Shop Heroes - Opaque UI

Shop Heroes is an item-shop game released on mobile and Kongregate in mid 2014 by CloudCade. The gameplay consists of crafting equipment for heroes, who then go on quests to find materials, which are used to craft more equipment. Players can gather in Towns to share the costs incurred by leveling up buildings, which unlock more heroes and quests.

CloudCade advertise striving for useability and superior gameplay. I understand that when they launched Shop Heroes, they were still a small studio. But their UI needs more work: it has too many screens, too many taps to start an action, too much information, and fragmentation/duplicate information. Sometimes, information is not just missing or duplicated. It's purposefully hidden, misleading, or manipulative.

Manipulating emotions

An example of UI manipulating emotions is the Roulette, which gives players one random award among 12. The UI shows each award equally likely to happen - 1 in 12, or 8% each. Yet the actual chance of keys, gems, and blueprint fragments is less than 1%. Why raise players' hopes so high if it never delivers? So they get 10 seconds of fiero after 10 months of frustration? It's as if a slot machine displayed the jackpot symbol with the same chance as others, but was actually rigged to nearly never stop on it. The gambling industry actually forbids such machines. One could argue that the Roulette is a minor mechanic in Shop Heroes, and that players may understand that it's rigged. A sincere UI would make the area of a reward on the wheel proportional to its likelihood.

Hidding information

An example of UI purposefully hidding important information can be found in the screen where players build their quest teams. Players send heroes on quests dozens of times per day. When heroes are strong enough to tackle the quest, a green smiley is displayed above their head. When they are not strong enough, the smiley turns to yellow or red, showing that they are more likely to be injured. Injured heroes are unusable for several hours, so players strive for green smileys. But each of the 8 equipment slots of each hero has a 1-10% chance to break during a quest. Therefore players equip their heroes with just enough equipment to reach green smileys, so as to minimize the costs incurred by broken equipment.

Yet players noticed discrepancies in the odds of injury. They asked on the forum whether increasing power above green smiley reduces the chance of injury. The community manager did not answer clearly at first, saying it's fun for those playing to figure out, and that it's impossible to create a tutorial for every single detail in the game. Players replied that 1) they are not asking for a tutorial but for explicit numbers to be displayed, 2) core mechanics should not be hidden, and 3) discovering 1%-likelihood mechanics is annoying and time-consuming. The community manager eventually cleared the matter, but why was this important information not explicitly provided inside the game? The in-game UI should, and can, do a better job at displaying the chance of injury, however small it is. One way would be to display the green smiley only when the chance is exactly 0%. Another way would be to display the percentage number, rounded up (0.123% would be 1%). Providing feedback through numbers is the only way that hardcore players can theorycraft and reverse-engineer the most intricate mechanics.

Hearthstone - crafting

Hearthstone has a soft currency called dust. Dust is used to purchase a desired card from Blizzard. Common cards cost 40 dust, legendary 1600. Dust is obtained from trashing cards: 5 for common cards, 400 for legendary. Players who want a specific legendary card are very unlikely to find it in a card pack. But they can trash the cards in the card pack for dust, and use that dust to buy it.

Blizzard gave a special name to purchasing with dust and trashing cards for dust: crafting and disenchanting. Yet this mechanic is far from the crafting we are used to in RPGs: no additional material is required beside dust, and all cards follow the same recipe. Rarity only increases cost. So why calling it crafting/disenchanting, and not buying/trashing? Why make a fancy UI, pretending that players are actually creating a card themselves, and not buying it from the store? I think it was so that players perceive dust as a regular game element, and not a currency. That way, players don't feel like they are purchasing dust (through card packs) with real money at all.

Blizzard actually introduced direct-purchasing (aka crafting) as a solution to what they say is a common trading-card game issue: when players obtain a rare card, they want to keep it, and they'll never trade it with other players. But that rationale is flawed. People who buy card packs will sell their duplicates if the game provides them an auction house. Blizzard probbaly did not want to go that route after their Diablo 3 auction house was overrun by gold farmers.

Habits

Notes from a French magazine called Ca m'interesse from January 2014. One article talked about choices, habits, and routines. Some findings are applicable to game design.

Richard Weiseman, a psychologist, followed 3000 people taking New Year resolutions. Half say they will hold their resolution on day 1. 12% manage it after one year. Weiseman gives tips on how to keep your resolutions, such as telling others about your resolution (to put peer pressure on yourself), avoiding previous (failed) resolutions (to prevent frustration), breaking it in smaller achievable steps (to prevent hopelessness), and giving yourself rewards for achieving these steps (positive reinforcement). It's been covered elsewhere too.

Based on previous research, Philippa Lally, another psychologist, suggests that it takes around two months working effortfully on new behavior to turn it into a habit.

Future hypothetical rewards (e.g. slim body in a month) are higher to accept than instant gratification (e.g. eat tasty food right now) because they require an effort of imagination. Solution: make future rewards more visible.

