"Players have no strategic choices whatsoever. The game length is completely unpredictable—it could end in 15 minutes or drag on for hours. Success depends entirely on luck, and players get brutally punished for rolling the wrong numbers. Oh, and there are more possibilities to fail than to succeed."

You'd be laughed out of the room.

Yet this "terrible" game design has survived for over 700 years, crossed continents, and taught millions of children around the world. You probably played it yourself: Snakes and Ladders.

But what if I told you that every element you might consider a design flaw was actually intentional? That this seemingly simple children's game was originally a sophisticated rhetorical device designed to teach profound religious principles about life, death, and the path to enlightenment?

Snakes & Ladders didn't start as a children's racing game. In its original form, it had a much more respectable name: gyan chaupar - literally "the game of knowledge."

The origins remain debated, but the game is closely tied to religious purposes in medieval India. According to one version, it was designed by Dnyaneshwar, a thirteenth-century Marathi saint. The act of playing wasn't just entertainment - it could be part of religious rituals, such as during the Jain Paryushan festival, when devotees fasted and played the game as a form of spiritual engagement.

In the original gyan chaupar, every element carried deep symbolic meaning. Players started at square 1, representing birth, and aimed to reach the final square, which represented moksha, a release from the cycle of death and rebirth. That’s why the game was also known as Moksha Patam, which could be translated as Path to Liberation.

The ladders weren't arbitrary shortcuts. Each one represented specific virtues like faith, reliability, generosity, knowledge or asceticism

The snakes weren't just obstacles—they embodied vices that drag souls backwards: disobedience, theft, rage or greed.

The entire mechanic was a religious metaphor. Ladders and snakes represented karmic behaviors, either helping or hindering a player's journey toward spiritual liberation. Every roll of the cowrie shells (the ancient equivalent of dice) determined whether your actions led to spiritual advancement or moral regression.

Here's where it gets fascinating from a design perspective. Players have almost no agency over where their pawn lands—they simply roll dice and move accordingly. From today's game design standards, this looks like a fundamental flaw. We've been taught that player agency is crucial for engagement.

But this "flaw" was actually the game's message: you need to align with your fate.

Some versions took this philosophy even further by prescribing a "correct" order of spiritual progress. As one Map Academy notes:

Players were required to land on such squares with an exact roll - you couldn't simply skip past important spiritual lessons.

The game's balance revealed another profound insight. The number of snakes was typically higher than the number of ladders—sometimes twice as many—and their effects were more punishing. This wasn't poor balancing; it was intentional design meant to illustrate a spiritual truth: the path to enlightenment is harder than the path to corruption.

Evil was easier to fall into, while virtue required more effort to achieve and maintain. The game literally embedded this moral lesson into its probability systems.

In the 1890s, gyan chaupar was brought to Britain and renamed "Snakes and Ladders." The mechanics remained intact, but the cultural adaptation was fascinating. The game lost its religious connotations while retaining the "good versus bad deeds" framework.

More interestingly, the balance changed. The English version featured equal numbers of virtues and vices. As the YouTube channel Extra Credits notes in their exploration of this topic, this shift may reflect differences between Eastern and Western religious philosophies - in English Protestant culture, the dominant belief was that every sin should have an opportunity for redemption.

Did you know that the phrase "back to square one" possibly comes from Snakes and Ladders? The earliest evidence of this phrase refers to the game: "he has the problem of maintaining the interest of the reader who is always being sent back to square one in a sort of intellectual game of snakes and ladders."

Later, in 1943, Milton Bradley created an American version called "Chutes and Ladders," replacing snakes with playground slides because snakes seemed too dangerous for children. The moral lessons remained, but now they depicted everyday childhood behaviors rather than spiritual concepts.

So why has this game remained popular and survived until today? The game is completely random and you can't even be sure when it will end—theoretically, it could take any amount of time, especially in versions where you need to roll the exact number to finish (if you roll too many, you bounce back from the last tile).

Easy to learn (and teach by it): The most obvious reason the game has survived is its simplicity—even very young kids can grasp the rules and find satisfaction in observing the effects of their die throws on the board. It also serves as a tool to familiarize children with numbers and simple math, adding educational value.

Production costs: It's cheap to produce—you only need a board, a few pawns, and a die (or other randomizer).

The thrill of randomness: While it makes the game pretty irritating in the long run, especially for adult players, for kids who don't yet have many other gaming experiences, it provides a genuine thrill of unpredictability. Will this throw make me ascend a bunch of rows? Will I roll enough to pass by the snake's mouth lying just ahead of me?

Imagination fills the gaps: As always with games—when you allow your imagination to work and engage with the game, you can forget about its flaws. The story your mind creates becomes more important than the underlying mechanics.

You can read more about why our minds love unpredictability and randomness in one of my previous articles.

Lessons from Snakes and Ladders

The survival of Snakes and Ladders teaches us several valuable lessons:

Sometimes "flawed" mechanics serve a higher purpose. What looks like bad design might actually be intentional communication of deeper themes.

Cultural adaptation doesn't require mechanical overhaul. The same core system successfully conveyed different messages across cultures simply by changing the context and balance.

Simplicity has its own power. In our rush to create complex, agency-rich experiences, we sometimes forget that simple, clear rules can be profoundly effective.

Randomness isn't always the enemy. While we often focus on giving players control, sometimes the experience of surrendering to chance can be meaningful in itself.

Snakes and Ladders raises a fascinating question for modern game designers: What are we really teaching through our mechanics?

Every game system communicates values, whether we intend it or not. When we design progression systems, difficulty curves, and reward structures, we're not just creating entertainment—we're embedding lessons about how the world works, what behaviors get rewarded, and what success means.

The creators of gyan chaupar understood this intuitively. They didn't just want to entertain; they wanted to teach. Every element of their design served their educational purpose, even when it made the "game" less traditionally engaging.

In our modern games, what values are we embedding? What behaviors are we rewarding? What view of the world are we teaching players through our mechanics?

The beauty of gyan chaupar wasn't just its longevity—it was its ability to package complex philosophical concepts into a format that anyone could understand and internalize through play.

As we build increasingly sophisticated games, perhaps we can learn from this ancient design: that sometimes the most powerful games aren't the ones that give players the most choices, but the ones that help them understand the choices they have in life.

Throughout my career, I've become fascinated by the psychological side of game design—how we can intentionally craft experiences that evoke specific emotions in players.

Today, I want to share a story that changed how I think about game design, and then dive into practical ways you can expand your emotional palette as a designer.

The Journey That Went Wrong (And Then Right)

Let me start with a story about one of the most beloved games of the last decade, though you might not recognize it from how it began.

Once upon a time, there was a game development team with an ambitious goal. They asked themselves:

This was no small challenge. Anyone who's spent time in online multiplayer games knows how toxic they can become. But these developers were determined to innovate how it feels to play with strangers from the internet.

They created a prototype with what seemed like perfect cooperative mechanics:

• Players could push each other to help them reach higher platforms

• Once up, the other player could pull their companion up to safety

• The goal was to incentivize positive cooperation between players

Sounds wholesome, right?

They put this prototype to a playtest, eager to see their vision of compassionate online gaming come to life.

What was the result?

Players chose violence.

Instead of the intended cooperation, players preferred pushing each other off cliffs. They found a way to kill each other using the very mechanics designed to promote friendship.

Faced with this outcome, the developers asked themselves a darker question:

The answer, thankfully, was no.

The developers realized something crucial: It wasn't the players' fault how they behaved. Players' behavior was shaped by the tools they were given.

Players experiment with what they can do and repeat actions that lead to something interesting. When pushing someone off a cliff caused a dramatic reaction, it became more engaging than the subtle satisfaction of cooperation.

This game eventually became Journey, one of the most celebrated examples of positive online interaction in gaming history. But how did they fix it?

The developers made two key changes:

1. Removed the reward by disabling collisions between players

2. Added a different reward for being close to each other (getting energy and being able to fly)

This completely transformed the game. Players started staying close to each other and expressing positive emotions towards one another, all without using words.

It's a perfect example of how game mechanics can reinforce certain emotions, and how even negative interactions can be unintentionally caused by design.

(The clip above comes from this great tutorial video made by avaloki)

Game Designers Are Emotional Chefs

This story illustrates something profound about our role as game designers. We're not just creating systems or mechanics—we're crafting emotional experiences.

As Tynan Sylvester beautifully puts it in "Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences":

Game designers, like chefs, need to understand their ingredients—but instead of salt and spices, we work with emotions.

Why do we play games?

Think about it: Why do players spend energy, time, and money to chase a ball, move tokens on a board, or click pixels on the screen?

Emotions are the reason that games exist.

As Tynan Sylvester put it: "The primacy of emotion is one of the great unacknowledged secrets of game design. Ask anyone about a game and they'll tell you what they thought of it. They'll make some logical argument about the game being good or bad. But usually that logic is just an automatic rationalization for the emotions underneath. What really matters is how a game makes us feel."

The Emotional Vocabulary Problem

Here's where it gets interesting. The English language alone has about 3,000 words for emotions. Some emotions are easy to recognize, like anger or fear. Others are more subtle and often difficult to name.

Consider these examples:

• Lugubrious - exaggeratedly or affectedly mournful

• Ebullient - energetic, enthusiastic, and excited

• Chagrin - anger or disappointment caused by something that doesn't happen the way you wanted

And some emotions' names are even unique to a specific language!

• Saudade - Portuguese term for bittersweet nostalgia or yearning

• Hiraeth - a Welsh word for deep longing for a home you can't return to

• Schadenfreude - a feeling of pleasure when something bad happens to someone else

The ability to differentiate and name emotions is called emotional granularity. It's like the difference between someone calling a wall "blue" and an interior decorator who can distinguish between azure, navy, cerulean, and cobalt.

Developing high emotional granularity has several benefits for mental health. Two decades of research show that people with high emotional granularity are less likely to resort to unhealthy strategies like binge drinking or aggressive behavior.

But besides having a positive impact on mental health, emotional granularity can also make you a better game designer.

The more precisely you can identify and name emotions, the better you can craft experiences that evoke them intentionally.

And how do we, game developers, usually talk about emotions in games? What are the most commonly used words when it comes to analyzing the emotional state of players?

IT'S FUN.

(Or not)

When it comes to emotions in video games, the industry often still behaves like teenagers who struggle to communicate and understand their emotions. Even when we go beyond "fun" (or "cool"), we tend to focus on just a few basic emotions like anger, fear, or joy.

But take a look at any list of emotions (e.g., from Brené Brown's "Atlas of the Heart"), which maps out dozens of nuanced emotions across different categories. We have so much more to work with!

Just as a painter needs more than primary colors to create compelling art, game designers need to expand beyond basic emotions to create truly memorable experiences.

Why is this worth the effort?

• Better control over the purpose of your design

• Great source of inspiration to make something unique and innovative

• Market opportunities by identifying emotions that people often seek but that are underrepresented in games

Consider the rise of cozy games in recent years. Before Stardew Valley, there weren't many games focused on providing peaceful experiences. Publishers were avoiding such genres, but it turned out there was huge demand for games that made players feel calm, content, and connected to simple pleasures.

Emotion Through Mechanics: Practical Examples

Here's where games truly shine compared to other media. While cutscenes, text, and visuals can provide emotional moments using tools from movies, literature, or paintings, the real power of video games is interactivity.

As Will Wright, designer of The Sims, noted:

Emotions provided by game mechanics are more powerful, and players will remember them longer, especially when they feel that the situation was unique and came from their own actions.

Let me show you briefly how different emotions can be evoked through specific game mechanics:

Sense of Loss

XCOM: Enemy Unknown - The permadeath feature makes you genuinely care about your soldiers. Losing a veteran fighter you've grown attached to creates real grief.

Before Your Eyes - Uses eye-tracking technology where blinking advances time. You literally can't hold onto precious moments—they slip away with every blink, creating a profound sense of loss about time passing.

Anxiety

Amnesia: The Dark Descent - Removes combat entirely to invoke anxiety. When you can't fight back, every encounter becomes terrifying.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - Uses a brilliant psychological trick. The game warns players that dying too many times will permanently delete their save file. This creates genuine fear of death—though it's actually a bluff designed to mirror the psychological fear experienced during psychosis.

Guilt

Papers, Please - Creates moral dilemmas through its core mechanic. Checking documents thoroughly saves innocent lives but earns less money for your starving family. The mechanical tension between accuracy and speed creates daily moral crises.

This War of Mine - Resources are limited, forcing you to choose between your group's survival and helping other people. Will you steal medicine from a sick family to save your own companions?

How to Choose Emotions for Your Design

When designing with emotions in mind, ask yourself:

What is the main emotion that your game uses?

You can establish core emotions the same way you establish design pillars. They serve as a beacon for the rest of the creative process. It'll help you understand what your game is really about. Is it about grief or satisfaction from revenge? Do you want to tell a story about betrayal or trust? Or maybe it's about belonging and relatedness?

