What are the best practices for game design psychology and motivation?

For me it works in the reverse way. I prefer to work on an idea and see where it goes. For me games are not cut according to people. People who are cut for games join them. However, in this commercial space, often a game designer may have to design for his audience, but the game may not be strong. It is just like shakespeare writing comedy - sorry didn't mean to touch your connoissuer nerve there. Table tennis was not designed for Chinese, it just happened to suit them. Nor was chess designed for russians. Hope the point doesn't get taken in the wrong way. Game Colleges are meant to teach, so they will have to discover subjects to teach.

This is not at all accurate and something I would not recommend. Games are not like software, developed to solve a problem -- Games are a form of expression, interactive entertainment and a vision that is meant to be enjoyed. Your idea, your concept should be the first and foremost thing you do. Iterate, get it "right", identify what it is that sets you apart from other games, and then start slowly homing down into your potential audience, when you are ready.

Game design is like catching lightning in a bottle - abstract yet fascinating. To understand player motivation and quantify our hypotheses, here's the scoop: -Get Close to Players: Interview your audience to learn their gaming preferences and what excites them. Their insights are gold. -Release an MVP: Create a Minimum Viable Product with the core gameplay loop. Observe interactions, measure engagement, and gather feedback. -Connect with the Gaming Community: Share concepts and artwork for valuable feedback. Think of it as brainstorming with gaming enthusiasts. By blending theory with real-world data, you'll start quantifying hypotheses and know if you're on the right path. Regardless, it's all part of the learning journey!"

I perceive the gravest error to be a designer's focus solely on what entertains them, overlooking the wider audience's engagement. True fulfillment stems from crafting core loops that captivate audiences, enticing them to return naturally. It's about understanding the niche, nurturing its potential, rather than solely pursuing our vision of the ideal product. Innovation is important, but so is familiarity. Incremental approaches to loop improvement often yield the best rewards.

Understanding the motivations of players of as a whole is essential to make a fun game. Will it have enough players to pay for itself and for the next stage? ( next game or live release). Knowing the target audience and their motivations is essential to make a successful game (in terms of reach and profitability) Art is not accountable for its choices. Design is. Responsible game design is about finding the overlapping zone between these 2 lenses looking at player motivations and behaviors and then finding the feasible part of that.

Feedback loops are very important and important for the success of games. In fact they are the single most important element which causes engagement. I wish gamification experts pay more attention to this when they apply game principles to education. Usually education has incomplete loops or delayed loops for feedback. Marks are overhyped and have no relevance. Feedback is the only relevant element of learning. Marks are relevant to certification.

The best games provide balance. Make a game too easy and the player quickly loses interest because all their in-game accomplishments start to seem hollow and unearned. Make the game too hard, and players will bounce off the difficulty curve and not return to the game. The difficulty with obtaining balance is that most games set their difficulty right at the beginning of the game when the player has the least amount of experience with the game itself. Therefore, feedback loops, especially around the First-time user experience (FTUE) can really make a difference in identifying the design in those crucial first hour(s) of gameplay.

I mostly agree with this however, if you examine the the way streaming shows or a series are run. There are two loops created one is in my opinion rewarding and the other is frustrating. The open loop is frustrating and often designed for less than reputable reasons. Open loops can be a great tool to help guide your players and offer them those mico endorphin hits. However be sure to close loops from time to time to give players a sense of accomplishment and closure, with the option to re-engage. An endless loop designed to keep butts planted in seats or eyes glued to screens is quite simply psychologically unkind.

Whether you are making a game where players feel like a one man army or you want to create intense competitive matches with tight scores, feedback loops are your best tool to more easily convey these ideas. Positive feedback loops are great for selling a player fantasy. Call of Duty's killstreak system being a good example. You get kills and later on get a tool that allows you to get even more kills. Negative feedback loops, on the other hand, are great for creating tension. Think FIFA's scripting or Mario Kart giving player at the back more powerful items. The idea is that if a player is doing well, we find a way to make things more difficult, giving AI or opposing players a chance to catch up.

It helps to look at loops in more nuanced ways than just as feedback. Engagement loops are there to keep you engaged. The shorter micro loop gives you second-to-second incentive, the macro loop gives you minute-to-minute incentive, and the meta loop provides hour-to-hour goals to complete. Feedback is part of all three!

Something I do to try and keep the challenge interesting is a difficulty wave, rather than difficult curve. ⬆️I plot out how I want player progression to look. 📈Then I tweak the difficult around that curve. 💪So after a very difficult section, I’ll create an easier section to help the player decompress and feel their new power/progression. I’ll also do vice versa to keep the players having an interesting experiance.

Also it's helpful to ensure that the challenge scales with the player. Ensure the player can get easy and quick wins early in the lifecycle, and when they first run into a puzzle or challenge that shows how difficult the game can be, they should be able to use powerups to aid their victory or be able to select another puzzle like in the game "Witness"

Another way to implement waves and variety is to use the space you have. Create different areas (if it fits your game concept) which differ in difficulty levels itself, props and weapons or story elements you need. Create small little chapters where you for example need to „start over“ because a different skillset or items are required then before. But let the user be free in that decision - nothing frustrates more then to be forced to begin from zero after you achieved something. With that you can create multiple waves of difficulty within one game without confusing the player while giving more depth to your game.

This wholely depends on the type of game you are designing, I think. In some games, like hollow knight or dark souls for example, the level of difficulty is set from the beginning and doesn't change and it is left to the player's creativity to think their way out. In others you have to start slow and warm up to higher difficulties as the player gains more experience. It truly is a hard balance to maintain but feedback is always important to help them when it is needed, like how to use a certain skill or letting them know that they can't go through this path in their current level and so on.