Baba Shiv, professor of marketing, asked 165 undergrads to pick either a chocolate cake or a fruit salad. The chocolate cake has a positive affect and negative cognition, ie it's emotionally appealing but you know you should not take it. The fruit salad is the opposite: negative affect and positive cognition, ie it's the rational healthy choice. In both groups, participants were asked to remember a number throughout the experiment. One group was given a 2-digit number (low cognitive load, ie high processing resources) and the other a 7-digit number (high cognitive load, ie low processing resources). 41% of the 2-digit group picked the tasty cake vs 63% in the 7-digit group. Under heavy cognitive load, people are more likely to choose options that are immediately pleasing. As a side note, when the presentation of the choice was through photos rather than the actual items, the difference between the two groups disappeared.

If I perceive a task as more difficult, I will expect a higher reward. It is not just about being strong-minded, but also about my perception of the task's difficulty.

Dominion's balance

Chapel

One of the cards in the Dominion base set is considered slightly better than most: the Chapel. Some simply say This is the best card in the game.. Others suggest that Chapel is very overpowered and should cost more. Vaccarino, Dominion's designer, is quite present on board game forums, and has stepped up to answer players' suggestions. Surprisingly, he admitted himself that Chapel is the most powerful Dominion card relative to its cost. This is the occasion to glean interesting tidbits about game balance!

First, since both players can buy the same cards, poorly balanced cards don't make the game unfair, [...] but they do make the game worse. It seems that as long as an unbalanced card makes the game fun, it should stay (and probably be tweaked).

Let's start with adjusting the cost. If Chapel cost more, it would be much weaker, and would not be used at all. This would reduce the number of options available in the game. Since it's more fun to have more options, increasing the cost is not a good solution. Ideally, everything gets played sometimes, and the only weak cards are those that are overrated. That is why to keep the metagame and discussion interesting, Vaccarino would rather avoid commenting himself.

This does not mean that overpowered cards are better than underpowered cards: if a card is so strong it is unavoidable, then cards that do not combo well with it will never be played, which is a waste. When using Chapel, a lot is left up to you. This provides a lot of diverse game play, which means Chapel has a strong play value, and the game benefits from it overall. As they progress, players learn using Chapel in new ways, which is a long-term rewarding experience:

1. why would I ever buy this when Witch isn't out?
2. trash your Estates with it and just have one dead card instead of three
3. trash your coppers [and estates] with it, and get a thin deck
4. is Chapel / Militia better so I can hurt other Chapel decks, or should I go Chapel / Spy to ensure trashing 4 cards
5. Chapel / Throne Room / Remodel

Another player suggested nerfing Chapel from trashing 4 cards to only 3 cards. Vaccarino seems to agree: in general, overpowered or underpowered cards can only be fixed by changing what the card does, not by changing their cost. But during playtesting, Chapel with "trash up to 3" was way slower than trashing up to 4, and Vaccarino couldn't win with it.

And this is how Chapel stayed at trashing up to 4 cards for a cost of 2 coins.

Playtesting

The play space of Dominion is quite big: there are around 10^15 possible combinations of 10 cards among the 157 available as of 2012. Therefore not all combinations of cards can be checked during playtesting. Since games get played way more than they get playtested, there may be some card combos that go unchecked until release. If a single card is overpowered, it is quite easy to spot and will be fixed. Two-card combos happen more rarely, so if one of them is overpowered, it may not be spotted as easily, but will also matter less. As for overpowered three-card combos, the Dominion developers aren't necessarily finding them. But if one happens during a game, and a player figures it out, it is highly unlikely that the player will face these three cards again in another game.

Playtesting can also reveal interesting/core design ideas. For example, Vaccarino was worried that drawing your whole deck would be bad. Soon [he] realized it was in fact fun.

Rewards, pacing, and dopamine

Rewards and pacing

There is something mysterious when people read through 1000 pages of Cryptonomicon, a 1999 novel from Stephenson, or through the thousands of pages of Martin's A song of ice and fire. What keeps people reading? Here are some rewards that both authors use throughout their books:

Reward	Pacing	Description
Character progression	Randomly (but fits the story)	The protagonist learns new skills, grows up, meets love, learns a lesson of life, or gets rich. We care about this character's well-being because we empathize.
Action and passion	Every 3-10 pages	When stuck in difficult situations, the reader knows that the hero can not die, so she asks herself: how is the hero going to get out of this alive? (Except sometimes, main characters actually die, leaving us in shock). The same applies for romantic scenes, where we wonder not if, but how it's going to work out between two characters.
Story progression	Every 10-30 pages	Right from the start, the authors put under the reader's nose a bunch of questions: what is happening, why is this guy so mysterious, and so on. The reader wants to know the answers, so she keeps reading until answers are provided, along with new mysteries to figure out.

Looking at blockbuster action movies such as The Bourne Ultimatum, the same kind of pacing emerges: action scenes are followed by the protagonist learning about his past. Then the plot moves on, the character meets new people, finds himself new tasks to do, and back to action scenes.

These rewards and pacing also echo those found in games and mentioned in a class on game balance from Ian Schreiber: gains in character power, discovery of new areas, and progression of the story are rewards to be used at irregular intervals to keep the player engaged. So reading books, watching movies, and playing games seem to provide similar rewards.