Should this feature reinforce that emotion or provide some variety?

Remember, you don't need to always target the same emotion. Contrast is a powerful tool—emotions appear more powerful when they're unexpected and opposite from what we just experienced.

A good example of such contrast is the "A Treasury of Legends" quest from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. The core loop of this game is focused on violence and combat, but in this side story, your task is to tell children the story of the legendary hero Perseus. The player can first learn the story from a nearby room with many relics related to Perseus, and then try to tell the story by selecting the correct options.

The quest is structurally quite simple but really stands out compared to usual activities in the game. It's surprising, introduces some comedy relief—especially when you don't remember answers. And when you do, you can feel like a mentor or teacher, which is not the usual feeling in an action game.

Should the emotion be positive or negative?

When deciding between positive and negative emotions, remember that you don't necessarily need to avoid negative emotions. Games provide a testing ground for social interactions and real-life skills. Sometimes exploring difficult emotions in a safe environment can be valuable.

The Risks

There's always a tension between commercial risk and artistic challenge.

Mismatching player expectations about what they expect to feel versus what they actually feel can be problematic. For example, in Frostpunk 2, we introduced complex political systems that made it harder for players to feel like the savior of their city. Opposing factions try to push the city in different ideological directions, so most of the time, you need to balance and navigate towards a fragile compromise. You can understand the position of politicians, often hated for not fulfilling their promises or changing their views. This anti-power fantasy was appreciated by players and critics looking for a thought-provoking experience, but for those who wanted to feel in control, it was a frustrating experience.

Cultural differences also impact emotional response to game mechanics. For example, Chinese players were much more critical of the political elements in Frostpunk 2 than European or American players. They found the presented conflict more artificial and frustrating, as in their perception, a nation should be more united in the face of a crisis.

The key is setting expectations correctly through marketing, gameplay videos, and proper communication of your game's emotional fantasy.

Practice Exercise: Emotional Design

Here's a practical exercise to develop your emotional design skills:

1. Pick an existing genre or game

2. Randomly select an emotion from an emotional atlas

3. Design a mechanic that evokes that emotion

   • It could be either a main game loop or a smaller feature in a larger game

4. Test your results with players

5. Research examples in existing games

Let me show you how this works with a concrete example:

I prepared a simple spreadsheet to randomize the genre of the game and the emotion. You can use it here.

Genre: Racing
Emotion: Gratitude
Design:

Working title: "Kario Mart" (Inverted Mario Kart) ;)

Goal: Reach the finishing line

Gameplay:

• A villain tries to stop all players with aircraft and traps

• Players have limited lives; when destroyed, they're stuck on track

• Other players can rescue them by driving close and pressing a button

• Points are awarded for:

  • finishing by yourself (50pts)

  • any player finishing (10pts)

  • all players finishing (100pts)

• When reaching the finish line, players can choose to stop or do another lap to help others

• The game ends when the timer runs out or when all players are unable to drive (either they got destroyed or decided to finish the game)

This creates gratitude when someone risks their score to save you, and generosity when you choose to help others instead of securing your own victory.

Let’s look at other games that managed to evoke gratitude:

In Death Stranding, you can use structures built by other players. Whenever you struggle with climbing a mountain and find a useful ladder left by somebody else, you can show gratitude by leaving a like. Just like in social media, but without any possible toxicity!

Nier: Automata managed to make players feel gratitude in one of its endings. If you are not afraid of spoilers, I recommend reading this great piece about probably one of the most creative endings in video games ever:

https://biggestinjapan.com/index.php/2019/10/28/nier-automatas-ending-is-a-masterpiece-thats-only-possible-in-a-game/

Key Takeaways

• Learn to identify and name emotions using resources like "Atlas of the Heart"

• Think about which emotions you want to evoke when designing

• Playtest to see actual reactions rather than assumptions

• Set player expectations regarding your game's emotional content

• Exercise your skills regularly with emotional design challenges

Final question

We have the tools to make players feel anything we want them to feel.

The question is: What feelings does the world need more of?

As game designers, we wield tremendous power over human emotions. Every day, millions of people spend hours experiencing the feelings we craft into our games.

What will you choose to make them feel?

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this deep dive into emotional game design, subscribe to get more insights on creating games worth your time. What emotions do you think are underexplored in current games? Let me know in the comments.

Subscribe now

Further Reading

• Tynan Sylvester, "Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences"

• Katherine Isbister, "How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design"

• Elizabeth Sampat, "Empathy Engines"

• Scott Rigby & Richard M. Ryan, "Glued to Games: How Video Games Draw Us In and Hold Us Spellbound"

• Brené Brown, "Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience"

• https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/13/22972989/journey-10-year-anniversary-multiplayer-jenova-chen-austin-wintory

"I had no idea how to extract resources. It took me over half an hour just to figure out how to construct districts! And even now, I’m not sure how to expand them!"

Thoughts race through my mind. What went wrong? All of that is explained in the tutorial messages. Could there be a bug that made them disappear?

“Did you try checking the tutorials?” I ask, a bit anxious.

The playtester looks puzzled. He doesn’t seem to know what I mean. Then, suddenly, recognition lights up his face.

“Oh, you mean those pop-up messages?”

I nod, relieved.

“Yeah, after seeing the first one, I turned them off in settings. I hate tutorials.”

This anecdote is just about one player, but I’m certain that this attitude is shared by a fair number of others. I’d bet money that if you’re a game creator, you have your own set of similar memories from watching people play your game.

So, what can we do about it?

The simplest solution is to make tutorials mandatory, forcing players to go through them. But there's a downside: players may end up avoiding your game altogether because of it.

We live in an age of digital abundance. When players are highly motivated, they might tolerate a dull, obstructive introduction. But in a world where they can:

• get a refund within the first 2 hours,

• buy your game on sale,

• or even play it for free through a subscription or F2P model,

you might just lose them in those early moments.

So, what’s the answer?

It doesn’t help that most of us don’t have good models to draw from when it comes to teaching methods. Traditional education relies on cramming large amounts of information into our brains, with the hope that a fraction of it will stick. The assumption is that whatever remains will be enough to call us “educated.”

In school, I learned about cell structures, conjugating German verbs, and hydrolysis reactions. I don’t remember any of it.

Let’s look for better inspiration. Take, for instance, a movie every geek on Earth knows: Star Wars.

Yoda might struggle to get hired as a teacher in a typical school, and not just because of his unique sentence structure or his tendency to use a stick for emphasis. Despite that, many people (myself included) would love a mentor like Yoda.

Why?

Instead of lecturing, he focuses on encouraging his students to ask the right questions and understand themselves better. Rather than speaking in theories, he places them in situations where they learn by doing.

If a fictional green gremlin doesn’t quite work as a role model, consider Socrates. He described himself not as a teacher but as an “ignorant inquirer.” His approach was to ask simple but powerful questions, encouraging others to think deeply about their answers.

This kind of teaching is also alive today in certain settings. My wife, who’s passionate about nature, introduced me to a method called "coyote teaching." This approach helps people understand nature by nurturing their curiosity—not just by asking questions but by encouraging them to seek answers on their own. It’s inspired by the way indigenous cultures guide children to explore the world around them.

So what does all this have to do with games and tutorials?

When designing a tutorial, we should remember that learning is far more effective when we spark curiosity in players.

How can we do this? Ideally, by making the tutorial almost invisible—giving players the sense that they’re already playing and facing real challenges.

To see this in action, let’s look at the first few minutes of one of my favorite games: Portal.

In the first few missions of Portal, players learn the basics without an explicit tutorial. Aside from a few brief prompts about controls, the game relies on its design to teach.

Sequence 1:
Initially, the player character is confined to a small room. After a moment, a portal opens. The portal is positioned so that both ends are clearly visible to the player, making it easy to understand the concept of connecting two spaces.

Lesson 1: How moving through portals works.

Sequence 2:
The player enters a room with a button on the floor. Stepping on the button opens a door.

But as the player moves toward the door, they notice it closes whenever nothing is on the button. 

At that moment, a cube is dropped into the room, and a small prompt appears on the right side of the screen: “E to pick up an object.”

Without any direct instruction, it’s easy to figure out that placing the cube on the button will keep the door open, allowing the player to pass through. The player connects the dots on their own, making this their first challenge in the game.

Lesson 2: To open a door, place a cube on a red button.

Sequence 3:

In this level, the cube, button, and door are positioned in three separate areas. A portal shifts locations periodically, allowing the player to access each of these elements.

Lesson 3:  This sequence reinforces and combines previous skills (moving through portals, placing a cube on a button) and shows players they can carry the cube through a portal.

Sequence 4:

In the next level, the player first sees a portal gun mounted on a rotating stand through a window. Watching, they observe the gun firing at the wall and creating portals.

So when players enter the room, they already know how the gun works. All they need to do is pick it up and press a mouse button to shoot a portal. The other end is pre-placed, so they don’t need to worry about that yet.

Lesson 4: How to use the portal gun to create a portal.

This is a masterful way to do tutorials. A portal gun could be a confusing tool for many players—it’s not something commonly seen in other games. But instead of handing it over with a load of instructions, Portal’s developers crafted a series of simple challenges that gradually introduce players to the portal mechanics.

Players feel they’re progressing on their own, with no one explicitly telling them how to solve each puzzle. In reality, every level is carefully designed to develop players’ abilities and deepen their understanding of the game.

Portal proves that the tutorial is a lie. Instead, it’s about designing a learning process within the game so players naturally pick up new concepts at a steady pace.

Because playing is learning. Evolutionarily speaking, play is how humans—and animals—learn new skills and experiment with strategies for overcoming obstacles. So game itself is a learning process, even long after the “tutorial” is over.

And learning is something that gives us pleasure. Our brains release dopamine when we’re learning new things, which also makes evolutionary sense: more knowledge means a higher chance of survival.

So why, then, are we sometimes so reluctant to learn? I remember how tough it was to motivate myself to study for school exams.

The learning process happens with the help of two ancient parts of our brain: the amygdala and hippocampus, structures that existed even in organisms that predate mammals! But we also have the prefrontal cortex, which constantly evaluates whether something is worth learning.

Our brains are constantly analyzing risk, weighing the cost (like time or effort) against usefulness. Let’s look at a few examples:

• Task: Studying for an exam
  COST: High
  USEFULNESS: Debatable (consequences aren’t immediate, and it’s unclear if the knowledge will be useful)

• Task: Learning how to drive
  COST: High
  USEFULNESS: High (You wouldn’t question the value of learning to drive while on a busy road!)

• Task: Learning how to use a parachute just before jumping out of a plane at 10,000 feet
  COST: Small
  USEFULNESS: Very High (obviously!)

Why does this matter to you as a game creator?

It’s about convincing the player’s mind to accept the effort of learning your game.

One approach is to lower the cost of learning: reduce the complexity of mechanics, improve information presentation, or break knowledge into smaller chunks.

Another approach is to increase the perceived usefulness of the information by appealing to the player’s motivation.

Before teaching a mechanic, show players why it’s valuable to learn.

Games often ask too much of players early on, where there’s more to learn than actual fun to be had. To ensure players stay motivated, make sure they understand why it’s worth learning a new skill or mechanic.

Consider another example from Valve (they’re great at this!). 

In Half-Life 2, when the developers want players to learn how to use the gravity gun to launch saw blades, they start by presenting this situation:

Players encounter a zombie split in half by a saw blade—a clear hint that saw blades are powerful weapons. 

Next, saw blades are placed in the player’s path, blocking the way forward. When players use the gravity gun to pull one of the blades to clear their path, an enemy appears in their line of sight.

The natural instinct is to press the shoot button, which launches the saw blade at the enemy, using the gravity gun. This creates a nearly effortless learning experience where players understand how to weaponize saw blades—first by observing, then by doing.

Teaching effectively is a complex challenge. It’s not just for game creators but for entire industries, societies, and educational systems.

There’s no universal method, but a few principles can make a huge difference:

1. Set challenges for players instead of step-by-step instructions.

2. Act as an invisible mentor, guiding the learning process subtly.

3. Focus on sparking curiosity and providing motivation to learn.

And this is just the beginning! Our brains have more complexities that impact learning, and each game genre has its unique challenges. Teaching complex strategies, for instance, requires different approaches than teaching platformer mechanics.

Already in 1999, Monopoly was recognized by Guinness World Records as the game that has been played by 500 million people since its invention. 605 million adults play chess regularly, and 70% of people play them at least once at some point in their lives! Besides that, there are physical games that we call sports, which are played and watched by millions of people.

And there is football.

How many people are playing football? It’s difficult to count every kid kicking the ball in the backyard, teenagers playing at school fields or colleagues meeting after work for a match. In 2006, the FIFA organization conducted a survey (Big Count) that estimated that 270 million people were actively playing this game, making it probably the most popular sport around the globe.

But the popularity of football isn’t limited to actively playing it. Actually, it’s the contrary - more people are watching it than playing.