An additional (but important) factor to consider is the learning curve of the game. Players should be able to understand the game mechanics and progress through the early levels without feeling overwhelmed. As the game progresses, the challenge should increase gradually, allowing players to build their skills and knowledge. That is less about adapting to the player (as you are unlikely going to do this automatically), but rather ensuring that the challenge and skill growth is done in a way that enables the player's abilities to adapt to your design.

My obsession is systemic design. A field where you can observe a kind of master scale between Authorship and Emergence. In essence, making a game that promotes autonomy for the player requires that you do less Authorship and allow more Emergence.

Autonomy, competence, and relatedness all come out of self-determination theory. As a heuristic—accurate in enough cases to be considered a good starting point—it's a useful tool. Give players the means to explore the game field, understand its challenges, and devise their approach to learning and solving its problems. Reversing elements of these can also create useful moments. Breaking any of the SDT triad results in dysfunction, but those dysfunctions can either create stress or dread (useful for horror games), or generate motivation to overcome the issue (to create a "push" incentive for an action game). Re-establishing the broken element provides a strong emotional reward moment for the player.

One other factor that contributes here is time or in most cases extremely truncated time. All these contribute to exploration and experimentation in very short periods of time. Which is in my opinion is a critical component of the "Fun Factor." Combined with the three psychological needs can allow players to iterate rapidly, gaining insights and experience in a compressed time frame. A great example can been seen in multiplayer games where leadership principles emerge in certain players out of necessity to meet challenges. This happens in a fraction of the time it might take in real world scenarios and is often carried into life outside the game. Very rewarding especially when shared with friends in game and out.

A great example of a mechanic creating a dynamic is the shared map in Pokemon Go. If a player sees a charmander on the map, they can verbally tell another player who can open the game and find and catch it too. This leads to a cooperative social dynamic, where players are rewarded for playing/being together. That's one of the fundamental social mechanics Niantic really nailed. When lures were launched to allow a player to spawn pokemon for all nearby players to catch -- so exciting!

I agree 1000%! By having a talented QA team on projects usually makes any game much enjoyable for the players. These passionate people can make suggestions the original Game Designer or IP owner didn’t think of, which can create an even better experience. Sometimes engineers are unable to find bugs like a professional QA team can. I think QA teams do not get the credit they truly deserve. One can even say they deserve higher pay.

Just noting that while it's mentioned last, this can be wildly impactful and isn't just a QA job. Building a UX system/team into the development process (early!!) can support teams with relevant feedback before too much effort is lost and a pivot is required. Prototyping/laying out mocks with different options, and getting them in front of others allows designers to consider accessibility, consistency in design (both internal to the game and matching player expectations on the platform), see when players are confused, tired, or even excited about something entirely different than what you designed for!

Testing in the very early stages, especially when designing mechanics and game systems is very important and it could impact your design and ideation greatly. So make sure to try out everything with players early on to makexsure you are on the right track.

Any new skill or system that you create must be explained properly in game. When testing, don't just note how your testers experience the mechanichs, but also how they conprehamd them. Think to yourself about a reasonable time by which you'd like a player to adapt to your mechanic or feature and see whether it happens. Testers won't drop your game as easily as players but they will figure it out around the same speed. You need to pay attention to the learning curve and fine tune it into being not too rushed and not too dragging on.

Something that for me is missing from this list, and I learned working alongside great Designers is really the fundamental of game design : Always keep an active RISK - REWARD balance.

In Free-to-play there is a special challenge called how to create a game that is not pay-to-win, but something that players would love to pay for. Usually, players don't like to buy cosmetics or access to content (PUBG excluded), but they will be perfectly happy to pay for something that gives them more power. And if it is ok to sell some powerups in pve games, it is more difficult in pvp games. So how do you sell power without selling power? First of all, you sell something that can be earned through free-to-play gameplay. Second - you sell something that can be spend (not worn forever). Third - you use counters in pvp (there are free counters, that can be used to protect from the paid upgrades). This is not the full list )

I think the biggest lesson I have from more data-driven approaches of different kinds is that we tend to be extremely selective in how we read the data. We had a tutorial with a 50% dropoff of players per step of tutorial. It was a free game, with a very low initial commitment. Removing the tutorial should've been the most obvious path forward, yet we didn't because the sentiment was "we need to have a tutorial." If you want to be serious about the play experience, you must be serious about your data.

I believe that when crafting a game with a narrative focus, having a well-structured story before developing gameplay mechanics is crucial. This aspect is often overlooked by small teams. Understanding the capabilities and limitations of your characters provides a solid framework for devising compelling game mechanics and loops. The game's environment and characters should fuel these mechanics. For instance, if your game is set on Mars, the combat dynamics should differ from those on Earth. A notable example is the Destiny series, which, while outstanding, could have amplified its movement and gravity mechanics to enhance the space exploration experience.

Think about how you can test your concepts and ideas early: figure out a green-light process to allow you to identify if a feature adds value, or not: 1. Create a prototype, test it in isolation -- does it work? Is it fun? Does it add to the game experience? Is it worth proceeding? 2. Use that same prototype in situ of your other mechanics and features -- is it still fun? Does it still add to the experience or does it convolute what you already have? 3. Greybox / iterate further -- is the effort involved in completing and supporting the feature still within the realms of what is possible (given time and recourse constraints)? Is it worth continuing? Once all the above is "green", it should be in your game!