Dopamine

Let's dig down to the physiological level of rewards. Most of the articles dealing with the physiological response of gaming revolve around addiction. For instance, a 2012 NY Times article reports that Zynga helps addict millions of people to dopamine, a neurochemical that has been shown to be released by pleasurable activities, including video game playing, but also is understood to play a major role in the cycle of addiction.. To that, the Zynga co-founder replies: Given that we're human, we already want dopamine. And that does not calm things down. So let's look at a less controversial topic: the physiological response of reading. This is not a survey of the field, but rather some picks from a few Google searches - nothing very serious.

First, according to Farland, a current writer, the dramatic structure of stories (exposition - action - climax - denouement) matches the bio-feedback of hormones such as dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol. He says: As a person "hunts" for clues, or for a way out of a problem, the brain rewards the person by releasing dopamine as a reward. [...] When you reach the climax of the novel, [...] you reach the climax of your emotional exercise. When the story ends [...] your stress is released. The adrenaline and cortisol stop flowing.

As notes from a psychology class on stress can tell us, cortisol is the key hormone of stress. Adrenaline is the hormone that tells our body to be alert. And finally, dopamine is in charge of rewarding our brain.

So what happens when we start reading? Some have guessed that we are having pleasure because reading is a tough task, and our brain rewards us for completing such a hard task. This seems confirmed by a 2001 study who showed that transitioning from rest to reading produces the same increase in dopamine concentration as transitioning from rest to memory-intensive tasks (something cognitively demanding). Although, a 2000 study seems to reject this hypothesis. Something that might be worth investing is whether reading a microwave-oven manual generates as much dopamine as reading an exciting short story where the action starts right from the start.

It may actually be more complicated: the dopamine concentration could actually not indicate our pleasure, but our expectation of pleasure: dopamine motivates us, increasing our energy and drive and compelling us to engage in the pleasurable activity. If everything is as nice as the brain predicted, dopamine levels remain elevated. If things turn out even better than the brain hoped, dopamine levels are increased; we engage in the pleasurable activity even more vigorously. If, on the other hand, the activity is less pleasurable than we thought it would be, dopamine levels plummet.

Back to games

So, what can we conclude about games? First, much like movies and books, reward us by generating dopamine when we succeed at a difficult cognitive tasks such as a head-shot in an FPS, or a successful Chess trap. That is pretty close to fiero, and in fact, Bateman already suggested in 2008 that fiero is a cocktail of epinephrine and dopamine. So, nothing brand new here.

Perhaps more interesting, long-term enjoyment seems to require the dopamine to yo-yo - which is bad. Let us assume that our brain produces dopamine by expecting a nice event. Then when our brain is done with those nice events, the dopamine level will decrease. That would be a horrible yo-yo if there were only one kind of event, but books, movies, and games, have at least three: action, story, and character events. So alternating events and interweaving them in such a way that our brain is always on the lookout may keep dopamine, and pleasure, at high levels instead of making it yo-yo.

There might be a few gotchas, though. First, the magnitude and the lifespan of the dopamine burst depends on a lot factors. Grinding monsters for a drop is only pleasurable so long as the brain is expecting that item to drop. After a couple days, the dopamine is all gone, and it's just boring. Some studies should investigate the average magnitude of an "achievement unlocked!", or the lifespan of a boss kill or a level up.

Second, dopamine bursts may not stack. The brain may be too busy expecting a story progression event that it may ignore, or even worse, be displeased, by a character progression event: it was not expecting it! This limitation does not seem cognitive, but rather emotional, so maybe people with higher EI could stack expectations and dopamine bursts more easily than indifferent people who say "it's just a game"?

Third, and to finish as we started, with books: Stephenson and Martin alternate their character viewpoints chapter after chapter, possibly to keep the reader's attention. By the way, they rarely handle more than 7 characters at the same time, since 7 is a magic cognitive number. These changes in views often cut short the action, so the reader may get frustrated, or even vexed for being tricked to continue reading by the exact same three mechanisms every chapter. It is interesting to know why people keep reading those long books, but that last reason is exactly why I stopped.

Stress: appraisal, coping, and physiology

Notes from the first few weeks of a class on stress by Sally Dickerson taught throughout Spring 2012.

Basics

Eustress = positive/healthy stress. Example: wedding, vacation. As opposed to distress. Three phases of stress: stressor, appraisal, and response.

The stressor is the eliciting event; examples are being stuck in traffic, having an exam, or arguing with your partner. Stressors break homeostasis, our stability with the environment. A stressor can be acute or chronic. Durations of exposure to stressor vs duration of perceived threat vs duration of stress response.

The response happens at all levels: emotional (e.g. fear), physiological (e.g. BP increases), and behavioral (e.g. running away). The response aims at bringing back homeostasis. If it lasts for too long, sickness appears because of the general adaptation syndrome.

Appraisal

Evaluation/interpretation of the harm, threat, and overwhelmingness of the stressor to determine the response. Individual- and context-specific. Individuals who are told beforehand that "pain is going to happen" have stronger physiological response to a stressor than individuals told "it's just a formality, nothing too big". Appraisal consists of the primary appraisal and coping.