FIFA claims that the final match of the last global tournament (the World Cup in Qatar 2022) reached a global audience of 1.5 billion viewers. What’s more, they said that around 5 billion people “engaged" somehow with the tournament.

That should be taken with the grain of salt, as FIFA is an organization that benefits the most from football popularity, but there is plenty of other data that suggests that football is currently the most popular game in the world.

Surprisingly, I don’t think that game designers often analyze football. Even though, statistically speaking, it might be the most engaging game ever invented.

So let’s try to find some design lessons coming from football (and justify why I spent several hours watching the last EURO tournament).

1. Football is easy to play (and watch)

It’s one of the cheapest sports to play. You need only one ball (or even an object that resembles it) and a small ground. The goal can be made from anything - when I was in school, backpacks were perfectly fine as posts. There is no need for a certain number of players - even two players are enough to play. Weather doesn’t impact it that much, and if you are determined enough, you can play with wind, rain, or even snow.

There aren’t many sports which are so easy to start. Even other fairly accessible games require a little more than a ball. For basketball, you need a hoop and flat ground to bounce the ball. For volleyball, a net on the proper level is necessary. For baseball, a bat and a glove are must-haves.

Moreover, football is also really easy to watch. The basic rules are simple to grasp by simply watching the game:

1. Two teams rivals to put one ball in the opposite goal to score.

2. Of the 11 players, only one can touch the ball with his hands and only in the zone near their team's goal.

And basically, that’s it. Of course, there are plenty more: fouls, free kicks, and the infamous offside rule, the topic of many jokes about its complicacy. But to start watching, you only need to know the bare minimum.

Such simplicity on the ground level might be quite common for popular sports but it’s something that video games often lack. Try to explain League of Legends to somebody who has never played it, and I guarantee it will take more time than in the case of football.

Moreover, video games often assume that you already have played something else in the same genre, so the entry point is set higher than you think. If you don’t believe it, launch some mainstream action game, give a gamepad to somebody who has never played games like that and watch how much it takes to walk and aim the camera at the same time.

LESSON:

If your game cannot be explained in a few words or understood by watching it for a couple of minutes, it will have limited potential to attract players.

It’s important even when you don’t aspire to be an e-sport phenomenon: it is much easier to sell well when people can understand your game after watching a short GIF.

2. Football has depth.

Simplicity doesn’t rule out depth.  

Football might seem uncomplicated, but it has enough space to have different strategies, evolving for years. 

At first glance, football now and 50 years ago is similar: the outfits or hairstyles of footballers have certainly changed but in both cases, you can see 11 men trying to score more goals than the opposite 11.

But under the surface, the game has changed tremendously over the years. Today, footballers play at a higher pace, they play in unknown formations and score most of the goals differently.

It all boils down to the football rules being both simple and deep enough to provide space for creating and perfecting many different strategies to win. In terms of strategy, football is similar to chess, where every game after opening quickly becomes a unique experience. But there is one important difference. In football, nobody knows a perfect strategy to win - even computers.

Different tactics have been trending over time. For example, years ago, teams used to have a defender called a libero (or sweeper) between the last line and goalkeeper. However, over time, this role became obsolete as new strategies appeared, making it obsolete in the face of zonal marking and offside traps. Instead, the best goalkeepers started to play far from their goalpost, similarly supporting the team as the libero used to. 

Doesn’t it remind you something? If you playing any multiplayer game, it probably does.

In video games, a tendency of emerging dominant strategies to win is often called a metagame. But there is one important difference, in most of the online games creators often update the game to modify the meta and make sure that the game stays exciting to play. In football, updates of rules are far more rare and usually, dominant strategies last until some coach invents a fresh, new tactic that is a good method to win over a dominant style of playing.

LESSON:

The game rules might be simple but if they are open to different strategies, the game will evolve by itself.

Instead of trying to predict ways of playing, create rules that allow players to invent solutions that you would never think of.

3. Football evokes emotions.

If you have ever seen a football match live in the stadium, you understand how strong emotions football can evoke. Being part of a group that roots for the same team is something that triggers some primal element in our brain that has told humans to organize in tribes, settlements, and nations.

People have a strong need to belong to a group and sports can be a way to satisfy that feeling. Strong identification with a team can cause higher social self-esteem and decrease loneliness and alienation. Engaged fans share emotions with their beloved team, meaning that footballers’ successes can bring them real pride and euphoria almost like they would achieve something on their own.

Football does something more to cause emotions than just offer a sense of belonging. It’s a game which evolved to be emotional. One of the most important factors is something as trivial as… average number of points scored during a match.

I used the term ”points” on purpose, even though football fans always speak about goals. But let’s compare this element to other sports. In basketball scoring over 100 points in the game is quite usual.  In American football games usually end with dozens of points scored. Football has an entirely different game dynamic - as the average ranges from only 2 to 3 goals per match - the last big football tournament (EURO 2024) had an average of 2.25 goals per match.

A low amount of points scored creates a risk of boredom. Especially, as a football match can end without ANY goals at all (except the play-off phase). But it also makes each score a very important moment, a big event that is awaited by fans.'

It’s difficult to predict when it will happen: sometimes it’s a result of long-lasting pressure, sometimes it comes from a rapid counterattack, and other times it’s such unexpected and random that is hard to believe that it’s actually a goal. 

But in any case, it causes a high spike of emotions. The crowd at the stadium erupts in applause and cheering. Of course, if the goal was scored by their team. If not, silence full of disappointment occurs, often followed by anger or despair. 

In football, many events have a great emotional weight. It isn’t only about the rarity of goals.

Physical contact between rivals often results in calling a foul, meaning that rules have been violated. Fouls happen quite often but the closer they are to a goalpost, the more controversial they become.

Fans of the opposite team usually disagree with the referee's decision, especially since in many cases it’s not obvious if contact exceeded the rules or not.

The consequences of it may be decisive: a foul close to the goal post might end in a free kick from the optimal position to score or even a penalty shot from 11 meters (statistically 3 out of 4 of them end with a goal).

What’s more, the player who fouls may also get an individual punishment. Giving yellow and red cards by a referee is usually also a quite dramatic moment. The range of punishment is short and quite merciless: two yellows immediately turn into a red card that bans the player for the rest of the match. Which is a strong disadvantage and usually a turning point in the match.

On top of everything, the football game has a great sound design. One layer comes from fans in the stadium: often deafening cheering, songs about beloved teams (or hated rivals) and loud reactions to important events. Another comes when you are watching a match on TV: many commentators are famous for how much they can add to the emotions of the match by simply using the tone of their voice.

LESSON:

Design the game to have moments that evoke strong emotions. Rare events with a strong effect on a gameplay may help with that.

Remember also that a sense of belonging to a larger group is a strong source of emotions. Their successes and failures become our own.

That’s only a small chunk of interesting aspects of football that might be a great inspiration for game designers. I have a feeling that we as game creators too often pay too much attention to other VIDEO games when designing our own. Especially to ones that just become a groundbreaking hit or belong to the same genre as our project.

Meanwhile, games were developed for thousands of years, without even inventing computers. People play them, teach others their rules or modify them to make them more interesting or accessible. Sports, traditional board games, cards, children’s games. Using them as a source of inspiration is not always obvious and easy. But if you succeed with that, I believe you may create something equally timeless and universal. And maybe one day, it will be played as often as football.

But today, let’s talk about how to provide players with a decision space inside a game story without losing control over it.

I became interested in that topic because I started a small side project: a text-based game in which naturally navigating a branching storyline is the main game activity (you can read more about the project itself in one of my previous posts here).

Of course, just after I got the idea for the game, I jumped straight to writing. I have written some stories in the past, so it should not be that hard, right?

I was wrong and quickly got lost in the jungle of overgrown story branches, ideas, and possibilities.

Two main challenges were:

• How do I provide freedom of choice for a player while telling a consistent story?

• How do I make sure that player won’t miss the important information?

I searched for advice from people more experienced in that field and found an insightful series of articles by Alexander Freed (you can find them here). There are many useful tips there, but I will cover only the most useful ones from my perspective. I encourage you to dive into the whole series if you are interested in the topic!

Let’s start from the beginning. And in the beginning, you should think about…

STRUCTURE

Even if it isn’t obvious at first glance, branching conversations can be quite different from each other. The most important finding for me was that they generally could use two different flows:

• Hub and spoke

• Waterfall

They are often mixed up, even in the course of a single conversation, but for more clarity, let’s talk about how they look separately.

Hub and spoke structure was often used in traditional RPGs. It assumes that an NPC serves as a source of knowledge for a number of topics, and players can ask about any of them in any order. After discussing the selected topic, the conversation returns to the list of topics, and the player can speak about something else.

Alexander Freed gave a good example of such dialogue:

“NPC: What did you want to know about?

• Player Option 1: Tell me about hubs.

• Player Option 2: Tell me about waterfalls.

• Player Option 3: Tell me about ornithomimids.

[Player selects option 1.]

NPC: Hubs are useful, but they don’t exactly sound natural.

NPC: Have you ever actually played a game with hubs and said, “That was a realistic conversation”?

• Player Option 1: Actually, I have.

• Player Option 2: Realism isn’t everything.

• Player Option 3: Point taken.

[Player selects option 2.]

NPC: I suppose.

NPC: That’s enough of that, though. Did you want to know anything else?

• Player Option 1: Tell me about hubs.

• Player Option 2: Tell me about waterfalls.

• Player Option 3: Tell me about ornithomimids.”

The hub structure is a convenient way to provide all necessary information and allow players to have control over dialogue flow. But as you can see in the example above, it’s far from how we talk in real life.

This is where the waterfall structure comes in.

As the name suggests, the player is carried by a stream of conversation. After choosing one of the options, the conversation advances to another choice. Choices that weren’t made are lost forever (which, in video game language, usually means the next playthrough).

This type of structure works best with games that want to achieve a cinematic feel and show the weight of your choices, like Telltale’s or Quantic Dream’s games.

It also lets players imagine that conversation could go in a number of different directions, which supports the fantasy of having a real influence on what is happening in the game.

Of course, this could be ruined in consecutive playthroughs (Telltale games again may serve as an example), but it is not necessarily a problem for the majority of players (statistically speaking, most of them won’t finish the game even once).

The disadvantages of a waterfall structure are the same as those of real conversation—they easily become chaotic, digressive, and unbridled.

The main challenge for a writer is ensuring that players get all the necessary information, no matter what options they choose. The most obvious choice is to try to develop all branches equally, but this isn’t sustainable in the long run.

Just look at the example: let’s assume the player has 3 options each time the conversation branches. It means that after the third choice, players can choose 27 different possible options :

That’s why a critical path is a very useful tool when preparing branching narration. It’s a part of the conversation that every player sees, no matter what. Such a dialogue’s backbone should contain only the most crucial story beats, which are the main purpose of the conversation. Most of the branches should eventually return to the critical path, which makes this structure look more like this:

This doesn’t mean that players’ choices are illusionary!

You still should have choices that meaningfully branch the main storyline, but they should happen only at moments important to the story. Putting too much effort into trivial scenes may lead to a lack of time to give enough variety and freedom when it’s actually needed and expected.

Besides, the fact that some choices don’t have impactful consequences doesn’t mean they are unimportant. These choices allow a player to express how the protagonist perceives the world around them, who they are, and what they want. In other words, they allow for role-playing.

The most important story happens in the player's mind, and good dialogue options would encourage that, even if that doesn’t change anything in terms of literal events.

To make your dialogues more effectively fulfilling a fantasy of playing a certain character, the good idea is to decide which archetypes your story supports. Think about who your player would like to be in your game:

• Noble knight?

• Vengeful warrior?

• Reckless adventurer? 

• Clever trickster?

• Calm diplomat?

You don’t need to change the plot to give an opportunity to play different characters. Saving a kingdom becomes a different story when the hero, instead of being a flawless savior, constantly makes snarky comments and has a cynical attitude toward the world.

There is no need to always provide a unique option for every supported archetype, but make sure that the player always has the possibility to choose something that is at least NOT contradictory to their image. Linking that with the regular possibility of saying something that fully fits the role will create a feeling of being a coherent character with a distinctive personality.

Another smart method for creating a feeling that a player’s choices are important are variables. If you are familiar with programming, you already know this term. Let’s explain it with an example:

The main hero talks with the Blacksmith NPC and makes a joke about the NPC being too not very smart. The variable called “offended_Blacksmith” is created and set as true. Later on, the player may ask about fixing his armor and:

• if “offended_Blacksmith” is true, NPC will make a joke about the main hero not being smart enough to avoid damaging the armor

• if “offended_Blackmith” is false, NPC will just neutrally say the price of fixing the armor

Variables are a very effective way to convince players that the world reacts to their actions. It’s just a different line instead of making a whole branch of events, but when players see the game respond to their past behavior, it makes the world more believable.

Moreover, they are quite flexible. For example, in the story above, you may want to set the “offended_Blacksmith” variable to false when the hero saves the whole village from a dragon—it may feel off if Blacksmith still holds a grudge after that.

