The slides! The slides!

MotivationalErgonomics_MIGS_2012

So, screw it. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I’m talking about Skyrim. My relationship to Skyrim is not exactly, um, healthy.

When I’m done writing this, I’m probably going to boot it up and get started on my 85,000th play session of that dumb game. WHY!? WHYYYYYYYY?!?!

It’s because somewhere along the way, their tricks worked. It got its hooks into me.

Now, I hated all of the other Elder Scrolls games. Well, hrm. Maybe “hated” is too strong a word. I “failed to play” all the other Elder Scrolls games except for Morrowind, and Morrowind got two hours of my life before I hung it up forever. The end had come for me while standing over the corpse of a grandmotherly woman, deep in the forests outside my starter town. This elderly lady had seen me pick up a piece of bread that didn’t belong to me, and had converted herself into a murderous fiend, determined to end my days with her fists (as she was completely unarmed). She was the only person who had witnessed my heinous crime, and so when I fled the scene of the crime into the nearby woods, she had shorty appeared, trucking after me into the dim, intent on ending my time on this planet for expressing my curiosity. After literally being forced to choose between the end of my game and murdering this kindly old lady, I decided that maybe I was “doing it wrong”, and hung it up.

But, Skyrim.

Dragons, right?? Who doesn’t love ‘em?

Me, at least in this incarnation. But everyone was playing it, so whatever, I’ll give it a try. Bought it for PS3, slammed the disc in the drive, and gave it the old one-two. Dragonborn! I am it! And stuff.

The first forty hours or so took about nine months. My sessions were generally a few hours long, and profoundly unsatisfying. I would pick up the controller, don my character (a female Redguard semi-paladin on a mission to ignore her so-called ‘fate’ and simply find a place in this chilly wasteland so far from her home), and would soon find myself going about vacuuming every object I could get my hands on from every cave I could locate.

I’m a hoarder. OH LORDY, THE HOARDING.

What I mean is that when I play a Bethesda game, I literally *cannot* leave behind loose, pick-up-able items. If you have played Skyrim, you know what this means. I… have a lot of stuff in my house.

Ruined books, for example! There are several different types of ruined books. I have over four hundred of the most common kind.

Shhhhhh. Shhh. I can quit any time.

The world seemed so wondrously false to me at first. I would try to get some emotional footing in the game, and would end up just slipping down the random looting slope. Weeks would pass between sessions, and I would only pick it back up out of a sense of “well, other people are playing this, so I probably should have an opinion about it.”

Fast forward to three months ago.

So, there is this key moment in the game where the Greybeards (which I think of as The Gandalfs) summon you to the big mountain, so that they can Explain To You The Plot.

I was busy. I had books to cart back to my house, man.

It took me something like three years of in-game time to finally get around to the side of the mountain where the path up lay. (What I mean by this is that everything between the starting valley, the second valley of Whiterun, and everything north of the mountain had been completely hoovered of recoverable goods. I am moving across Skyrim like a wave of item removal.) By the time I got there, I figured that maybe they had gotten the message? I might have been Dragonborn, but I was not going to be the Tool of Fate. Nossieree.

But, hey. I was there. Why not go see what the old farts had to say? They might even have some ruined books.

So, I got up there, and with defiance in my visage, I admitted that yes, I was the Dragonborn. They seemed excited by this, and taught me a few new tricks.

And then they sort of went about their business.

Confused, I interrogated their leader. “What’s the plan?” I asked.

I’m paraphrasing here, but his response could be summed up as “Yeah, we really have no idea. Let us know what you come up with.”

It was at that moment that the cold, snargly claws of Open World Design wormed themselves into my mind.

What, like, I can just sort of do whatever I want? COME ON. I’m the Dragonborn! Isn’t there a… a… thing?? Someone to kill? An item to recover?

The Greybeards simply shrugged. “We hope so! Because, dragons, right? Wow! They suck!”

Looking down on the wide vale that dominates the land called Skyrim from high on that polygonated mountain, I took in a deep breath, tasted the freedom, and said to myself, “I bet the designers didn’t really intend this to happen.”

See? I bought the trick. I drank the cool-aid. I figured I had out-smarted the gods of their world.

I was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. But, I crossed over two hundred hours last weekend, am the Lord of Just About Everything, have pushed the cursed Imperials out of the lands, and am level a billion in everything. Story hook lead to achievement hook, and now I Will Finish It. It’s how I am.

Why am I telling you this?

Honestly, I just enjoy telling the story. I’ve told it to several of my friends, and I wanted to write a blog post (FOUR MONTHS!!), and it was the first thing that came to mind.