Primary appraisal

The individual estimates the importance/meaning of the stressor, and its implications on her well-being. "This is the most important day of my life" vs "No big deal". Three types of primary appraisals:

Type	Description	Emotions generated	Physiological response	Example with stressor = "just got fired"
Harm/loss	The damage has already been done	sadness, anger	damaging	"Everyone looked at me packing my stuff"
Threat	Possibility of future damage	anxiety, fear	damaging	"How am I going to pay the rent?"
Challenge	Potential to overcome and profit.	excitement	positive/healthy, smaller than harm or threat	"Let's find a better job"

Primary appraisal moderators:

• sense of control. If the individual feels (no need to actually be) in control = less stress. But inappropriate sense of control increases stress: individuals blame themselves for an event they actually could not influence, especially if the event is big: "it's my fault if my car's brakes broke and it caused an accident".
• predictability. Know when stressor happens (and/or does not happen) reduces stress. Unless stressor very frequent or very rare, or horrible outcome (e.g. earthquake).
• ambiguity. If information on the stressor is vague, stress increases.
• centrality. If the outcome is important to the individual, stress increases.

-	Optimists	Pessimists
Face problems	actively	passively
Receive positive events	wrt themselves, in general and absolute terms	wrt other people, in specific and relative terms
Receive negative events	wrt other people, in specific and relative terms	wrt themselves, in general and absolute terms
Example: just got fired	"my skills were not a good match for that company" (external)	"i am a failure" (internal), "I can't do anything" (global), "I'll never get another job" (absolute)

Coping

The individual estimates how well she can cope with the stressor. If she estimates she does not have enough resources to cope with the stressor, the stress response will be bigger. Coping can happen before, during, or after a stressor, and it varies in time. When it happens before, it is called proactive coping (e.g. keep water bottle packs and a torch light at hand in case of a disaster). Even when given information, if people feel like they can not change the outcome, or if they underestimate the problem, they may not pro-actively cope.

Avoidance or minimization are effective coping strategies for short-term stressors. Vigilance and confrontation consist of gathering information or take direct action, and are more effective in the long-run, but fail if the information is of poor quality (e.g. individual googles "soar throat" symptoms and finds herself on a page about a deadly disease). Social support from others is a form of coping; the individual reduces her stress response by receiving moral support, information about the stressor, or tangible resources (money, workforce, ...) to overcome the stressor.

Coping can be problem-focused, emotion-focused, or both. Problem-focused coping is constructive (e.g. studying for an exam), and effective when the individual can have an impact on the stressor. Emotion-focused coping does not address the problem, but rather regulates the individual's emotions cognitively (how people think about the stressor, e.g. "it could be worse"), or behaviorally (doing something, e.g. jogging or eating chocolate to feel better). Emotion-focused coping is effective when the individual does not have control on the stressor.

In general, optimists deny less and cope better than pessimists. For instance, Type A individuals are competitive, easily provoked, fast-paced, and impatient. They have more risky behaviors, are less likely to receive social support, and have bigger physiological responses. Hence, they are more sensitive to stress. Moreover, according to a 2006 study (see also the pdf), Big 5's Neuroticism is related to distress and emotion-focused coping, while Conscientiousness is related to task-focused coping.

Methods for assessing stress

• After an unpredictable/random trauma (e.g. a disaster): from groups or individuals. Problem: getting a baseline before the stressor happened. Solution: compare with similar groups or individuals who were not exposed to the trauma.
• Life events: go through individual's recent events to assess her current stress level. Depending on the category of the individual, each event has a standard weight (e.g. for undergrad students, "death of relative" = 100 points, "got a ticket" = 20 points).
• Daily stressors: going over recent events or maintaining daily diary (prompted by researchers every day at the same hour).
• Lab experiments: standardized stressor, influence on appraisal (but appraisal ultimately depends on the individual), can measure physiological response, but not generalizable.

Physiologically

Cortisol is a hormone released by the adrenal gland in response to stress. Its function is to have the body generate energy by breaking body fat into glucose. In the circadian rhythm, it naturally peaks at wake up, and falls at sleep time.

Cognitive tasks such as mental arithmetic increase the concentration of cortisol in the blood. Public speaking increases it even more. The two combined generate more than the sum of each. Public speaking exposes our differences with other people, and invites criticism: it is a social evaluative threat. This threat is increased if we are captured on permanent record, in front of a critical audience, or compared to others negatively. On the other hand, emotion induction (such as watching a scary movie) or exposure to noise do not influence the cortisol level.

Uncontrollability increases the cortisol level. Hence, false feedback to a stressful task will increase the cortisol level. Changing the task difficulty on the fly, harassing the individual under stress, or adding noise and distractions increases stress. An uncontrollable social-evaluative threat generates the biggest cortisol response, and a slow stress recovery: the cortisol level remains high longer.

