101 Distinguishing Real Problems from Appropriate Challenges 104 Evaluating Motivation: The PENS Model 107 An Easy Transition 110 CHAPTER 9 Behavioral Tools 111 A Quick Guide to Behaviorism 112 Behaviorism in Video Games 119 What about Free Will? 123 CHAPTER 10 Rewards in Games 125 Common Reward Systems 126 Combining Game Rewards 145 PART III: PLAYFUL DESIGN IN USER EXPERIENCE CHAPTER 11 Games for Action 147 Appraising a Game’s E"ciency 149 Methods 150 Reframing 154 xii C!"#$"#% Real-Time Reinforcement 160 Optional Advantages 162 Scheduled Play 166 Di#erent Is Good 168 CHAPTER 12 Games for Learning 169 What Makes Games Suited to Learning? 171 Strategies for Using Games to Support Learning 184 Playing Smarter 195 CHAPTER 13 Games for Persuasion 197 This Is Not a New Idea 198 Procedural Rhetoric 201 Designing Persuasive Games 206 Case Study: Fitter Critters 209 Changing Minds 215 CHAPTER 14 How Games Are Changing 217 Five Trends 218 Game On 229 Index 231 Acknowledgments 244 About the Author 245 C!"#$"#% xiii nce you have a solid concept for a game, you can start working out how you’ll turn it into a playable experience. But development can be a risky venture. Games are inherently negotiated experiences; Othe designer normally just de*nes the parameters of play, within which the players bring the game to life. Part of the experience is created in advance, but the rest exists only in the moment of play. +is means that it can be very di,cult—if not impossible—to tell how well a game will play, short of actually playing it. You have to assume that the design of any game will go through a lot of revisions between conceptualization and launch. It can also be very hard to think through all the *ne points of a game’s design right from the start. In particular, games that o-er great depth of play and very involving experiences are necessarily complex undertakings. Game designers need reliable tools to help them re*ne an idea thoroughly and e,ciently. Prototyping meets both of these needs. It minimizes risk by exposing design problems early in the process. Designers can then focus on solutions that will improve the design. Prototyping also allows designers to .esh out and re*ne a game at a detailed level. It brings the gaps in the design into focus, and it’s a cost-e-ective means by which designers can experiment with di-erent ideas. In this chapter I discuss two types of prototyping that will be familiar to UX designers, each of which has unique considerations in the context of game design. +ere’s a natural progression between the methods, moving from lower to higher *delity and ultimately to the *nal form of the game. Practice with applying these methods to game design may even yield insight into better practices for the design of conventional user interfaces. I’ve often found that the shift in thinking that is required for designing games can crack open new approaches to UX design. Paper Prototypes Paper prototyping is beloved in the UX design community for its ability to support highly informative appraisals of early design concepts without the overhead of lengthy, expensive development cycles. But at *rst glance, this method we know so well might seem ill suited to many video games. Can you really represent the experience of a game like Asteroids on paper? It’s di,cult enough to get a paper prototype of a Web form to re.ect the way it will behave in the real world. How then can you re-create the mechanic of .ying through open space and *ring wildly at giant boulders that crumble into smaller pieces shooting out in di-erent directions, all while following Newtonian physics? Stone Librande, creative director at Maxis, advocates using paper prototypes broadly in the design of video games. He challenges participants in his workshops to create paper versions of real games they’ve played in the past, and as it happens, one session actually produced an entirely o/ine version of Asteroids (Figure 7.1). 86 C&'(#$) 7 AXIS , EA/M, DE N F Y O IBRA L E URTES ON T CO S FIGURE 7.1 The classic arcade game Asteroids, re-created as a fully playable paper prototype. A probability matrix (bottom right) determines, from a die roll, whether a shot hit or missed. In this simulation, players chose one of four directions in which to point their spaceship, from which asteroids approached one step on each turn. Players then rolled a die to *re, and a probability matrix based on the size of the asteroid and their distance from it determined whether they were successful. +is prototype successfully reduced the game to its most basic interaction. So at least some elements of video games are suited to paper prototyping. Even if some parts of a game you’re working on don’t translate, chances are that other parts do. +at’s okay; you don’t have to re-create the game as a whole faithfully. But wherever an opportunity exists to answer a design question on paper, the expediency and a-ordability of the paper method make it worthwhile. What Works on Paper? While paper prototypes usually can’t o-er a precise representation of an entire game experience, there are some common aspects of a game’s design that they are especially good at evaluating. Balance Paper is a great tool for e,ciently *guring out which values to assign to elements in the game so that they balance well against one another. See the sidebar for an example of how Stone Librande applied paper prototypes toward this end in the design of Spore. C)$'#0"1 G'2$ P)!#!#3($% 87 Paper-Prototyping Spore Stone Librande +e video game Spore (EA/Maxis, 2008) is an epic spanning the evolution of life on a planet. +e player begins the game controlling a primitive organism in a small tide pool. Over time the organism evolves into a sentient race of creatures that, if successful, will conquer the planet and eventually colonize the galaxy. AXIS I was the lead designer on the *rst portion of Spore, called the “Cell Game.” In this , EA/M DE stage of the game the player starts out as N a weak tadpole-like creature. +e player’s IBRA L goal is to navigate through increasingly E ON T hostile waters and crawl up onto land.