Skyrim! It is sort of good.

Vivid memory: sitting in one of the weirdly tall presentation halls at the GDC in 2004, and watching in horror and awe as Nicole Lazzaro blasted a hole in my brain. It would prove to be a wound that I would never recover from.

Nicole Lazzaro: Action Philosopher

Do you know of her 4 Fun Keys? If you are game designer and the answer is ‘no’, then first: swift kick to the shins!! And, next, get started. It is good stuff.

In 2004, though, the year that Nicole would give her first ’4 Fun Keys’ talk, I had had none of that. In 2004, I was a four-year Electronic Arts ‘vet’, making games starring James Bond.

Like most of us at that time, I was largely self-taught, at least in the tasks that I was being paid for. I had been taught to program by my father, and had been taught to make movies by my university, but I was doing neither of those things. I was an associate producer, trying to guide a group of unruly level designers through the corrals of shipping a game at EA.

And I needed some game design principles with which to guide those guys. Hoo, boy, did I ever. They were, as we say, ‘challenging’.

Fortunately, I had a slight leg up, having been buried in psychology and technology for most of my childhood (thanks to parents who shared those interests), and having been an avid roleplayer and gamer for my entire life. But, although I had been working in the games biz for years by this time (my first gig was in 1996) I had not really been exposed to anything like a games industry collective wisdom. You know, like the kind of thing you could get at the GDC.

After all, it was EA. When you said, “I would like to go to the GDC this year,” the response was always a crooked look, and: “Why, you looking for a new job?”

/facepalm

For the record, Dudes Who Always Said That: “No, asshat. It’s because, unlike you, I have an interest in pursuing and contributing to human knowledge. Unlike you, I am not happy with plundering my industry for personal benefit. I want to give something back. You can’t imagine what that would feel like, can you? Wow, that says horrible things about you.”

I’ve always wanted to say that. I wish I could say it to his/their face(s).

ANYWAY! Where was I?

RIGHT! I had been starving at EA, you see. For years, I had been learning my trade, but with the exception of just a brief handful of other intellectual souls, I was without collaborators in trying to grasp something like a functional theory to explain what in the hell we were doing.

And it seemed important, you know?!? Lots of money was flowing through a thriving industry, I had been shaped by the games I had played, and there seemed to be some kind of underlying structure to what we did. But there were blessed few academics interested in what we were doing (seems strange that less than 10 years later that has changed so fast), and what few books existed at that time had failed to compel me.

We were drowning in a need to succeed with motivating our players, but we had no theory to work with, and I had not yet encountered the theorists that would (soon) solve this problem for me.

“FINE!” I said, shaking my fist at the sky, “I’ll make my OWN damn theory!”

Of course, being a young, brash, un-academic, I proceeded as most of us did: I made it up. Looking back, I imagine that I could have consulted with the grand wizards that stalked the halls of the building I worked in at the time (you know, guys like Rich Hilleman and Bing Gordon… the ‘little people’). Hell, every leader on the team I was on had been making games for over a decade. But did I ask them what they thought?

Of course not. I was way smarter than those guys. Pssh.

/facepalm

Anyway. In my off-hours (or, during the 30-minute map build cycles we had on 007: Agent Under Fire), I would furiously scribble manic insanity in a notebook I was carrying around, attempting to first brainstorm all the varieties of player motivation I could come up with, and then organize them.

Game designers all do this, I think, at some point. There’s a joke that floats around the GDC: “What this industry really needs is another player taxonomy!” There are as many taxonomies as there are designers, I believe. (Perhaps a taxonomy of designers would be useful!)

What I came up with would prove to be simultaneously insightful and revealingly incomplete. Heh. I have a blind spot, it turns out.

I devised a three-motive system that I lovingly/pretentiously named ‘Arena, Labyrinth, Plot’. It went like this:

• The ‘Arena’ was the part of the game that had moving, unpredictable targets in it, and required a skill test to overcome. The ‘shooting and jumping’ part.
• The ‘Labyrinth’ was the path, doors, and keys that the player traversed during play. Quests, achievements – that sort of thing.
• the ‘Plot’ was the context & characters that gave the experience meaning. Story, or the lack thereof.

There was a lot more to it, but you get the idea. It was neat. Wrong, as I would soon learn, and woefully focused on what I knew (single-player action/adventure), but neat.