Novelty and diversity also seem to increase the cortisol response. Facing many stressors at a time seems to increase the cortisol level logarithmically with the number of stressors. On the other hand, facing a stressor as a group reduces the individuals' cortisol response. Similarly, in a 1991 study, women's stress response was found to be smaller if their pet rather than their friend was with them: as opposed to the friend, the pet provides support without judging.

Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities - Beenen 2004

Notes from Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities, by Beenen et al. 2004

• 830 respondents who rated rare movies on a movie recommendation website.
• Theoretical framing: social loafing/free riding
• Findings: the contribution of an individual may increase if:
  • his contribution seems unique to the group
  • specific benefits (ie individual-only or group-only) are not mentioned. The best is to not mention the benefits at all.
  • goals are specific
  • goals are framed for the group rather than for the individual
  • goals are challenging (but still within reach)

Connections:

• reasonable goals echoes intersubjective flow from Celia Pearce
• In MMOs, tank, DPS, and healer are unique roles. Does that make them play more/better towards the group?

The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First

Notes from a CGVW talk by Dave Kosak, a Blizzard quest designer, at UC Irvine on February 22nd 2012. Original talk called "The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First" delivered at GDC Online 2011.
TLDR: When gameplay comes first, story-telling must make it beautiful, not suffocate it. There are different ways than text to convey story and characters.

The problem

Games can be story-driven (RPG or interactive fiction), gameplay-driven (Blizzard's "gameplay first"), technology-driven (early games on Kinect, or to show off a 3D engine like Crysis), or money-driven (Zynga). How can stories be included in gameplay-driven games?

Looking at other media, telling a story requires different amounts of time: books take 10 hours, movies 2 hours, sitcom episodes 20 min. Books are walls of text, movies have long scripts, and sitcon episodes have at most 3-page scripts.
In MMOs, it's hard to display walls of text: there's a limited amount of screen and UI real-estate, and players have a limited amount of attention. Players can pay attention to the story most in calm solo exploration, slightly less in group quests, even less in dungeon raids, and nearly not at all in intense PvP.

In Diablo, the core gameplay activity is kill -> loot -> sell -> repeat. Content designers should not obstruct the core activity, e.g. with cutscenes during game action. Instead, content designers should enhance the core gameplay activity. If gameplay is a road, content should be beautiful flowers on the side of the road.

Brevity is key. Example: the Red Dead Redemption mission called free the captured sheriff. When the player sees this line popping on the screen, and the minimap showing markers for sheriff, outlaws, and nearby weapons, she figures out herself what to do first: she could go save the sheriff, kill outlaws, or look for a powerful weapon. Moreover, the quest becomes an answer to the situation presented to the player: why has the sheriff been captured? Which kind of person is the sheriff?

Telling a story without a wall of text is possible through:

• dynamic level design
• dynamic environment aesthetics (changing to reflect quest progression/completion)
• events triggered when player arrives
• hints in NPC or enemy dialogues

Characters

Character geometry: balance between too few traits = cliche, and too many traits = too complicated + boring + harder to understand. Example: Sylvanas Windrunner is persistent, protective, and hard-hearted. When she becomes undead, all her traits are even more accentuated. Other example: Han Solo is cocky, scoundrel, and egocentric.

Interactions with other characters and the background of the character let us know, without the need for a wall of text, a character's traits. Ex: Han Solo leaves his friends when they need him, Luke meets him in a shady place, he owes money to Jabba.

Quirks are not traits: quirks are minor and only serve to further individualise a character. You can find a list of traits there.

• 1-dim characters: enemies or minor allies. Ex: Hungry ogre.
• 2-dim, with 1 expected and 1 unexpected = interesting: quest givers and companions. Ex: elf druid who is protective (expected) + violent (unexpected).
• 3-dim: franchise characters such as Arthas = cocky + practical + naive. Only and exactly those 3 traits make him pick Frostmourne. When he turns undead, naive becomes power-hungry.
• 4-dim: Freeman's character diamond. Often leads to contradictions between traits, also called masks, which can either be total pretense (clown pretends he's happy but is actually depressed), partially revealing, or representing a character's aspirations. Used in marketing personas and novels.

How to compel people to a character: Cf Writing screenplays that sell:

• sympathy
• jeopardy (we want Indiana Jones to survive)
• talent/good at what they're doing
• funny
• heroic/noble
• independent/do their own thing/own quirks
• artistic/admires beauty (ex: Sherlock Holmes plays the violin)

Cliches can be used as a shortcut to establish a character. When established, take the cliche, and throw it away: Her eyes were as blue as the sky can become Her eyes sparkled like saphires on black velvet (jewels give a refined connotation) or Her eyes were the same milky blue as my mother's eyes were before I killed her (surprise and suspense!).

Social status shows differences between high-class people (smooth movement, complete sentences, slow speech, direct eye contact) and lower-class people. Body language also works. Cf the movie 300. Changing status generates interesting dramatic situations. Ex: the boss has high status at work, but when he's back home, he's low status obeying his wife.