You might also use gameplay statistics as variables, such as the level of the character, the amount of money, the weapon, the weather, or the time since the last conversation. All of them may make the conversation more responsive and unique. 

Just be careful not to make too many of them—while they are cheaper to make than branches, they still add complexity to your dialogue that needs to be maintained and tested.

There is one more thing that you should not forget when creating a branching dialogue.

Perhaps it’s the most important one. 

It’s a story.

While having a lot of constraints, it’s easy to forget that the dialogue needs to be exciting. 

When trying to be as informative as possible, the whole scene may miss any tension.

When presenting information about the world, dialogue may no longer be personal and emotional.

I know it’s easier said than done, but the story is why any dialogue occurs. Remember that any goals you have while writing a particular conversation shouldn’t override the main one—allowing players to experience the story they won’t forget.

Because it was their story.

Curious to know more? Check it out:

• All articles by Alexender Freed about writing at GameDeveloper.com

• GDC talk by Josh Sawyer: “Choice Architecture, Player Expression, and Narrative Design in Fallout: New Vegas”

• A short story by Jorge Luis Borges called The Garden of Forking Paths (an experiment on branching narration released back in 1941!)

• Aisle is an interaction fiction game made by Sam Barlow (Her Story, Immortality). It has an extremely horizontal narration structure: you can make only one choice, but the number of options is enormous. You can play it here.

Despite all of that, SimCity is political. In fact, there aren’t many games that are MORE political than SimCity. 

Clayton Ahsley wrote a great article about how Jay Wright Forrester's book Urban Dynamics inspired Will Wright, SimCity’s designer. He mentions this book in the context of learning about how urban planning works.

What is it, exactly? Let’s read the official description:

“In this controversial book, Jay Forrester presents a computer model describing the major internal forces controlling the balance of population, housing, and industry within an urban area. He then simulates the life cycle of a city and predicts the impact of proposed remedies on the system.”

Sounds like a perfect handbook when you’re making a game about construction and managing cities, ain’t it? But wait, why does this description start from “In this controversial book…”?

This book influenced many government urban-policy decisions, and from today’s perspective, many of them are heavily criticized. Clayton Ashley provides us with examples:

“Forrester’s arguments enabled the Nixon Administration to claim that its plans to slash programs created to help the urban poor and people of color would actually, counterintuitively, help these people.

The book’s model was also very abstract. None of the people in the city belonged to racial, ethnic or gender categories and it left out any representation of the city’s geography, like neighborhoods or parks. When criticized by urban planners and anti poverty activists, Forrester would protest that his model was merely a tool for understanding how cities worked.”

What does it have in common with SimCity? As a game that shows a part of reality, it needs to make assumptions about how the world works. It says which solutions are better and which are worse. Intentionally or not, it propagates some vision of the city and inspirations for its original design played an important role in it.

It’s not only about being inspired by this particular work: to make a city-building game, a lot of questions about our reality need to be asked.

Should building more roads help fight traffic jams? Should the city be divided into districts with different purposes (housing, industrial, etc.) or have a more dispersed structure? How important are parks and nature in the city?

This decision-making process is what politics is really about.

Laswell provides a great definition, claiming that politics is about who gets what, when, and how. 

Politicians, elections, and debates are the most flashy elements of politics, but they are not the most important ones. Politics should be primarily understood as a process of deciding how a neighborhood, city, country, or even the world should look.

In that sense, games and politics have a lot in common. One may even say that politics is like game design but for reality. It’s a process of deciding which rules and activities should benefit the whole society.

And in that sense, games influence politics. These solutions come from society, which is shaped by culture. Games, like other media, are part of it. If the best method to fight traffic jams in SimCity is to build more roads, it’ll be more difficult to understand that in real life, it’s actually the opposite.

The degree to which a game is political varies from title to title. Some games are built around this topic, while others focus on things that have little to do with politics. Abstract puzzle games or sports games shouldn’t be put in the same basket as Metal Gear Solid or Bioshock. Tetris or FIFA aren’t political… right?

Well, maybe Tetris gameplay itself is quite abstract, but the issue of its commercial rights was quite a political entanglement: capitalist companies wanted to buy them from the communist Soviet Union, where the ingenious game about falling bricks was made by Aleksiej Pażytnow.

When Russia started a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, EA Sports removed the Russian national team and Russian football clubs from FIFA 22. It was a political act that was impossible to avoid. If they didn’t delete those teams, it would be perceived as pro-Russian activity as they were also banned in real-life international tournaments.

Most games have some sort of political message. It could have nothing to do with supporting liberal or conservative agendas, minorities, or feminism. If the game is any sort of trade, it speaks something about how the market works. Could you manage conflicts in the game by talking or fighting the only option? What is the most important to win - research, conquest, exploration? These matters are tightly connected with politics, even if that often happens subconsciously. 

Games speak with mechanics. This concept was proposed by Ian Bogost in his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. He defines procedural rhetoric as:

In my opinion, it’s better to be conscious of the political impact of your game when making it instead of making a political stance by accident. It also makes your game better by touching topics that are relatable and important for people.

Citizen Sleeper is a clever text-based RPG with a bunch of interesting mechanics based on the strategic usage of dice and timers. The dystopian, cyberpunk setting is compelling and interesting to explore. However, what made me remember this game is how it shows the struggles of precarity. Despite being an android, the game's main hero is facing similar challenges that many people in our real world –  living from one gig to another, hoping that it’ll bring enough money to pay for food, shelter, and medicines.

When playing Citizen Sleeper, I finally earned enough money to stop worrying about regular medical expenses, and I felt relief—a real one. 

Citizen Sleeper shows how good games are at evoking empathy by putting players in someone’s shoes. Lucas Pope does the same kind of work in Papers, Please, another political game done right.

In this game, you work as an immigration inspector and check if people are allowed to cross the border to the fictional totalitarian country. The main conflict in the game comes from working for an oppressive regime that enforces ridiculous rules that make it difficulty to enter for a lot of people desperately needing to do so. On the other hand, your disobedience or mistakes may bring a terrible fate for your family that you try to maintain using your small salary.

As Soren Johnson noticed in his GDC talk:

Putting politics in the center may help in creating a game that will be remembered for years. Like in the case of Bioshock, a game that shows how an attempt to build a utopian, libertarian society may end up. Irrational Games is a highly political game, but one that can stand next to dystopian classics like 1984 by Orwell or New Brave World by Huxley.

Politics in games is most efficient when players are encouraged to think about a particular topic instead of being preached about what opinion they should have. Games should provide a space to explore different political ideas, ask ethical questions, and reflect on how our world and society shape us.

Play as an activity was evolutionary serving this exact role: allowed to learn valuable skills in a limited environment. That’s why children's play often imitates very primal activities: fighting, exploring, building, etc. Games could serve as a space for learning different concepts, and politics may be one of them.

Making games that speak about politics by their mechanics is a powerful tool. But it also has its risks. 

First of all, games always need to be engaging. I already told the story of The Landlord’s Game, but it’s worth repeating in this context. She described her game as “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences."

Magie created two sets of rules:

1. One included tax, which rewards everybody when wealth is created. It was anti-monopolist in its intention.

2. The other one is about showing how monopolies crush all opponents.

   

Unfortunately, the second one was more engaging to play and was copied to make Monopoly, one of the most profitable board games ever made. The game's original message got lost, ultimately promoting the opposite perspective.

(I encourage you to read the whole article focused on the clash between creators' intentions vs. players' behavior here.)

Another interesting example is Frostpunk, the game on which sequel I currently work. It’s how it’s described on Steam:

“Frostpunk is the first society survival game. As the ruler of the last city on Earth, it is your duty to manage both its citizens and infrastructure. What decisions will you make to ensure your society's survival? What will you do when pushed to breaking point? Who will you become in the process?”

Players may introduce laws that make survival easier but make the city more totalitarian, so the main question of the game is whether the end justifies the means.

While such a moral dilemma was relatable for a Western audience, the game was perceived differently in China. According to the South China Morning Post, some Chinese players were offended that the game suggested that they “crossed the line” in order to provide survivorship. From their cultural and political perception, the fate of the collective is far more important than the freedom of individuals, so the message of the game was different for them than for the creators. 

However, making a game that ignites such debate and allows us to compare our worldviews may be perceived as a success. The more we do it in games, the more we will understand each other in the real world.

***

Today’s topic was inspired by a panel discussion about Games & Politics, in which I had the pleasure to be one of the panelists. You can listen to it here:

I need to ask them myself, too, as I’m starting a new project after hours.

What do you want to achieve by making this game?

It’s the first and most important question you can ask yourself before committing to making the game. The answers to all other questions depend on that one. 

For example, it doesn’t matter if your game is marketable if you just want to make it to learn the engine and don’t plan to sell it.

There might be plenty of possible motivations to make a game: 

• Learning craft

• Become famous

• Earning money

• Persuade people to think about a particular issue

• Explore your creativity

• Working out your personal traumas or feelings

Probably everybody has their own mix of motivations. However, it’s beneficial to choose the main goal to serve you as a lighthouse during development and ultimately as an indicator of how much you succeed. Not for rating yourself but for learning from your mistakes and doing the next project better.

GOALS OF MY PROJECT:

First of all, I want to make a game that I could say was made 100% according to my vision. Game development is usually a teamwork which is often beneficial for the quality of the game. But the larger the team, the more compromises and dependieces from other people during development. Besides, I started working in gamedev in 2016, and despite working on 8 different projects, I cannot say that any game that was actually finished and released was my own.

Finished. That's the second keyword. I have a tendency to start projects, and I get excited about fresh ideas, but I struggle to finish what I’ve started. I know that’s a common tendency among people who work in creative businesses, but I believe this fallacy can be managed with a proper scale and organization.

So, my main goal is to make and release a game on my own. It needs to be really small so I can make it relatively quickly (after hours of my regular job) and learn how to finish and ship projects.

What are your capabilities?

Your goal might be ambitious, but you need to consider your capabilities. Are you working on the project solo or with a team? How much time do you have? Do you have any money?

This question is not only about limitations but also your strengths. What are your skills? What are you best at? You should choose your project to emphasize your strengths and mitigate your weak sides. 

Be careful with the scale because you underestimate how much work it actually takes to finish something. How can I be so sure? It’s our common human bias. It’s called the planning fallacy and was first described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. You can read some strategies to avoid it to some extent (like dividing planning work into smaller pieces), but the main point is to assume that making a game will take more time than you think.

“We’re working third year on our three-month project”—such jokes are quite common among game developers for a reason.

So, better start small than fool yourself into thinking your idea for an open-world RPG will take 12 months to develop.

MY CAPABILITIES:

My main skill, except for game design, is writing, so I decided to go fully in this direction. Making a text-only game (so-called interactive fiction) in which players can choose different actions or dialogue lines suits my strengths and goals (something easy to finish with full creative control).

My idea for the game assumes that it will be a collection of short stories showing different people's perspectives on one global event. This will allow me to divide the work into smaller chunks while developing a bigger story arc with every episode.

It makes the initial goal even simpler—just to finish the first story, which could serve as proof of concept. Depending on how difficult it would be to write the first story, I can adjust the scope for the rest of the game.

I decided to use Twine, a free, open-source tool for interactive, non-linear stories. It’s easy to use at the basic level but looks powerful enough to allow adding more features in case I will want to increase scope in the future.

What is beyond my capabilities?

Unfortunately, English isn’t my native language, so I would like to use a professional translator or proofreader to ensure that the text is at least as good to read as in Polish.

I think that using art illustrations, sound effects, and music would benefit the game and help reach a wider audience. However, I don’t want to commit to it before making at least most of the game because it would enlarge the scope and may distract me from the main goal (again, finish!).

What are you passionate about?

The process of making the game has a decent amount of low points when it’s easy to get stuck and eventually drop the project. It’s easier if you are deeply passionate about some element of the game.

It might be genre, setting, or even a particular mechanic - anything that works for you.

Games are a really versatile medium, and even if your passion doesn’t have much in common with digital entertainment, it can serve as fuel to make your game truly outstanding.

The Legend of Zelda was inspired by exploring caves. The profession of the main hero in Death Stranding actually exists in Japan. There was not a topic too niche for making a simulation game out of it (which proves the portfolio of PlayWay publisher or the success of Supermarket Simulator that I described here).

Combining two or three unusual topics may be a really powerful move. Scott Adams, creator of Dibbler comics, says that his secret recipe for success is to learn how to be good at two or three different disciplines instead of trying to be the best in one. And that speaks to me a lot.

Let’s take Dredge, my favorite indie game in 2023, as an example. Making a successful fishing game is difficult; there are already dozens of them. The same goes with adapting the Lovecraft vibe to video games—there is probably no other writer who has the tag on Steam after his name (“Lovecraftian”) because there are so many games inspired by his works. But Dredge, being a twisted fishing horror, instantly became incomparably more unique than games belonging to only one category mentioned above. 