‘Soon’, in fact, was GDC 2004, in that weirdly-tall presentation hall, when Nicole Lazzaro put this slide up on her screen:

Suddenly, the ‘Arena’ was where ‘Hard Fun’ (‘fiero’) happened. The ‘Labyrinth’ was where her ‘Serious Fun’ (‘relaxation’) happened. My ‘Plot’ was a small part of what ‘Easy Fun’ (‘amusement’) was talking about, but hers was broader and more complete.

And I had totally missed ‘Social Fun’. It hadn’t even occurred to me.

/facepalm

(For the record, while that omission may have been partially attributable to the pre-’social’ game developer culture at the time, it’s far safer to place the blame on my inherently solo gaming habits. I… don’t play games with other people much. They never want to 100% all the levels and do all the challenges and stuff! Is that so wrong?!?)

But for me, in that moment, my obvious omissions were not the point. The point was that I was sitting in the room with at least one other person who was trying to think about this problem in something like the way I did. And from the looks of it, there was significantly more than just one.

We’re at the end of this tale. I’ll close with the other thought that hit me at that time, something that has continued to be my focus and priority in thinking about these problems. It is this: Nicole’s work (and most of the work that has been done on this topic) was focused on understanding the player-side part of the equation.

This is crucial work. Understanding our players is the basis of everything we do, and it was the work that simply hadn’t been done at that time. Nicole (and a few other people, who I hope to talk about next time) did and continue to do pioneering work in pushing forward our empathy for our players.

(Amazingly, this is also the part that many people on the development side consider a waste of time, and actively discourage. Although, it should be said that the success of Zynga and their motivation metrics has finally shut most of those bozos up. Good riddance.)

However, the part of the equation that has always drawn my interest has been the design side. Nicole identified ‘Hard Fun’ in her model of motivation – and my process has been to try and define a series of guidelines for designers that would lead the way towards creating that kind of fun in a person.

I haven’t succeeded in this. At the time, I called this the ‘Arena’. Now, it’s something else, and I have the distinct impression that we are getting closer to a solve for this problem. But, solved or not, I walked out of that hall in 2004 filled, both with the illuminating brilliance of new insight, and with the contentment that there was still plenty of work to be done.

Which is important, I think, for a 100% completist like me.

This post is part of a bigger post, something I’m doing (slowly, heh) in response to questions I get asked about why in the hell a game designer is pursuing the collisions between the Big 5 model of personality and game design. It’s more than a tad self-indulgent: you’ve been warned.

Other posts: Prologue 1, Prologue 2

My gradeschool was a semi-hoighty-toighty private school by the name of ‘Evergreen’. It was, I would later learn, structured with what I can best describe as a kind of stew of progressive schooling ideas, circa the mid-1970′s.

I learned 100x more at that weird little elite hideaway than I ever did at my junior high or my highschool. The quality of education rocked, and I’m eternally grateful to my parents for sending me there. (I can tell you, though: being dropped into the public school system after eight years of progressivism was a BIT of a shocker. I adapted… but it took a while.)

One of the cool things about attending that school was that they had a lot of cool books lying around. For example, by the time I was eight, I had read all of the Tintin and Asterix the Gaul comic books. These are amazing, wonderful, imaginative tales of weirdness that are, alas, almost completely unknown within these here United States (being European classics). At my gradeschool, however, they were all just sitting around in the various bookshelves of my homeroom. When I didn’t feel like going outside to be tortured by the bullies during recess, I would go find a corner somewhere and read those instead.

One of the other books that caught my interest during these ‘avoiding going outside’ sessions was an off-blue thin paperback called Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates. The teachers had casually left this book lying around in plain view. Almost like they WANTED us to pick it up on our own. Almost like they wanted us to feel like we were getting away with reading stuff we weren’t really supposed to be reading, because it wasn’t mentioned anywhere in our lessons. Clever bastards.

The book held within it a 70-odd-question test (that the author, in a fit of modesty, named the ‘Keirsey Temperament Sorter’) that had an answer key and everything. You could take the test, score your answers, and then the book would serve you up a ‘personality type’ based on those scores, along with a brief, easily digestible description of that type.

After a few weeks of hovering around it incessantly, I stole that book and took it home.

Of course I did! Besides having an instinctive interest in the topic, I was a highly-self-conscious kid who was being tormented almost daily by seemingly unending legions of kids who were meaner and better-equipped than me, and I had some vague hope that understanding myself better might help get me out of this mess.

Also, I would grow up to design video games for a living, and here was a literal book-as-a-game. It was like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure! Everything was laid out in plain language in the book – you could explore the structure of the test as much as you wanted. And I did. I would take it again and again. I would pretend to be different people, to see what the results would be, and to understand the ‘personality’ of the person I had been pretending to be. Sometimes I would attempt to take the test as my tormentors, or perhaps as one of my crushes. I think I actually tried to take the test as one of my teachers one time, to see if I could ‘reverse engineer’ him.

