Games as experiences

[Michaël Samyn]

Here's an interesting attempt to define games as experiences of the player, rather than objects made by a developer. It's written from a player's point of view, but I think it can be equally helpful for a designer. We should design our work around the experience of the player. Everything else is just material to support that experience. If we need rules and goals to create the experience, fine. Just don't start there. Don't start with a narrow object-ive definition of what you're making. Start from the situation you want to create in the mind of the player, the feeling you want to evoke in their heart, the mood you want to immerse their soul in.

[Derrick]

I wholeheartedly support this philosophy, Michael!  And it is how I am approaching my work.

[Thomas]

I would really like for this to be a more common design philosophy. Many action games take it at heart, but in those games the gameplay is so interwoven with the experience that the games do not come out much more differently. Still even though one might think the "player is action hero" experience would be easy to accomplish, many games still fail. For example in Resident Evil there is a strange merchant and shooting galleries that heavily detract from the core experience of being a hero shooting zombies. I would really like to see normal games embrace this idea of "creating an experience" more and I think there is such a huge problem with many games because designers are stuck to the concept of providing entertaining gameplay diversions (like RE4 shooting galleries, etc).

Note that this is a problem with very simplistic (and frankly mostly uninteresting) shooting games! Even in this category many games fail to embrace the notion of creating a worthwhile experience!

Still worse is with games that try to create interesting and meaningful worlds and then for some reason adds a lot of gameplay that does nothing but distract. A recent example of this is The Void, which contains fantastic art and an interesting premise, but is bogged down by very unforgiving gameplay. I really wanted to be immersed in the world, but I simply couldn't because of how the game plays. It is really a shame. I think they came up with many to them interesting gameplay mechanics but did not really consider how it would affect the experience.

The same also goes for adventure games that often bog down the experience with strange puzzles and too long dialogs. There are many games I want to play to explore and experience the world they create, but all of the extra additions just make break most immersion.

I am not talking about removing gameplay or anything here. I am not suggesting to convert these games into not-games. I am simply talking about focusing on an experience and then making sure the player gets it. So many games that I have played fail at this, even though they could have managed it without doing anything out of the ordinary and could have left almost all normal gameplay intact. Instead, designers are so eager to add "fun", replayability and longer gameplay time that they simply forget what they (I assume) set out to do in the first place!

To summarzie: Many games fail to create the intended experience even when sticking to simple, standard gameplay. And this is before we try to move in to more interesting subjects and meaningful games...

[Michaël Samyn]

Is this because of economic reasons perhaps? The pressure to make the game seem like "a lot of value for money"?

[Thomas]

I personally feel the pressure of having "long gameplay time" ever since I stared making commercial games. When designing free games this was never an issue, but when money comes into play there is ALOT of pressure on gameplay time. Publishers ask for it, Reviewers take it into account and gamers nag about it. There is very few people who say that a game should be as long as it needs to be, instead all seem to say LONGER IS BETTER. This is really disturbing and really hinders me as a designer. I really try to push it aside, but since I need to take money for it, I feel this need to give it proper value and not "cheat" my user. I know this is really bad thinking, and I try to step outside of it But I have been bombarded by it so much that it as really stuck to me 

I think many (most?) designers are stuck in this and in similar ways to the need for "fun" and replayability (luckily I feel no pressure for those things). It is something that has been hammered by external forces for a long time and people are afraid of not having this and might even have some unconscious processes that lead to the fixation to these things.

Why is this so? Well as you say, money is part of problem. And it also a problem of seeing games as toys, which have been very nicely explained here:
http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=6867
http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=6886

What is so sad is that few people really honestly care about it, but those that do are the ones screaming the most and designers hears it. When it comes to length, I personally really hate long games, 10h is pretty much max what I want to spend on a game and I am very hesitant to start playing a game that I know will be longer. I simply have better things to do and I think many other people feel the same. Yet, publishers want to say 30h of gameplay! "Pro" reviewers have a lot of more time to spend on games and hence 4h is not that much for them as for me or other people.

These 3 things (fun, length and replaybility) are so tightly connected to games and yet they are probably the things that hurt games the most (and here I mean games that just try to be normal-run-of-the-mill games too!). They always pop up when talking about games with publisher, journalists, etc.
I almost never get the question: "What emotions do you want to evoke?", but almost always question like: "What enemies are in the game?", "Is it replayable?", "How long is it?", "What does the player do?", etc. So the whole business is kind of enforcing these things on themselves in an evil spiral.

Imagine if interviews to a novelist would be like this! "How many pages will the book be?", "What kind of font will you be using?", "What does the protagonist does most of novel?", etc. It would be totally absurd! And yet it just comes natural for games.