WHAT I AM PASSIONATE ABOUT IN MY PROJECT

I’m a fan of sci-fi, especially Phillip K. Dick books, so exploring this genre and taking inspiration from stories I love will be the source of my motivation.

I am also interested in storytelling, and the interactive fiction genre will allow me to experiment with a new form of narrative, different from linear structures known from books or movies.

Last but not least, psychology and what makes one’s identity is also a fascinating topic for me, so the main topic of the story will be what makes you a real "you."

By combining all of this, I believe I can make something quite unique and fresh.

Is there a place on the market for your game?

Choosing a genre and topic for your game is probably the most important marketing action you take during the whole development.

Unless, of course, you’re from EA or another company with millions to spend on marketing. But even such resourceful companies may fail when they choose a topic and genre that doesn’t resonate with people enough.

Of course, it’s not about chasing hot trends, but analyzing the market before making a decision may help you tremendously in making your project financially profitable. 

It sounds scary, but there is a ton of invaluable knowledge you can learn by reading The GameDiscoverCo newsletter or How To Market A Game blog.

If your main platform is Steam, you may use one of the many tools that analyze sales data in this store (based on the number of reviews, followers, or concurrent players).

An interesting move to start with is to use Game-Stats.com to check median revenue for particular tags on Steam, which may give you an idea of how profitable more a less is given genre or topic.

Besides, it’s a good idea to look for games similar to your idea. First, see how they are doing regarding sales. Then, learn from their mistakes and see what makes them attractive.

Other websites that you may find useful are:

• https://steamcharts.com/

• https://steamdb.info/

• https://letsmakeagame.net/steam-game-revenue-calculator/

• https://playtracker.net/insight/ 

MARKETABILITY OF MY PROJECT: 

The main goal of my project isn’t a commercial one—I don’t expect to earn money on it. I intend to keep costs low, keep my financial risk small, and treat any profit as a pleasant surprise.

The genre itself isn’t especially profitable, but there are a few exceptions—games that sold really well despite being based mainly on text. I plan to make a separate post about this topic, but what I wanted to underline is that they somehow transcend their genre and offer something more than just choosing dialogue options. 

My strategy for providing such a twist is to present dialogues as challenges. You will be able to lose and hopefully have tense, interesting confrontations. I hope that I can introduce some simple mechanics that will make the experience feel more like a game than “just” an interactive story. Again, more on that in the future.

What is your game's meaning?

Not all the games need to be ambitious. But as a creator, you will spend at least hundreds, probably thousands, of hours on your game. You better know what this game means for you and, ultimately, for your audience.

Your game will impact other people. Maybe you just want people to have a great, careless time. Maybe you want to raise awareness on a social matter that is important to you. Or it’s just important for you, and you need to make this game to process your inner feelings and personal experiences.

All answers are good. Just take time to think about one.

MY PROJECT MEANING:

Creating the game myself will be important for my self-confidence and help to fight my inner impostor syndrome. I also would like to write about topics that puzzle me, so I hope it will allow me to self-analyze some of my feelings and thoughts.

Besides, I would like this game to be thought-provoking about a particular topic, which I think is particularly important nowadays.

It all sounds vague at the moment, but I don’t want to spoil it too soon!

***

That’s all for today! This post was a little bit different than usual. My idea was to describe the first stage of my development process while showing a few more universal tips that can be applied to your ideas. I intend to make it a series published every two weeks (interwoven with “normal” posts about varied topics) summarizing my progress and describing what I’ve learned.

Let me know if you like this idea!

I wasn’t disappointed. Santa Monica Studio made a remarkably polished game—admiring the details of characters' clothes or finding tiny details in the environment was a pleasure by itself. I enjoyed the story and its tone, set somewhere between a myth, fairy tale, and modern blockbuster cinema. Combat was insanely satisfying, making me feel the strength of Kratos, even if I didn’t master all the moves and possibilities.

But there is something I don’t love about God of War: Ragnarok — how it constantly wanted to reward me. 

In this game, the player gets some loot after combat, but even more rewards come from exploration and opening crates scattered among the levels.

It sounds like a good idea, especially since the game has a Metroidvania structure. This means that some parts of the map are inaccessible until a new gear or ability makes them possible to reach (often with some convenient shortcut). This encourages players to explore the map and return to previously played levels to gather new rewards.

But even during the first playthrough of the level, I usually get quite a lot of stuff. A few steps aside from the main path and, boom, here it is, a shiny, glowing crate hiding something valuable. Crates are huge (like everything in God of War), and opening them comes with a very satisfying animation of the hero using a great deal of force to open it or even blast through its lid. There are a few types of them; some require a simple puzzle to open, and some do not. Some are very common; others have more legendary items.

It doesn’t sound like a controversial feature, right? With such a reward system, some games would try to take real money out of players’ pockets. However, as a premium, single-player experience promoting PlayStation, God of War: Ragnarok doesn’t lower itself to such a rip-off (and praise for that!).

However, despite the good intentions of the creators, rewards distorted my experience with the game. I started fully immersed, feeling like a mythological hero exploring the Norse world. But after some time, I felt more like a rat in a maze rushing from one reward to another.

I stopped caring that much about the environment and just looked for the shining glance of the next piece of loot. Crates were hidden, but my mind quickly adapted to it and almost intuitively knew where to search for them. They broke my immersion not only because their presence in the world usually wasn’t justified well enough but also because I didn’t feel like I’d earned those rewards.

Besides that, rewarding players for looking at every corner of the level triggers some „gamer OCD.” Adrian Chmielarz neatly explained that in an article called Game Openings are Important, or the First 300 Seconds of Bioshock Infinite. It contains a beautiful drawing that says more than a thousand words about this issue:

Of course, God of War: Ragnarok or Bioshock Infinite (which served as the example for Chmielarz) aren’t the only games that can be criticized for that. It’s the opposite; they are examples of very good games, which makes such “gamey” mechanisms stick out more than usual. We expect such games to reward us with great stories, amazing vistas, or exciting challenges, not artificial coins and virtual points.

However, single-player games are only the tip of the iceberg. Games that rely on maintaining users for a long time (so-called GAAS or game-as-a-service) actually push the barrier much further, making rewards a separate layer of experience (e.g., season pass), which isn’t connected that much with HOW we play, but HOW OFTEN we play. It’s the gamification of an act of playing itself.

Gamification was invented to make boring stuff (like working, exercising, or buying) more interesting by using mechanisms taken from games (points, levels, quests, etc.). Thanks to it, Duolingo can motivate us to do our Spanish exercises by evoking the fear of losing a streak of daily activity. Or a sports app can convince us to work out more by tempting us to complete an achievement. 

The paradox is that some games use mechanisms popularized by gamification but not in the gameplay itself (as it used to be, originally). So, playing the game is merely a means to progress in the metagame, outside of the game’s core loop. Leveling the rank to unlock new cosmetic items becomes more important than what we do to unlock them.

But are rewards always an effective way to motivate players?

Researchers do not share a unanimous opinion about it, but there are enough voices against it to at least put this assumption in doubt.

In the ‘70s, Edward Deci claimed that external rewards decrease our intrinsic motivation for a task1. Jesper Juul, in his article Demotivation by External Awards, wrote about ”a famous 1973 experiment2 that showed that when nursery school children consistently received external rewards for drawing, they lost interest in drawing and began drawing less.”

He also brought a great quote from the book Punished by Rewards:

There is also very interesting research from 2016 that suggests that although rewards may work for less motivated players, they may backfire for players who are already enjoying a game.

The research was called The Motivational Push of Games3. It was an 11-day study of a game for training executive functioning, with players split into two groups.

Players who identified less with their in-game avatar (thus were less involved in the game) had their motivation wane quicker than in the other group. However, they positively responded by including a reward after a week of playing—their effort and results improved. 

For players who identified more with avatars, the effect was completely opposite: their effort and performance dropped. 

Those are only a few examples of research that put the effect of rewards in doubt, and you can easily find more. However, to be frank, some researchers claim the opposite – in some research papers4, it is claimed that both rewards and intrinsic motivation positively influence performance and will to do the task.

I don’t have enough time or knowledge to give a decisive judgment about the impact of rewards on motivation. What I want to do instead is to undermine the common assumption that rewards are necessary for a player to keep playing. During game development, I sometimes have been a part of discussions about increasing the number of rewards or strengthening their meaning. But I don’t recall ANY situation in which somebody would argue that rewards in our game can, in fact, make players less engaged. And research says that it is, at least, a possible scenario.

Gaming is not the only field in which rewards and motivation are important. One of them is education, in which the attitude towards rewards has changed. There is a trend in modern educational methods (e.g., Montessori) not to praise children for the effects of their work but for the process itself. Saying that they have drawn a beautiful picture sounds harmless, but it may teach children to focus more on praise than enjoyment of the activity itself. Moreover, kids may be less creative, being afraid that they won’t achieve the same result for the second time if they don’t repeat what they have already done.

When we have intrinsic motivation, we can enjoy the activity itself. But when rewards come, a desire to achieve only a certain effect may become dominant.

I know that I can be demotivated by rewards. Maybe not in the short-term loop, as it’s difficult to stop the game when another reward is just behind the corner. But after I finally stop playing, another reflection may come: Was this time really well spent? I often have such regrets after scrolling through social media, and I have them after playing something that is just an addictive form without substance.

To be clear, I’m not talking about God of War here. I found enough meaning in the game story, challenge in the game mechanics, or immersion in the game world to feel that it was a time well spent. But I don’t think that chasing from chest to chest to get more rewards was an especially good part of this experience.

God of War: Ragnarok is a story about maturing into an adult. Maybe it’s high time game developers did the same. Giving treats looks like an easy way to earn love, but does it work in the long term? Everybody loves candies… until they eat too many.

Yes, I envy movie directors, scriptwriters, musicians, and writers—people generally have an idea of what they do. What helps in recognition of such professions is that they aren't afraid to tell stories about themselves: films about films are pretty often phenomena. The same goes for writers or musicians whose lives are shown in all sorts of different mediums.

But game developers? Judging by how rarely pop culture used to cover this topic, the game-making process seemed uninteresting for a story. 

Or maybe — nobody has yet found an interesting angle to talk about this new medium?

After I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I know that it’s possible to use a game development topic to tell a universal story that could be moving even for people who don’t know much about games.

Gabrielle Zevin's book is about ambition, creativity, and complicated relationships that cannot be easily labeled. It's also about video games that the two main characters—Sam and Sadie—create. Their games' success brings them fame, money, and—occasionally—satisfaction. However, it's also the root of envy, quarrels, and selfishness.

In this story, video games don't just serve as a unique background. You can easily see that games aren't just a random topic for Gabrielle Zevin but something she knows inside out. Her characters spend childhood with The Oregon Trail, get excited to play a beta of the new Metal Gear or wonder why Donkey Kong wears a tie.

In the book, game development is dramatized but still believable and relatable. When Sam and Sadie give the first level for their friend to play, they hear what most developers hear in such a situation – it is too difficult! When head creatives in the project grow apart and work separately on "their half” of the game, they create a disappointing game with unclear vision. When they need to make a quick sequel for a breaking hit to satisfy the publisher and make more money, they risk burnout and produce an uninspired follow-up.

All of these situations may resonate with the experiences of actual game developers—even if they aren't as famous or successful as those fictional characters or don't publish games as fast as them (this is my only beef with the book; it’s frustrating to see how often they ship a new game when, in reality, you may spend years without getting any new game released).

But what I liked the most about Tomorrow is how this book uses games as a metaphor for saying something meaningful. There is a scene in which Ms. Pac-Man is an excuse for a mother and her son to talk about death. Reflection on how Hideo Kojima shows female characters in Metal Gear Solid is juxtaposed with a breakup with the toxic man. The fictional games Sam and Saide designed reveal something about their personal anxieties and dreams. 

There are a few more philosophical reflections about the nature of games, like this one: 

Tomorrow... is "the million copy bestseller," according to its publisher. The movie adaptation rights are already sold. Although, the single book probably cannot change the general pop-cultural perception of game development, it’s an important step. 

The film industry also has a growing interest in showing the work of game developers. In 2023, the Tetris movie was released, and thankfully, it isn't an adaptation of falling bricks gameplay but "the story of how one of the world's most popular video games found its way to players around the globe." It focuses on pursuing publishing rights for this groundbreaking game made in the Soviet Union. It’s a dynamic and exciting movie that even has a car chase sequence on the streets of Moscow! However, what’s most important is that it also shows the person behind this game - Aleksiej Pażytnow – and his passion for the act of creation. The scene in which he meets another designer and they start to iterate on the Tetris prototype shows how joyful and satisfying the work on games can be.

Game development could also serve as a canvas for comedy: Mythic Quest TV series is about a video company that tries to keep its MMO game on top despite the enormous ego of its game director, the overgrown ambitions of its lead programmer, or greed coming from the monetization head. It does not always hit all the right notes, but it's difficult not to like the main characters. Besides, one of the episodes called A Dark Quiet Death (s01e05) is pure genius, worth watching even completely separately (it's a short, standalone story that serves as a prequel to events in the main storyline).