Influence - Cialdini, 1993

Weapons of influence

Fixed-action patterns: the response behavior always happens in the same way. We're interested in the trigger of that response. Most of the time, the trigger is valid, but sometimes it's misleading. This response is triggered because the load of information in our society is too big for our lazy brains, and we need shortcuts.

Give a reason/explanation when asking a favor; it increases its chances of being accepted. "Let me pass you because I'm in a hurry."

Expensive = good. Make the customer think "it's a bargain!". Pretend to discount an item from $100 to $50 while the actual price really is $40.

Contrast principle: When buying a $30k car, a $1k radio does not seem like much. Show a $500 suit first, then a $50 shirt to make the shirt look cheap. Also works the other way: clients won't buy if you first show the cheap item and then the expensive item.

Reciprocation

Reciprocity rule: We feel obliged to return favors because society looks down on ingrates. You can increase compliance by providing ... a small favor prior to a request. Benefactor-before-beggar strategy.

Why it works: The reciprocity rule promotes the initiation of trade without fear of loss. It is too socially beneficial for us to want to violate it. It's also hard to reject gifts, even unwanted ones. Since society looks down on ingrates, feeling obliged is disagreeable, and that makes us ready to give a lot to get out of such a disagreeable situation. Examples: political favors, "you don't bite the hand that feeds you".

Concessions: the basis of trade and negotiations. Example: Boy scout in the street sells expensive lottery tickets for $10 apiece. When we tell him no, he asks "what about a $1 lemonade then?". We're likely to say yes because we think he did a concession to us. Add the effect of the contrast principle: $1 is nothing compared to $10.

Commitment and consistency

Once we make a choice (e.g. bet on a horse, or pick one of two lovers), we stubbornly stick to it and back it up ("despite all his flaws, he has lots of qualities").

Why it works: Lazy brains use consistency so that they don't have to re-evaluate a decision all the time. We are under pressure to bring our self-image into line with our past actions. Hence, any request that goes in that direction will be accepted. Example: Phone call and ask people how they're doing. They answer "Great!". They just made a commitment. Continue with "Glad to hear it, because I'm calling in support of a charity for Orphans in Hospitals during Christmas ...".

Foot-in-the-door strategy: sell an undervalued item to transform prospects into customers. When they realize that they are customers of yours, they will come back to buy any item, even overpriced ones, by self-commitment.

Active, public, and effortful commitment is the most effective at changing the self-image. We accept responsibility for a behavior when we think we've chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures (ie rewards or threats did not justify the participation, yet you participated). Examples: Customers who write the sales contract down themselves are less likely to cancel orders or ask for refunds. Undergrads who choose to endure a fraternity hazing convince themselves it was worth it.

Low-balling: Promise people a reward (e.g. money or fame) if they do something repeatedly (e.g. save energy, take out the trash), and cancel that reward after a while. They are likely to keep doing it because in the meantime, they have built other reasons to support their new image (e.g. "I am the kind of person who saves the planet or helps someone").

Social proof

We find correct what people similar to us find correct (social evidence). Example: canned laughter in TV shows to signal that it's funny, or herd behavior.

Pluralistic ignorance: Lots of people, none of them knowing what's going on, are all looking at each other for clues of what to do. Since they can't find any, nobody does anything because everyone wants to stay poised in public. Even more efficient when people are in unfamiliar contexts (e.g. abroad or in fancy receptions).

Liking

Tupperware parties and obligation of friendship: people twice more likely to buy because from a friend than because the item is useful. Door-to-door marketing: simply mentioning "your friend X recommended you to us" is enough: turning the sales person away ... is almost like rejecting the friend.

We like and are more likely to favor good-looking people and people similar to us. We generally believe compliments and those who give them.

Cooperation: when cooperation is required to achieve common goals, and each party has a part of the solution, it can turn enemies into collaborators, and then friends. For example, Bad Cop puts pressure on the interviewee, so that Good Cop looks like he's cooperating with the interviewee, and makes him comply with his requests.

Association: we hate people who bring bad news, and we tend to prefer products who are advertised by good-looking people. The association does not have to be logical, just positive. See also Pavlov's dog. Similarly, when our national team the soccer world cup, we feel associated with their success: "we won!". But when the team loses, "they lost!". We are particularly eager to bask in reflected glory when our image has been recently diminished.

Authority

Milgram experiment and its addition: instead of a single authority figure asking to give shocks, have two authority figures giving conflicting orders (shock vs don't shock). The subject tries to see who is the boss of who.

Clothes and titles: an actor disguised as a doctor in a TV ad gives more credibility to the medicine. Security guard uniform doubles the rate of people who give a dime to another person for parking. When jaywalker in business suit, people are more likely to mimic him.

Important things and people are seen as taller. Yet the more a category of people is concerned by a mark of authority (e.g. students by teachers, or males by cars), the more that category underestimates the authority's impact on them.

Scarcity

We are more motivated by not loosing something, than by gaining something of equal value.

Reactance: as we're losing opportunities, we feel like we're losing freedoms. Since we hate losing freedoms, especially those most recently acquired, we'll fight to keep them. We'll also give those freedoms more importance or qualities than before. Example: 2-year-old kids discover they have a body of their own (a form of freedom newly acquired). They'll say no to everything to check their new boundaries. Same with teens realizing they can be independent of their parents: they fight parental authority.