[Jeroen D. Stout]

Still worse is with games that try to create interesting and meaningful worlds and then for some reason adds a lot of gameplay that does nothing but distract. A recent example of this is The Void, which contains fantastic art and an interesting premise, but is bogged down by very unforgiving gameplay. I really wanted to be immersed in the world, but I simply couldn't because of how the game plays. It is really a shame. I think they came up with many to them interesting gameplay mechanics but did not really consider how it would affect the experience.

I follow The Void on a SomethingAwful.com playthrough, allows me to see the startlingly beautiful worlds without all the gameplay - I got turned off off the game quite quickly the moment I realized what dedication was required of me.

I do think a short game can be worth more than a long game - like whiskey, there is less but it is more potent than beer.

The elements of fun, length and replayability are, to my mind, really part of the larger problem that games have evolved as a certain fixed culture before being part of a wider culture. I know that I would like a short game exploring worlds and settings in the style of the gem Prospero's Books, but I have a hard time fitting it into my mind.

However, make a game in which every screenshot would be a romantic-era painting and in which I would do nothing but walk around a surreal-yet-logical landscape filled with ballet-swimming nymphs and opera-singing children and my €10 is yours. Problem is that I have had enough exposure to these things. We need to think of ways to sell this to others. Not merely work on selling our own game, but selling an idea. Like 'indie' became hallmark of creativity (albeit unjustly so), we need to find a way to make 'notgames' (or whatever flag) accepted so that others may consider spending €10.

[Michaël Samyn]

What is so sad is that few people really honestly care about it, but those that do are the ones screaming the most and designers hears it.

Don't you just hate the internet sometimes? 

[Michaël Samyn]

It's different for cinema and theater and pop songs: in general people dislike long films or long operas or long songs. A film always lasts 90 minutes, a song always 3 minutes. Is it just because of the higher price tag that a longer time is expected of videogames?

On the other hand, when parents are complaining about the short attention span of their children, shouldn't we applaud the long hours that some of these kids are prepared to spend on a game?

[Michaël Samyn]

Connecting back to the topic of games as experiences, I just struck me that we never ask "How long is Photoshop?" It's a bit hard to imagine for me, but if we really would design games as software (as opposed to film), then would the question of time not become irrelevant? Then playing a game would take as much time as a player wants to spend on it.

[Mike]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC9To8rBCGA

Just saw this trailer for Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption and I think it fits the idea of games as experiences very well.

Of course there are going to be more traditional gameplay mechanics and action scenes in the final game, but I think it is a rare example how to advertise and sell experiences (also notgames?) to customers.

The message is: Red Dead Redemption is not (only) an action game, it is how life in the West was like.

[Michaël Samyn]

I don't think that that's what the article was about.

[Albin Bernhardsson]

A reason why games tend to be longer would perhaps be that they're also a lot more expensive. An average game may be sold for about 5x the price of a movie or a music album.

By this, gamers expect to find a lot of content for their money. People, in general, don't pay as much for a 9 minute EP as for a full-length album.

The problem is that gamers seem to prefer to pay $50 for a long game rather than $10 for a shorter one. Doesn't that pose a much higher risk if the game turns out to be bad?

This focus on quantity over quality is of course saddening.

[Andrew Tremblay]

Considering the mood of the player is a dichotomy in a way though, because in a lot of ways people don't know exactly what it is they want but they say they do. Granted they do have a good general idea, but never all the details. No one ever entertains someone by giving them exactly what they expect and no more or no less.

It's like the sad parts in movies, people don't know it will happen in the film and they may not like it at the moment it happens but at the same time they enjoy the overall experience that can result from a tragic event. If a movie watcher didn't like the sad part of a film while that same sad plot point was what led to their favorite part, that opinion may not be a valid one.

Similarly, Thomas, if a player says that they wanted the game to be longer, the game might have actually been the perfect length. Portal is a good example of this, I feel, as it is a good game that progresses quickly and ends before the mechanic feels overplayed, while lots of people I know (who go back and play through it over and over again) complain about how short the main part of the game is.

Also Chainsawkitten I feel that more commercialized games are more... exploitative? That might be too strong a word, but the goal of a commercial game is to make money, and you make money by getting people to buy your game, and you get them to buy a game by getting them to want to play your game. Now this can all be handled through advertising, but nowadays really good games are ones that players recognize as fun to play or just have a lot of content to explore. And when you enter into subscription games or free-to-play with microtransactions, then that's where people are really trying to perpetuate the gameplay experience (further than what it naturally should, in my opinion).