Making a main hero a game developer allows for going meta or breaking the fourth wall. This trick was used in Black Mirror's Bandersnatch or The Matrix Resurrections, where Neo lives in the Matrix again, but now as a game designer. Similar topics can be found in the Westworld TV series, eXistenZ by David Cronenberg, and probably a bunch of other movies (including those that aren't out yet).

Okay but what does it give us, game makers? Seeing somebody of your profession on the TV is nice, but is that even important? 

Yes, I think so.

It makes our job easier to understand by the audience and helps them recognize that games are made by a bunch of individual creators, not faceless corporations. The video game is not made by EA, Ubisoft, or 2K but by Monica, Alex, Greg, Robert, or Anna. Even mainstream blockbuster games made by 1000+ teams have elements that are a result of the sheer passion of individuals. 

That matters because we need more personal relations with the audience. It doesn’t sound good in the age of internet hatred, but I’m talking about something more positive and real. Game developers rarely experience direct contact with people who enjoy their work. Not many of us have ever had the opportunity to hear a standing ovation from a room full of people – even if our game is enjoyed by thousands or millions of players! 

Watching streams or reading comments doesn’t give the same energy as an actual conversation with a real person, which is positively impacted by your work. Naturally, this comes from the digital nature of games, but even an email or message that comes personally from a fan of the game and shows that our work means a lot to this particular human being might make us feel that all of this is worth our efforts.

Stories about game development won’t immediately change it, but hopefully, they will bring more attention and understanding of the developers' perspective.

Speaking of which, those stories can allow game creators to change their perceptions about their jobs. In mundane reality, it’s easy to forget how extraordinary what we do is. We’re getting paid for creating fictional worlds filled with our rules and ideas. Someday in the future, somebody will immerse themselves in them and, hopefully, have a wonderful time.

We should cherish and celebrate acts of creation, not only the results, such as applause, popularity among players, or financial success.

We might also gain the courage to tell the world about our process. Then, maybe we will start creating more games about ourselves, exploring the capabilities of our medium, and self-analyzing our creations.

Like Beginner’s Guide does. The game is a follow-up to the famous The Stanley Parable, but instead of analyzing the game medium by itself as its predecessor, it focuses on WHO created it. It's narrated by its main developer, Davey Wreden, who shows and describes a collection of short games made by Coda, supposedly his friend. Reality and fiction get all mixed up in this dark and personal story.

I cannot even describe The Beginner’s Guide in detail without realizing that I fell into a trap set up by the message of this game. I just don't want to be like the narrator of this game, overanalyzing art created by somebody else only to feel smart about himself. Play Beginner's Guide if you like to experience that for yourself. I don’t know a better game about creating games (or even creating any piece of art).

But despite all my love for Davey Wreden’s work, I hope that someday I'll play an even better one.

But before we get to his pieces of advice, let me tell you the most useful thing I learned when I was a student. And no, I haven’t been studying game development or anything related, but journalism (in Polish, so please forgive me for all the grammar mistakes here).

While studying, I often heard the following advice: “If you particularly love any sentence you’ve written, delete it.” Professors loved to say that, students (me included) hated it. “Why should I delete something that is the best in my text?” – I was asking myself.

After some time, I internalized and embraced that advice. Such a sentence was usually a show-off - it contained some original metaphor, an uncommon word, an unusual construction. However, it rarely served the text as a whole and - above all - the reader.

Such attitude helps to avoid the trap that a lot of creators fall into – pleasing your ego, instead of your audience. Later on, I learned that it was a quite universal rule for writers, repeated by many successful authors.

What about video games? Does this rule apply here, too?

In general – yes, but I think this advice should be framed a little bit differently. And here we’re getting back to Sid Meier.

If this name somehow doesn’t ring the bell: Sid Meier is one of the most recognizable designers ever, known for many groundbreaking titles like Civilization, Pirates, and Railroad Tycoon. In this last game, he had a design issue described in Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games book (I wholeheartedly recommend it!).

One of his coworkers, Bruce, gave him feedback about the unfairness of the gameplay of Railroad Tycoon. His bridges kept being washed out in floods. Sid explained that it’s not uncommon in this genre - SimCity has a variety of natural disasters – and it’s grounded in reality as a legitimate concern for rail companies.

But Bruce had something indisputable to say:

“When my bridge is knocked down for no reason, I’m not having fun.”

As a designer, you never should discuss such a sentence. Maybe it’s not the fault of the design itself. Maybe it’s a matter of presenting the information, showing feedback, or balancing it properly. But it’s never players fault that they aren’t having fun.

Let’s listen to what Sid Meier has to say about it:

“He was right, of course. It seems like players ought to appreciate the hardships we throw at them – that the whole reason they play is to prove their worth. But it’s not. People play games to feel good about themselves, and random destruction only leads to paranoia and helplessness. Thwarting an enemy’s attack feels worthy, but recovering from an ambush is a relief at best. Unfortunately, the flip side of that imbalance is that the designer feels powerful and clever, which is what makes these unexpected setbacks so tempting to implement. 

As major plot points, they’re practically universal: your trusted partner steals the treasure; the damsel who begged for help is a double agent; the noble scientist has a secret weapon to wipe out mankind; the princess is in another castle. Or in other words, the player did everything the designer asked of them, and then the rules changed for no reason. A sudden reversal of fortune is only exciting or dramatic when it happens to someone else. When it happens to you, it’s just a bummer. The player may soldier on out of defiance, or irritation, or just a basic acceptance that this is how games are supposed to be, but their experience has been diminished nonetheless.

I had recognized these pitfalls when they were part of a linear storyline, but Bruce’s comment helped me see that the same principle applied to even the tiniest plot points in open-world games. All random obstacles are, on some level, crafted with an “imagine the look on their faces when” mentality, which can also be loosely translated as, “Hey! Hey! I designed this! Look at the big brain on me!” The game isn’t supposed to be about us. The player must be the star, and the designer as close to invisible as possible.”

The golden rule that Sid Meier coined for himself is to “make sure the player is the one having the fun.” Not the designer or game maker, but the player.

Of course, it’s wonderful if you can have a great time in your own game. It’s an incredible feeling when it happens. But what really matters is the players' experience.

Maybe, you as a game creator are the only person who can enjoy the game as nobody else cannot understand it fully due to ineffective onboarding or lack of tutorial.

Or you might be tired of the gameplay you work on after playing hundreds of hours. You might be tempted to change something in the game just to feel different and fresh for you. However, players may perceive it differently – maybe, the game is already fun and you cannot see that after getting so used to it. Maybe, it’s already too complicated, and adding new stuff will only enhance this problem. 

You won’t know any of those things until you won’t have player experience in the center. And that’s why it’s so important to playtest your game with actual players - as early as possible and as often as possible.

I made this mistake a couple of times, one of the examples was when I worked on DLC for 911 Operator, a game about managing emergency services. The DLC was called Search and Rescue and I was striving to prove to others and myself that I could be a great game designer (at that time I was sort of a jack of all trades in the small indie studio where its founder was the main designer of the game).

The core loop of the game was to send the correct emergency units to the various incidents on the map (so it was a sort of unusual RTS).

I proposed a feature for special incidents that require players to search an area. Such incidents spawned a grid of squares around them. In one of those squares was the searching object (a missing child, dangerous criminal, etc.).

This mechanic requires a lot of micromanaging if you want to try to find an object by yourself. However, I intended to make it sort of risk/reward mechanic - you could send the team to the center of this incident and let them do the job automatically or manually send your teams to selected squares.

In the second option, you could get lucky and finish the assignment quicker - when you selected a square with a missing person or object, it was instantly done. However, this option was more random and cost the player a lot of attention which was needed in the rest of the city as well. And sometimes it was even more time-consuming if the damn criminal was hidden in the last undiscovered square. 

I was quite proud of this feature. It was impactful during gameplay and quite a visible element of this DLC, highlighted in trailers and screenshots. However, what did players think about this feature? Let’s look at Steam reviews:

Yes, at least some of the players totally missed the option that they could send teams to the center of the incident to let them solve it automatically. So they couldn’t feel that there was any significant decision to make.

I knew how the mechanic worked, so I’d never seen this issue in my playthrough. If we run more playtests or I would focus more on player perspective, I would probably see the need for more communication by UI or text.

But hey, Sid Meier made some mistakes, too! ;) Speaking of which, this is how he solved the issue of bridges destroyed by floods: 

“The key difference between a gameplay challenge and a betrayal, I realized, was whether the player had a fighting chance to avoid it. So rather than eliminate the flooding, I introduced different kinds of bridges. A wooden bridge was cheap, and would get the railway up and running right away. A fancy stone bridge was more expensive, and took longer to build, but would be impervious to flooding. By giving the player control over how much risk they would tolerate, the floods not only stopped feeling unfair, they became a source of genuine reward. To imagine their bridge emerging whole from the receding water line felt better than if it had never flooded at all.”

And this sounds so much more interesting than the initial design!

So next time, don’t get angry at players who don’t have fun in your game! This doesn’t mean that you’re a bad designer or they can’t understand the genius of it.

Try to find the underlying reason and come up with the solution. In the long run, it will make your game better. For everyone, even for you and your ego. What is better for the ego, than actual praise for players?

Is he right?

Some gaming devices are defined by how one interacts with them—for example, Nintendo Wii, followed by Kinect from Xbox and PlayStation Move. The popularity of the Wii was huge, and most games for it were unique and incomparable to anything else, thanks to its motion controllers. But this revolution didn't quite catch on in the long term - at least in the traditional console market. It could be said that VR is the continuation of these traditions in this regard, also allowing you to make strange moves in your living room, to the amusement (or annoyance) of other household members.

Mahler suggests going the VR route and adding similar controllers to traditional consoles. The so-called 6DOF (6 degrees of freedom) controllers allow movement in more directions than a regular controller. Such controllers are included with Oculus Quest or Valve Index - we can wave them in all directions of space, rotate, and move them almost like our own hands. However, this does not mean you have to give up the existing buttons - they are still on the controller, just like triggers and analog sticks.

The new controller could make both existing game genres work better on consoles - especially FPS, in which the lack of precision of the mouse is compensated by auto-aim on the gamepads.

However, something else is the most interesting for me. It’s noticing how much the input method affects the game design and how the controller can affect the players themselves.

You could see how much a device can influence game design by observing changes in the shooter genre after 2006 when Gears of War premiered. It was created by Epic Games, a studio known for the Unreal series, a hardcore PC game full of fast action requiring high precision. But when they created an exclusive production for the Xbox console, their shooter game was adapted to the weak side of gamepads: in Gears of War, the most important thing is to hide behind cover, which means that we do not have to shoot while moving. This makes aiming on the pad easier, reducing frustration and shifting the game's focus from quick reactions to a more tactical attitude.

Do you want to know how much the addition of a new input option impacts game ideas? Look at Playdate - a small portable console with... a crank. Contrary to intuition, it is not used to charge the console but is one of the controllers.

This is enough to make small, black-and-white games a completely different experience than most indie games. In one game, the crank charges the flashlight, in another, it serves as the main controller to unwind the rope on which the thief robbing the residence hangs.

The controller we use to play can influence our feelings about the game. And it isn’t about convenience, or at least, not only.

An example is Diablo, which played on a console brings a quite different experience than when played on a mouse and keyboard. Moving the character directly, using the analog stick, gives a more natural and direct feeling of being a character than ordering them where to move by pointing a cursor. On the other hand, aiming at a large group of enemies or managing your equipment is definitely more convenient when using a mouse. Playing on a gamepad won't work in every case but in the case of, for example, the barbarian class, it can give much greater satisfaction from combat and a sense of identification with the controlled character.

However, what impresses me the most are the games that can influence our emotions by using controls.

The creators of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons managed to do this. Each stick is responsible for controlling one of the brothers. At first, it seems a strange and unnatural solution (because most games have accustomed us to something different), but over time we understand how powerful a narrative tool is the fact that we take care of two brothers at once.

Warning, now there will be a SPOILER to the ending. BUT if you haven't played Brothers for over 10 years since its release, maybe it's worth reading it instead of fooling yourself that you will play it soon ;)

When one of the brothers dies in the finale, we suddenly feel his absence on a very physical level. Our body has become accustomed to controlling both of them at once, and now one of the knobs remains idle. No other game, or perhaps any other work of culture, has ever made me feel a sense of loss in such a TANGIBLE way as Brothers.

END OF SPOILER

Interestingly, there is a concept in psychology known as embodied cognition, which describes how the physical state of our body affects our mental state. Perhaps in the context of games, they can be extended to how physical exposure to the game affects our emotional state while playing.