Scarcity works on objects: ban phosphate use and people start finding it more useful. It also works on persons: cf the Romeo and Juliet effect: because their parents forbid it, their love is bigger. It also works on information: tell supermarkets that beef is scarce and that it's rare to know that beef is scarce increases sales by 6x. It also works on rights and ideas: forbid a book to minors and 1) they want to read it more, and 2) more of them think they're going to like it.

Temporal scarcity: examples include "available only this week" or pausing a face-to-face conversation to take a phone call because "he may not call again!". Being put in competition with other people (e.g. auctions) is even more efficient.

Scarcity creates a desire that has little to do with the merit of the commodity. The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity, but in possessing it.

For the win - Doctorow 2010

Doctorow C. 2010, For The Win

Notes from For The Win from Doctorow. The book's license is Creative Commons NC-SA. No spoiler here, only some interesting concepts mentioned throughout the book.

Part I: The gamers and their games, the workers at their work

• Some players in developing countries like China or India farm gold or are paid to raid with richer solo players from the West to drop them gear or level them up. Western players want to keep up with their friends gear- and XP-wise.
• The parents, whether Indians or Americans, don't understand how their kids can spend so much time playing online games. American parents talk about addiction whereas Indian parents about waste of time.
• There are multiple, competing interworld exchanges: want to swap out your Zombie Mecha wealth for a fully loaded spaceship and a crew of jolly space-pirates to crew it? Ten different gangs want your business. Even RL traders place money on the value of virtual gold, because virtual gold fluctuates a lot and can be exchanged against RL money through the official in-game banks. RL criminal cartels also turn IG gold into real money.
• Big gold farming businesses hire hardcore gamers to kill other farmers. The biggest sellers of virtual gold are game companies themselves and they hire killers too.
• Dungeons are made so that farmers make less and less money: grinding gold gives 12k the first hour, 8k the second, 2k the third, and 100 at the end. Then, a GM appears and bans them, but they've already collected as much as they could for the night before going to sleep.
• Mechanical Turks were an army of workers in gamespace. All you had to do was prove that you were a decent player -- the game had the stats to know it -- and sign up, and then log in whenever you wanted a shift. The game would ping you any time a player did something the game didn't know how to interpret -- talked too intensely to a non-player character, stuck a sword where it didn't belong, climbed a tree that no one had bothered to add any details too -- and you'd have to play spot-referee. You'd play the non-player character, choose a behavior for the stabbed object, or make a decision from a menu of possible things you might find in a tree.

Part II: Hard work at play

• Mushroom Kingdom is a Mario-based MMO from Nintendo-Sun. You can play on the side of Princess Peach, or on Bowser's.
• Prikell equations: a certain amount of difficulty plus a certain amount of your friends plus a certain amount of interesting strangers plus a certain amount of reward plus a certain amount of opportunity equalled fun
• virtual currency tended to rest pretty close to its real value, plus or minus five percent
• Socio-economics experiment about envy: lock 25 grad students in a room for 8 hours. Give each of them a poker chip and say "Every hour I'm going to give each of you $20 per chip you hold". At the beginning, each chip is worth 8*20=$160. After 2 hours, chips start being exchanged against dollars, and at the end of the 8th hour, some chips even get traded for $50, while they only bring $20 to their owner. Each of them started and kept trading because of the fear that he was missing out on what the rest of them were getting: the sirens called Someone else is getting richer, why aren't you?. Greed is "if 1 is good, then 10 is definitely better". Envy is about what other people think is good, and being part of the crowd.
• Gamerunners spend most of their time in the Command Room, watching the world through logs, screens, chat channels, or charts, to get a feeling of the game worlds - Fingerspitzengefuhl.
• the game soundtrack has its own AI that creates more dramatic moments

Part III: Ponzi

• Gold farmers used to login from Asian IP addresses, give all the gold from an account to a newbie without speaking a single word, who in turn would give it silently to a bunch of other newbies from guilds with names like "afasdsadssadsa289". Later, gold farmers logged in using American proxies, started speaking broken English, and became indistinguishable from profitable Western kids.
• After their 12-hour shift, some gold farmers relax by playing some more with a separate avatar that they only use to play, not to work with.
• Pacific protest: ask everyone to gather in downtown and eat ice-creams. Recruit people passing-by in giving them ice-creams.
• If you nuked every account involved in a gold-farming buy, we'd depopulate the world by something like 80 percent.
• Coke ran games that turned over more money than Portugal, Poland or Peru.

21st Century Game Design - Part I

21st Century Game Design, by Chris Bateman and Richard Boon, 2005.