The book used the Meyers-Briggs type indicator for its results, the personality theory that generates ‘types’ like ‘INFP’ or ‘ESTJ’ – 4-letter alphabetical codes that meant a lot to people in the know, but meant absolutely nothing to anyone else. I learned to say “I’m an NF, but I would guess you are an NT”, and make it sound like that meant something really cool and insightful.

This was during the late 70′s. But that Meyers-Briggs test is still being used today, in a wide variety of settings. Usually, to teach managers how to better manipulate their bosses. I didn’t know it then, but that weird little book had infected my young, impressionable mind with some of the best and most modern psychological theories of the day. Clever bastard teachers.

I read it cover-to-cover dozens of times before I hit highschool. I don’t know how many times I took the test, but I know that I had learned to ‘spike’ the test to get whatever result I wanted. (I thought I was pretty clever. Alas, by doing that not only had I circumvented the primary value of such a test – which is getting to know yourself better – I had also managed to convince myself that I was a type that I wanted to be, instead of the type I actually was. Yeah, don’t do that. It leads to years of confusion.)

I didn’t know it at the time, but the way I figure it, my brief-but-intense relationship with that book at the very least burned into my brain a deep understanding that human motivations are widely varied, and at best gave me some solid initial archetypes to work with. By the time I hit highschool, I already had a pretty complex model of human behavior running in my head.

You know who liked that? Girls. Girls liked that. Of course, boys liked it too – but, to me, the more relevant fact was that the girls that I hung around with were, often, delighted to talk to someone who could somehow magically pierce through the cloud of mystifying human behavior around them, and seem to make some sense of it. I was shy – horribly, horribly shy, in addition to being awkward, over-sensitive, all that and more. Having a skill that the ladyfolk that I had miserable crushes on appreciated was its own reward.

So, I got hooked on personality theory.

I studied. I studied everything I could find. Every personality test, every motivation model, anything that I could use as a tool in navigating the shark-infested waters of highschool, college, and early adult-hood, I absorbed. My uncle was a licensed therapist, and a practitioner of something called Neuro-linguistic Programming, and I reveled in his tales of ‘eye cues’, ‘pacing’, and a whole battery of techniques and factoids that further pushed back the boundaries of my understanding of the human species.

Of course, I had no idea if I was really getting any of it right. I would experiment on my friends, and if the results were roughly within expectations, I would call myself a ‘master’ and move on. (It was clear, I think, even early on, that I was more of an entertainer than I was a scientist.)

There is a lot more to that story. Each new system that I digested brought with it personal revelations and new ways of interacting with / manipulating / helping other people. Each system was its own garden of delights, filled with its own unique relationship-destroying pitfalls. But for our purposes here, the point of all of that is that throughout my life, I’ve been adding new tools to my ‘how people function’ tool belt. At every level of my life, I have leaned my mind towards learning about the varieties of human motivation.

Of course, the result was that when I became a game designer, I brought this toolkit with me.

Colleagues of mine, the ones who didn’t automatically reject anything related to psychology as equivalent to voodoo, have often expressed some surprise at my level of interest in human motivation. For many game developers, who have never plumbed the depths of personal analysis, personality theory is mystical bullshit. It’s perceived as a marketing tool at best, and a horrible distraction at worst. But for me, it was as natural as breathing to imagine how differences in personal motivation could lead to differences in preferences of play.

And so, when I encountered the various existing ‘player type’ models early in my career, applying them to our day-to-day game development practice was the most obvious thing. However, that would prove to be a lot harder than I had imagined.

(Which, you know, I’ll probably talk about in the next post…? I think? Let’s wait a bit, and find out!)

What I mean is, I’m not really sure how to structure this. Rather than wait until I have it figured out, I’m going to start, and make it up as I go alone.

I’ve been blogging off and on for a long damn time now. Recently, it’s been way more off than on, and… well, calling what I do ‘blogging’ is rather an insult to blogging. It’s inconsistent, what I do, and more of a public diary than any kind of attempt to generate ‘content’. So, before we get started on this, I feel obligated to warn you about two things:

1. I will often go off about topics or pursue a level of descriptive detail that is probably not interesting to a general readership. That is because I am not trying to attract a general readership. If you choose to read this, you only have yourself to blame.
2. I’m going to write front-to-back, like a book. This isn’t normally how it is done: blogs are supposed to be chains of self-contained bits, where no prior knowledge is needed to understand what in the fuck is being discussed on any given day. This won’t be that.
3. Oh yeah, and I swear a lot. It lowers people’s opinion of me and makes my work less palatable for a lot of people. But I like it, so… yeah.