Another game that plays on our emotions and body at the same time is Before Your Eyes. In this title, the developers from GoodbyeWorld Games used a camera to track the player's blinks. All this to create a story in which blinking moves the player in time - sometimes a few minutes forward, sometimes years. So we listen to the story with open eyes trying not to miss any of it. And when we blink, we often feel irrevocable regret for what we can no longer experience. Isn't that a great metaphor for life?

This also makes us feel the story on a physical level, and how well we control our body affects how we perceive the plot.

Sometimes we also feel the influence of physicality in games, even if it is not the most important element in the game design.

• When running away from enemies with the analog stick pressed, you will feel tired after a long time and are more susceptible to accidentally slipping your finger.

• In FIFA the vibrations of the controller become more intense during a match-deciding penalty, trying to stress you out like the controlled player.

• Driving off the track in a racing game causes the pad to vibrate uncomfortably and makes the car more difficult to steer.

• In Death Stranding a Bridge Baby carried by the player may burst into tears and it can only be calmed down by gently rocking – and the player needs to rock the pad as if it were a real newborn.

New devices and methods of interacting with computers are inspiring and exciting. This is good because this causes technological progress. Dozens of innovations will be forgotten, but one of them might become a new standard.

But what excites me the most are people who can take current constraints and do something within them. Something that no one has ever thought of before. Influencing the player in a way never seen before. It allows me to see that game designers shouldn’t think about input only when they are setting controls and deciding which button does what.

Game designers should be perceived input as a full-fledged gameplay and storytelling tool. What's more - this is the only way we can be sure that the player is moved by our game. Quite literally.

***

That's all for today! If this post was useful and interesting for you, I would be grateful if you would write a comment or share it with someone who may enjoy it as well. 

Thanks!

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First, let's take a glance at the SteamCharts statistics for these two games.

(If you're not familiar, that portal displays the number of concurrent players in a game, serving as a reliable indicator of its popularity.)

Let’s guess who would win: the multimillion-budget game about killing DC superheroes…

…or a small game about running a supermarket?

You can see that the result is striking: Supermarket Simulator is ~3.6 times more popular!

Of course, this comparison is not entirely fair – Supermarket Simulator has become a viral hit, and many similar simulation games, both in terms of topic and quality, aren’t even close to its success. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, on the other hand, is an example of a big-budget production missing the expectations and needs of the targeted audience.

But still – isn’t it puzzling that the game about such an ordinary job is FAR MORE popular than a big-budget superhero game? Why is that?

Simulation games for a long time used to be associated with rather inaccessible experiences. They provided a way to operate complicated vehicles like planes, submarines, or trains. It was nearly impossible to play them without specialistic knowledge or, at least, careful reading of a manual.

There was one exception, though. The Sims. This series was a kind of genre by itself, but could also be described as a “life simulation”. Contrary to other simulators, The Sims were easy to play, even by people who don’t usually play games. And it worked – the series has never had a lot of respect from hardcore gamers, but for many, it is a cult classic and the game of their childhood.

The Sims series proved that simulating more ordinary life can be fun, too. But in some way, it was a power fantasy as most of the games – The Sims offers a virtual version of “dream-life” fantasy, a sort of digital “doll house”.

Let’s go back to the present times when publishers and retailers no longer dictate what game is worth doing. When the only barrier to releasing the game is a $100 fee for Steam, even very niche themes might be profitable enough. And creators of simulators understand that very well. They earned their success not only through such evergreen themes like trucks (Euro Truck Simulator) or farming (Farming Simulator), but also through more surprising topics like cleaning stuff (PowerWash Simulator), mowing grass (Lawn Mowing Simulator), renovating houses (House Flipper) or running a gas station (Gas Station Simulator).

Those games are often rough around the edges as their budget is rather tight – to make a profit from a niche is a great strategy as long you can make money even from a relatively small amount of purchases. Especially, that making games faster and releasing them often, increases the chances of having an idea that will catch on and become a hit, even outside of its niche. Like Supermarket Simulator.

There is more than one reason for a success like that. We could talk comedy potential in such games which makes them perfect for streamers or YouTubers. We could talk about low entry-level making them accessible even for casual players.

There is a degree of luck too.

But I have a feeling that there is something else about them.

Simulation games give something a lot of us are missing in the modern world. They are mundane and down-to-earth. Goals are straightforward and the progress is measurable. The work is usually easy to understand and somehow relatable. 

Sounds simple? But maybe that is enough. Such a fantasy of a simple life starts being attractive in our modern world. Every device, app, and platform tries to simulate us. Moments of boredom are very rare. So, spending time cleaning stuff with a pressure washer or putting products on market shelves might become a refreshing, peaceful experience.

We need boredom and peace for the health of our minds. Depending on what we’re doing, our neurons fire in different patterns called brainwaves. A lot of activities, maybe even more than ever, require us to concentrate causing Beta brainwaves. But to truly relax our mind needs Alpha brainwaves. Doing repeatable, monotonous activities allows us to wander with thoughts. This is not only relaxing but beneficial to our creativity and well-being.

Can simulation games help us achieve such a state? Possibly, but it requires scientific research to truly prove it. 

Are such games the best way to relax? I don’t think so, video games in general aren’t the best form of relaxation.

But maybe the popularity of such games comes from this unfulfilled need for calm, monotonous activity that our brains lack.

To be honest, I’m not a fan of simulation games, personally. However, I believe that it’s beneficial for all creators to understand why they are popular and what needs they address.

You don’t necessarily need to make Delivery Simulator 2024, but you can use that activity to evoke a certain feel. Even, if your game is set in a strange, post-apocalyptic world as Hideo Kojima and his team created in Death Stranding.

Maybe repairing cars doesn’t sound exciting enough for you when speaking about Car Mechanic Simulator game, but what if this car is your only way to survive in a world full of dangerous anomalies? Pacific Drive mixes elements of simulation and survival games in really clever way.

If tearing down walls to renovate a house in House Flipper is not appealing, maybe cutting spaceships to pieces will be a better fit. Hardspace: Shipbreaker got you covered with a challenging gameplay, which not only requires patience during disassembling spaceships (some elements might explode), but also really good spacial orientation (as you move in the void, in all 3 dimensions).And as a bonus, you get a narration that is a funny satire of radical capitalism.

Whatever you prefer, just keep in mind what type of need, your game addresses. Why is it worth playing and what does it give to players? And then, it won’t matter if you’re doing a game about superheroes or supermarkets.

As a fan of narrative-focused games, it was hard for me to accept a situation in which the hero I controlled didn't speak. However, I've changed my mind and now find it to be something unique for the medium of video games. I hope you will do the same after reading this, or at least understand the reasons behind such a decision.

In the era of early video games, protagonists often didn't say a single word. Mario, Link, or Doomguy didn't speak. Technological limitations were the obvious reason, but those games were also more interested in finding fun in the gameplay than in telling stories.

In cinematography, silent films became extinct over the years when technological advancements allowed for making movies with sound.

It's different with games. Bioshock, Dishonored, Metro – it's easy to find examples of modern titles in which the main hero doesn't speak. Why?

A quick note: I don't mean an actual voice when talking about a silent protagonist. RPGs often don't have a voice-over for the main hero, but still allow us to say plenty of words. We just read instead of hearing them - mainly for immersion. Or budget. Or both.

Immersion is also the most obvious reason for making the protagonist silent. You're the main character. You're taking part in the game's world and reacting to it however you want. Your thoughts are the monologue of the main character whose actions are your decisions.

Hearing a voice may break that immersion - especially if it is different from your vision of your character.

There is also a risk of confusion when you hear a voice but you don't see who is speaking. Is that me? A voice in my head? Or another character?

That issue may occur when you can't see the lips of characters (e.g. in helmets) but it's especially common in first-person perspective games.

I used to work on an FPS prototype in which the main hero had another voice in his head. It wasn’t the best idea in hindsight.

During a playtest, many players weren't sure which voice belonged to whom. All that because they weren't introduced in a way that allowed for easy identification.

If it were today, I would write a scene that presents a main character's voice for the first time in the most unambiguous way possible – e.g. by responding to a call, showing visually that this is our hero speaking to a device. Or make the protagonist silent.

Such issues are more common. The creators of Portal's games, famous for playing with players' expectations, had an idea to end the Portal 2 story by breaking the rule of a silent protagonist. A deadlock between two antagonized AIs that can be ended only by a human.

In the final scene, Chell, the main hero who remained silent for both games, would say a single word: “Yes”.

It sounds like a funny idea, but playtests have revealed that it brought too much confusion – players were not even sure how to say it.

So sometimes it’s better to use the right to remain silent. Especially, since having the main character speak during gameplay is not a trivial task. The level design needs to go in paired with voice-over to make sure that the player will hear it in the right area.

Besides position, there are plenty of other actions that may impact the voice: e.g. the voice of a running or jumping person should sound different. And this is only the tip of the iceberg regarding how inventive players can be when it comes to ridiculous behaviors.

This is why games often take control away from players in the narrative moments – either fully (cutscenes) or partially (disabling running or moving). It helps with narration but limits the gameplay. So it's a matter of priorities.

Half-Life is a great example of a game that has prioritized uninterrupted control of the character by the player. Keeping the main character silent, even though his name and backstory are well known, helped with that. And that hasn't stopped Gordon Freeman from becoming iconic.

Question time!

Have you ever played a game in which your character was

• joking when you were irritated

• were scared when you were amused

• feeling guilty when you were feeling badass?

Such dissonance is yet another reason for a silent protagonist.

It's fun when your character is saying what you feel, but it's worse when you're feeling completely different than "your" character.

Last but not least, silent protagonists allow for clever narrative twists - like subverting who we really are in the game world. In Bioshock, we start the game in a way that suggests that our character is not important in this world.

Without speaking a word, we can quickly forget that we control anybody in particular and treat the main hero as our avatar, sort of an empty vessel. And the game used that in a surprising final twist, revealing who we were controlled for the whole time.

This is the end of today's post. My main inspiration was the great article "Silence is Gordon" by @jeremy_peel in the magazine EDGE (#388). The great anecdote about the Portal 2 ending comes from there as well as a few good points in favor of the silent protagonists.

Well…

Here comes the story about creators' intentions and players' behavior...

I read this story in EDGE #388, where Andrzej Blumenfeld, CEO of Far From Home, was talking about Forever Skies. In this survival game, the ecological catastrophe made the planet uninhabitable to humans and you as a scientist fly in an airship high above toxic clouds.

The game setting was inspired by the situation in Kraków, one of the cities in Poland in which air pollution reaches a dangerous level. But despite the creators having a clearly stated mission, the release has brought some surprises.

“We added a recycler since people were just going to the edge of their airship and tossing unwanted items overboard which felt a little odd for a game set around environmental issues,” said Andrzej Blumenfeld.

That’s not an exception - noble ideas often don’t go in pair with actual players' behaviors. I would say that games are the most difficult medium to convey a message intended by a creator.

It’s because as game developers we try to provide players some freedom in their choice of actions, but also need to take care that the experience is engaging (others may say fun but in my opinion, it's too limiting).

The best example of “fun” winning with the message is the fate of The Landlord’s Game, a cautionary board game designed by Elizabeth Magie in 1904 (sic!). What did she say about her game?

Magie created two sets of rules:

1. One included tax which rewards everybody when wealth is created. It was anti-monopolist in its intention.

2. The other one is about showing how monopolies crush all opponents.

Unfortunately, the second one was more engaging to play and was copied to make Monopoly, one of the most profitable board series ever made.

If you want your game to say something particular, DON’T focus on words in dialogues or even the setting of the game.

What’s more important is what the player DOES.

Neurobiology proves that too.

Brain plasticity means that everything that we experience leaves a trace in the mind. The more frequent the experience, the stronger its effect on our future behavior.

As Donald Hebb said:

If a child is told by its parents to do something, but parents are doing the opposite – what the kid will follow: their behavior or their words? It is quite clear, right?

Now, put players instead of kids and game developers instead of parents.

And remember to SHOW them how to behave instead of TELLING them what to do.

I dig the Monopoly example from an INCREDIBLY insightful presentation made by @SorenJohnson. Check out his blog and the podcast, they are awesome sources of knowledge.

Buy or wishlist Forever Skies - it's a really interesting game especially if you are a fan of survivals like Subnautica! And the fact it's trying to say something about the problems of our world is something I respect a lot.

I also had a post with another good example of players behaving differently from the creator's intention and how it links with the psychological theory of self-determination. Read it here:

You know the game already, don't you?

No Man's Sky is the subject of an already iconic tale about failed expectations (and later redemption). But the catch is that its creators delivered exactly what they promised - boundless exploration of space. Still, players were disappointed. Why?

Players often want to think they want freedom, but in reality, they want to feel autonomous. What's the difference? Freedom means you can go everywhere. To feel autonomous you need to have volition to go anywhere.

"You can procedurally generate 18.4 quintillion unique planets, but you can’t procedurally generate 18.4 quintillion unique things to do" - the quote from @JakeSwearingen's review is a perfect summary of why the size of the world isn't crucial when talking about players autonomy.