A lot of what enjoying a game is from a player perspective is in the expectation of being satisfied, but it is also expecting that it is done in a different way than other games that the player has played. In some ways the player is considering the risk of not being satisfied, making the act of approaching a game a game in itself. We don't want to feel pandered to, and we don't want to be aware that someone made this for our enjoyment, we don't want to know that it was tailored to be hard but not too hard. In whatever medium we experience we crave the unexpected. At least in my opinion.


But on the topic of the original post, focusing on the experience of the player is what every successful game designer does. You don't make a successful game - even a mainstream one - by disregarding the mood and feel of the player. Or maybe the terms need to be more specific, what do you mean by experience? Is it satisfaction of an impulse? Is it a more noble form of gratification? Self-actualization, even?

And Michaël Samyn, the notion of games as software rather than films is a notion that can be scrutinized, as I feel it ignores the storyteling aspect that games can provide. Considering Photoshop, or FinalCut, or a hammer, there are tools and there are toys, but the same object can be considered a toy to one person and a tool to another. Someone editing films for hollywood, for example, and someone who just likes making funny videos for youtube. We're getting into defining entusiast and hobbyist and describing the transition from a hobbyist to a profesional now, which is not the topic of this thread. I suppose your question relys on how each person approaches a piece of software, be it to them a tool, a toy, or a game, which is not exactly something you can control easily.

[Michaël Samyn]

What we're doing here is establishing an entirely new medium. It's unavoidable that we look at old media for reference. Since we look at cinema and games a lot, I propose we look at architecture and software as well.

On the topic of sadness, in a recent review of our The Graveyard, the fact that it was sad was mentioned as a negative point. 

I don't think we should gloss over designing for an experience as something that everyone does. My reaction to the article was not that we should add some concern about the player's experience to our game design. Rather to think about our work as designing the context for an experience directly, disregarding whether it is a game or not. Just think about the experience you want to give the player, and then design something that can give the player that experience. In that sense, the player's experience becomes the basis of the artistic process and not some additional design aspect that simply makes the game a bit better or worse.

[Andrew Tremblay]

What we're doing here is establishing an entirely new medium. It's unavoidable that we look at old media for reference. Since we look at cinema and games a lot, I propose we look at architecture and software as well.

It is also due to the fact that the medium is so new that a person approaching it will not expect any base level of sophistication. Not to mention the fact that it's an uphill battle socially to get any form of emotional recognition with interactive media, let alone with something that could be close to being called a game. </complaining>

It's getting better, though. The fact that games are now being targeted to practically every age range is a great indicator that many people are moving towards more interactive avenues and are aware that others are as well. This popularity will hopefully lead to a distribution of games as homogeneous as movies and books, and the over-saturation of current game norms will give way to people desiring more alternative modes of experience within the medium. (Though I still do not know what exactly you are talking about when you mention experience.)

I cannot think of any preexisting medium that interactive media cannot potentially incorporate and expand upon. It is for that reason that I pursue it.

I don't think we should gloss over designing for an experience as something that everyone does. My reaction to the article was not that we should add some concern about the player's experience to our game design. Rather to think about our work as designing the context for an experience directly, disregarding whether it is a game or not. Just think about the experience you want to give the player, and then design something that can give the player that experience. In that sense, the player's experience becomes the basis of the artistic process and not some additional design aspect that simply makes the game a bit better or worse.

I guess I might have a less specific definition of experience. The game itself and the act of playing it can be the experience that the designer considers to optimize. It can be a shallow experience, certainly, but it's still an experience that a person somewhere has to consider and care about and build for someone. How that design of the experience is approached and treated is still not properly established in my opinion, or is full of poor assumptions. I do know that a lot of people try to focus on the mechanics of a game, while some try to focus on plot or main message instead, but they both still seem to consider these two aspects of the same thing as opposing. All mediums consider the experience of the viewer/listener/reader/player to some varying degree of accuracy and success. The intent to create the experience, I believe, is always there.

Take books for instance, if a person tells an author that they didn't like their book, that author probably shouldn't consider that to improve the book the pages should be made easier to turn, or that typos are prevalent. There is likely a weak portion of the plot or a bad strip of dialogue that the reader has disagreed with. Of course more absurdly, if an author has an incredible story it probably shouldn't be written on pages that give you paper cuts with every page turn, as that can be distracting.

On the topic of sadness, in a recent review of our The Graveyard, the fact that it was sad was mentioned as a negative point. 

That may very well be an indicator that the medium is not yet ripe in many people's minds, that it may be still too closely associated with the impulse gratification and subconscious ego manipulation of Peggle. The Graveyard was far from perfect from my definition of an experience, but the fact that it caused the emotions that it did was sort of the point of it, and was the aspect that I most enjoyed.