That was three things. I added the last one at the last minute. Stay alert!

One more thing.

Why? WHY??

Mostly because I like to tell stories – and the last year has presented me with a bunch of stuff that… doesn’t normally make it to the top of my story list, but that I have found fucking fascinating. I started out with what I thought was a robust understanding of gameplay-related philosophy, and then ended up a year later with almost all of my initial ideas turned upside-down and scattered around on the floor.

I want to sort through that pile. I want to do that both because the bits and bobs are shiny and sparkly, AND because I want to make sure I didn’t miss anything along the way.

Anyway. That’s all the caveat stuff out of the way. Maybe next time I’ll actually start with the tale.

Does that sound stupid? It sort of does to me – I mean, yeah, there was a lot of interest, and there continues to be a lot of interest, and wasn’t that obvious?

It wasn’t. Not even close.

So, before I start to forget it, I’m going to start writing down some of the… stuff? I guess? that led to my presentation at GDC this year. It’s been a weird road, and… well, and I like telling stories. So here we go.

First: my talk at GDC was “The 5 Domains of Play”. In that talk, I presented a preliminary translation of a model of motivation psychology called the “Big 5″ into game design principles… or, at least, I made a good stab at it. The talk was well received. Yay!

But I gotta tell ya – getting there was quite a thing. Especially considering my original destination had nothing at all to do with the Big 5. I hadn’t even *heard* of it when this whole thing began.

More changes to come, but a good start.

.PDF: 5_Domains_of_Play_GDC2012

.PPTX: 5_Domains_of_Play_GDC2012

Enjoy!

Holy fucking shit.

I’ve been attending the GDC I was a wee sprite of a game developer. I sat in awe as Marc LeBlanc cavorted around the hall shouting about “MDA! MDA!”. I watched Chris Hecker’s presentations go from highly technical algorithmic breakdowns to meditations on the intersection between technology and human beings. I attended Brian Moriarty’s ‘last’ presentation, and walked out stunned, in awe, my ideas about how awesome presentations could be forever changed.

GDC geek, I. Fanboy.

Of course, along the way, I applied to give talks. We all do this, I think: we imagine that since the ideas in our head are incredibly useful to us, they must certainly be useful to others. I applied for three years in a row, I think, before I realized that, like in the normal games industry, having a good idea wasn’t enough.

So it was, a few years back, that I returned to the well, and applied once again. This time, however, I had learned: the talk I submitted came straight out of my actual work on Red Steel 2, it covered ideas that few if any other developers had ever encountered, and I submitted to speak at GDC Europe – where, as an American, I would be an oddity, and the organization was (perhaps) more hungry for speakers (and thus more willing to take a risk on an un-tested speaker).

Got in. Woot!

That talk was a pretty awesome success – people seemed to like the cane swinging and the entertainment factor, and that coupled with some actual data seemed to fit the bill. I gave another talk the following year, and one at a show called FMX in Germany. And I ‘broke in’ the talk I will be giving at GDC Prime at the first PAX/DEV.

Two GDC Europes, an FMX, and a PAX/DEV, all with high ratings on the surveys. That was a resume – some material to put in that little box at the end of the application that reads “prior speaking experience and ratings received”.

Still, I was pretty nervous when I submitted the application.

See, the topic is wider than I’m used to. I’m presenting work that I have been doing over the past six months in mapping something called the Big 5 model of motivational psychology to game design and gameplay elements. It sprang out of an attempt I made to unify the existing game motivation-of-play models. That failed, but along the way I stumbled on to something much more potent: a motivational model with a statistical base of scientific evidence behind it that took me completely by surprise. So, I’ve been connecting that base to what we do as game developers in triggering human motivations.

Does that sound cool? It does to me. So why was I nervous?

Two things: first, there is not very much room for this kind of talk at the GDC – there used to be more talks like that, but there has been a shift towards practical, immediately-applicable presentations in recent years. That’s probably a good thing… but not if that’s the topic of your talk. Second, while I’ve become a semi-known speaker, I am absolutely not known for this kind of topic. And offering to give a talk on a topic that you aren’t a recognized expert on is risky at best.

So, nervous.

But, somehow, it happened. Which is amazing: walking around on that floor with a ‘speaker’ badge will be strange strange strange.

And, of course, getting accepted only *increased* my nervousness. Because this is The Show, man. I only get one first chance at speaking here: I hope I don’t fuck it up!