NMS's creators provided an impressive number of content updates with new mechanics and activities. It made players' reception better because they could choose between many different actions. The size of the world stayed the same, but it was populated with interesting decisions.

So we have established that size doesn't matter! It means that even more linear games can provide autonomy for players as long as they make players WANT to do things that they are doing. Narration, level art, even lightning or sound effects - they can all contribute to it.

Autonomy is one of the core human needs according to Self-Determination Theory (SDT). Besides competence and relatedness, it's the reason why we're intrinsically motivated to do activities that aren't necessary or obligatory. Like playing games.

This is my 3rd post about needs coming from Self-Determination Theory. In case you missed it, here are two previous ones:

Why such actions are the very best moments for the most popular franchise in the most popular genre of video games?

Before we deep dive into answers, let's look at this massacre of balloons in Splatoon.

There is no blood or corpses but shooting a balloon is still a satisfying action, right?

People love headshots in video games, but not because of brutality.

It's all about clear feedback.

We're seeing the immediate and powerful reaction to our actions. We can feel COMPETENCE.

Competence is one of the core human needs according to Self-Determination Theory (SDT). Besides autonomy and relatedness, it's the reason why we're intrinsically motivated to do activities that aren't necessary or obligatory. Like playing games.

(I wrote about SDT here)

How can we achieve a sense of competence? By having clear feedback, adequate difficulty, and measurable goals.

It almost sounds like the rules for good game design, right? That's why games are ideal for achieving a sense of competence. Maybe even better than real life? ;)

But game creators need to remember that it's equally easy to ruin the competence feel. Let's analyze a few possible reasons.

1. Unclear goal

When I'm stuck on the level, I don't feel like a hero. Especially, if I'm stuck not because of the challenge but because I don't know what the game expects me to do.

2. Changing the type of skill required to beat the game

Variety is important, but when the game imposes a linear stealth sequence for players who for the whole game learned how to fight dynamically, things can get frustrating. I bet you remember such levels and you don't have many warm thoughts about them.

3. Helping players too much

Games often help players. Platformers usually have "a coyote time" - players can still jump for a split second after leaving the platform. Action games often lower damage received when players are near death so they can have epic comebacks more often.

But sometimes games are too pushy. I remember when my roommate did a rage-quit in God of War 3. Not because he died dozens of times in a row. He did it because the game kept asking him if he wanted to lower the difficulty after death.

4. Randomness

Players don’t really hate randomness and so-called RNG. They hate lack of influence and taking away the feeling of competence.

Randomness which can make us lose no matter how good we play is frustrating. But it can be awesome, just remember to provide a way for players to feel that they can significantly impact results, despite the aspect of randomness

So, let’s do some summary:

1. Humans strive for the feeling of competence.

2. Provide it for them using clear, fair rules and understandable goals within their reach.

3. Show them how they can get better.

   And if they do - present progress on the way to the goal.

I hope you enjoyed this! If you're interested in the usage of Self Determination Theory in games, I’ve already written about competence and autonomy:

Balatro is based on poker but has the premise of breaking traditional card game rules by adding new cards, sometimes with surprising rules to “trigger adrenaline-pumping, outrageous combos” (from the store description).

Traditional cards and the Balatro’s aesthetic remind us of the disliked, shady uncle of video games – gambling. Balatro isn’t the exception, a lot of video games use mechanics that can be spotted in casinos. In roguelike deckbuilders, such elements are part of the core loop, typical for this genre.

Let’s leave the moral judgment for later with one important remark – I’m talking about buy-once games which don’t try to reach your pocket and get your “real” money. Only your time – but this is part of the deal, you bought them to entertain you, didn’t you?

So to really understand why games like Balatro are engaging, we need to understand why gambling is so captivating. Why is it fun to risk your money? Spoiler, it isn’t about winning, at least not only.

Imagine that you are doing some activity in order to get a reward. 

Option 1: You’re getting a certain reward for your job - 2 dollars. 

Option 2: You’re getting a random reward - you can get 1 or 2 dollars.

What option looks more motivating? The researchers proved that the answer is counterintuitive – people invest more effort, time and money to qualify for an uncertain reward than a certain reward – even of higher expected value! 

Why?

Uncertainty is the answer.

We, humans, are attracted to unpredictability. Our brain loves guessing, even more than guessing right. A moment before smoking a cigarette is more exciting for the brain than smoking itself. The same is true with betting in the game - not a win itself, but the anticipation of the win is the moment of the highest dopamine kick.

Roguelike deckbuilders have a lot of moments of such anticipation. What cards will I draw? What rewards will I get? Will enemy action end how I predicted? 

Such games have challenging difficulty by design as losing and starting over is an inherent part of their loop. You never know if the next battle bring you another even more shiny reward or if you will lose and need to start from scratch. To keep you even more engaged dying often brings you new unlocks that encourage you to start a new run.

Is such an attitude just a tool for designers or something morally questionable? Is that bad that the game tries to keep players engaged? On the ground level that is something universal for game makers who want to provide entertainment. But the line between engaging and addictive is thin and it’s also a responsibility of creators to think about it. We don’t want players to have remorse and regret spending too much time with our game after all, right? 

Maybe it’s better to give the player a convenient exit point after a satisfactory session instead of keeping them in the loop and evoking one more turn syndrome. Maybe it’d be a good idea to ask players how much time they would like to spend in the game (like Book of Demons by Thing Trunk does) before they even start the run.

After all, the games are for players, not the otherwise.

The Children of the Sun is a very stylish game about sniping cultists. On every level, you use only one bullet. Seems hard? Thankfully, you can control it. You start with the ability to re-aim after shooting somebody, but you gradually gain more methods of controlling the path of the bullets.

It’s a rare mix of puzzle and shooter, reminiscent of the ingenious Superhot. Besides being mechanically original, it also boasts an avant-garde, unsettling art style – both retro and contemporary. It's already impressive work, especially since this is a solo-developer game ( @primaerfunktion made it). It's something worth waiting for, trust me.

Backpack Battles was one of the most popular demos during the festival, and at first glance, it was difficult to see why. Rough UI, no tutorial, no single-player mode. I went straight to play, and after a couple of fights and visits to the store, I found myself completely sucked in.

It’s the game about what is the most pleasurable part of a roguelike deckbuilder - shopping and equipping your character with new shiny stuff. Instead of fighting by yourself, you are just observing the results (it reminded me that people were crazy about autobattlers a couple of years ago – it’s crazy how quickly some trends disappear). The game also uses the idea of backpack tetris known from Diablo or RE series and makes it really engaging by providing a lot of synergies coming from the proximity of items. Discovering synergies and organizing the backpack gives a lot of fun, especially when you get quick feedback by observing the next battle. Backpack Battles has some issues with randomness and displaying crucial information, but once you get hooked, it's hard to tear yourself away.

Millennia is another contender for the throne of the 4X genre, temporarily abandoned by Firaxis, which has not yet announced the successor to Civilization VI, released over 7 (!) years ago. The game from C Prompt Games is quite similar to the Civ series but has enough fresh ideas to be an interesting proposition for fans of the genre. I got particularly intrigued when I learned that after the Age of Bronze, I might not only progress to the typical Age of Iron but also to the Age of Blood due to being too aggressive in the early game, or the Age of Heroes because of discovering many unique landmarks. Alternating historical timelines sounds like a great idea for replayability and adds mid-game goals that you might want to achieve.

Millennia appears to emphasize recognizing your playstyle: your actions within the game directly affect different domains, such as Government, Warfare, and Exploration, earning you points in each. Once enough points have been accumulated, they can be utilized to activate corresponding abilities. It's a clever system that reinforces various strategies; for instance, engaging in combat yields points to summon additional units. The entire system is more complex, involving Nation Spirits and Culture—it certainly holds great potential for being highly replayable. You can find more information about it here.

News Tower is about running a newspaper company in 1930s New York. It pays attention to details that make this experience believable despite a somewhat cartoonish art style. There is a surprising spatial aspect - from sending reporters to different places, through building your office to conquering the NYC map by enhancing your distribution. Time pressure to finish another edition of the newspaper by the end of the week creates a great loop. And I just love the feeling of choosing what should be on the front page since I played Lucas Pope’s (@dukope) little gem called The Republia Times. I have always been convinced this feature deserves a full game focused on it. Fingers crossed for News Tower, as it goes to Early Access—go check it out! 

"Can we have an online game where people feel friendly and compassionate towards each other?"

Devs created a prototype with the goal of incentivizing positive cooperation. Players can push other players to help them reach the higher platform and pull each other.

Here is my super professional visualization (not actual gameplay footage):

They put this to a playtest.

What was the result?

Players chose violence.

Instead of cooperation, they preferred pushing each other from the cliff. (again, not in-game footage):

"Is humanity at its core just dark?"

That was the question creators asked themselves.

Thankfully, no.

It was caused by the need for relatedness, one of the three core human needs specified by the self-determination theory. Thanks to understanding players' needs only a small change was enough to transform players from jerks to loyal companions.

I'll tell you how they solved it and reveal the name of the game.

But before that - let's talk psychology.

Human motivation can be:

• Extrinsic (basically, when you're doing something to get a reward or avoid punishment)

• Intrinsic (when you're doing something because you enjoy it) You're intrinsically motivated when you're playing the guitar or watching movies. Or playing games.

In the mid-80s, Richard Ryan and Edward L. Deci wrote that people can become self-determined when their needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy are fulfilled. Their work was called Self-Determination Theory (SDT).

When our needs are met through engaging in an activity, we experience strong intrinsic motivation to continue doing it.

Games, with features such as clear goals, feedback, and customizable environments, provide an excellent space for fulfilling those needs.

This is why games can be incredibly engaging. But how can we apply this concept in practice? Today, let's focus on one of those needs - relatedness - and explore how the designers of Portal game used it for their benefit.

They created a series of puzzles demanding the creative usage of a cube. However, there was an issue - players tended to leave the cube after solving a puzzle instead of taking it with them to the next part of the level.

So they gave this cube a personality changing it to beloved Companion Cube. Besides, getting a lovely look, it got a name and a place in the story. Moreover, the game told explicitly players that the cube BELONGED to them and that they should take care of it.

With the help of some clever dialogues hinting that the Companion Cube might be something more than just a cube, Portal creators did something amazing - got players attached to the simple, inanimate object.

Then, they instructed the players to destroy it, fully aware that this would evoke a sense of guilt due to the emotional attachment.

It was possible because we all have a need for relatedness - the desire to feel loved, connected to others, and meaningfully involved with the broader social world.

Of course, we can fulfill that need through interactions with real people. Multiplayer games can be a space for that giving us a common goal and topic to talk about making them basically ice-breaking exercises (unless someone is insulting your mother).

But, humans can relate to fictional characters. Or even objects as in the Portal example. Game creators can use it for different purposes - e.g. when your task is to provide survival to a group of people knowing their motivations, stories or even names makes it more meaningful.

And how can we fulfill OUR need for relatedness? According to self-determination theory:

1. We want to be seen by others.

We want to feel that full attention is given to us and we're being listened to. That's why good game design puts a player in the center. We don't necessarily need to save the world but players should feel that they are important.

2. We would like to be supported.

It doesn't refer only to literal support but being rescued by others can build relatedness. We want to feel that people fully understand our feelings and empathize with them.

3. We want to influence others.

In real life, it could be as simple as someone laughing at our joke, but in games, we have opportunities to have a more profound impact on others. We can kill a monster who terrorized the whole village changing life of people living there.

But not only.

Remember the example from the beginning? Developers wanted to create a unique online experience in which players will be compassionate towards each other. Prototype failed. Players were killing each other by pushing from the cliff.

The game was called Journey and was developed by thatgamecompany.

We already know that they succeeded - today, it's widely perceived as one of the most beautiful online experiences in gaming.

So, how did creators change the players' behavior?

They realized that players were experimenting in that environment searching for the most interesting action to do. The action with the most powerful feedback and influence on others was pushing somebody to die.

Especially, since Journey doesn't have any voice or text communication between players, so there weren't many other ways to impact other players.

So, the creators changed the reward: they disabled the collisions between players and added a feature of charging energy when you got close to someone.

As Jenova Chen said in The Verge's article:

That's a fantastic example of how the relatedness need can both negatively impact the design of the game and be used to strengthen it.

This post is based on the talk “Psychology of engagement - understand needs of your players” that I gave at @GameDevSession

I posted about two other needs - competence and autonomy. Here you can read about them:

Curious to read more? Here are my sources:

• BOOK: Glued to Games: How Video Games Draw Us In and Hold Us Spellbound, Scott Rigby, Richard M. Ryan

• BOOK: The Psychology of Video Games, Celia Hodent

• GDC TALK: The Freedom Fallacy: Understanding "Player Autonomy" in Game Design

• YOUTUBE: The psychology behind the Companion Cube's fame

• GOOGLE SCHOLAR: Self-determination theory