Part I - Games exist primarily to satisfy the needs of an audience

ch1 - Zen game design

Zen Buddhism can not be learned, it can only be experienced. There is no objective perspective on anything. Hence zen game design's tenets: game design reflects needs + there's no single method to design + there exist methods to game design. These methods are:

• first principles: what you want to do -> game world abstraction -> design -> implementation
• clone and tweak: most common method. existing design -> tweak -> implementation
• meta-rules: goal = provoking debate. meta-rules -> design -> implementation
• expressing technology: in teams without actual game designers. technology -> game implementation
• Frankenstein: art or technical materials -> design -> implementation
• story-driven: narrative -> design -> implementation

Participants in the game project: audience, publisher, producer, programmers, artists, marketing/PR, license holder. Example: saving for causal audience is vital; for hardcore audience, it should not break gameplay; for programmers, it's a technical detail; for producer, it's looking at how other games do it.

ch2 - Designing for the market

The commercial success for a medium clears the way for artistic expression, not the way around

A game design is successful when the target audience is satisfied. This justifies the need for an audience model. Existing models: simple distinction hardcore/casual, distinction by genre (but genres are too vague), EA's model, and ihobo's model.

Simple hardcore/casual distinction

hardcore	casual
plays lots of games	plays few games
game literate	game illiterate
plays for the challenge	plays to relax, kill time, and just for fun
segment can be polarized: many can buy the same title	hard to polarize, diverse and disparate

EA's model:

EA's model take-away: do not ignore hardcores because they are the ones pushing a game to broader segments. Corollary: no TV ads are needed if the game is not made for casuals.

iHobo's model:

Evangelist clusters = gaming press, mainstream press, and the 3 million of hardcores in the world. Target clusters = Testosterone (9M players worldwide), lifestyle (30M), and family (90M) gamers.

Design tools for market penetration (aka demographic game design):

• Looking for good gameplay (ie the game being performance-oriented, with stats, clear goals and victory conditions) vs good toyplay (unorganized). Hardcores are driven by gameplay, but lifestyle and family gamers are driven by both.
• Controls should remain accessible for casuals.
• The minimum play session length is usually expressed in terms of the duration of a level or the time between two save points. For casuals, it should be below 15 minutes, but hardcores do not mind core activities of a game taking at least an hour or two. Ex: a typical DotA match takes 45 to 60 minutes, whereas a (small size) Mine Sweeper can take less than a minute. Nintendo games are also famous for allowing the player to quit at any time and provide core activities of at most a few minutes.
• The average play session length is also lower for casuals: they may complete one level at a time, whereas hardcores can aim at 10 levels per play session.
• Play window: total time spent playing the game. The longer the play window, the longer hardcores will spend evangelizing the game. Therefore, despite most of the players not completing the game, content is crucial! The play window can also be extended by introducing hidden features, higher difficulty levels, variety in characters to play with (to increase replayability), and online PVP (although that only works for Testosterone and hardcore gamers).

Phases of penetration: taking the example of The Sims.

1. Hardcore penetration: the game needs challenge, progress, and depth.
2. Hardcore evangelism: the game needs to appeal to the Lifestyle gamer, easy to reach fun, strong marketing, and a strong license.
3. Casual penetration: the game needs fun, toys, short minimum play session.
4. Casual evangelism: the game needs to get the attention of the mainstream press.

ch3 - Myers-Briggs typology of gamers

Assumption: nature of games people enjoy and frequency of play vary with player personality and reaction to situations. The Myers-Briggs model was developed in the 1940s and indicates how an individual would prefer to react to situations in general. See the Myers-Briggs type frequencies in the US. Four pairs of traits:

Type	Opposite type	Game design
Introversion (50% of pop) think then act, needs private time, 1-to-1 communication and relationships	Extroversion (50% of pop) act then think, likes people, deprived when alone	Most games are played by introverts. Extraverts can take long breaks from the game, so provide a todo list for them when they come back to play, otherwise they'll forget what they had to do in their previous play session. Extraverts like DDR because of its performance aspect.
Sensing (70% of pop) live in the present, apply common sense, based on prior experience, likes clear and concrete info	iNtuition (30% of pop) live in near future, new and imaginative approaches, based on theory, comfortable with fuzzy information, seek for patterns)	Learning and problem solving are frequent gameplay elements in many genres. Learning: in tutorials, S will accept linear series of lessons, but N would rather guess by themselves. Problem solving: S will use trial and error, while N will like to use their lateral thinking skills. Therefore, make lateral thinking puzzles (at most) secondary objectives, or allow the player to progress without having completed all of them. Ex: Super Mario 64 only requires 30 stars to unlock new levels. S want simple and usual mechanics, while N won't mind having to guess the rules and a steep learning curve.
Thinking (30% of women, 60% of men) decide from facts and logic, objective, focus on task, think that conflicts are sometimes unavoidable	Feeling (70% of women, 40% of men) decide from emotion, subjective, focus on consequences to people, wish to avoid conflicts	Clear goals for T. Personal encouragement for F, but T may feel patronized. Solution: useful AND aesthetic/fun items are rewards that will satisfy both T and F. Gathering collectibles give goals to T, but should not be a grind. F are motivated and rewarded when they see their actions have impact on the world or other characters. T enjoy receiving critical feedback (a game over with tips), but F will take it personally. Ex: Zelda gives clear goals (good for T), falling or getting hit results in losing half a heart (and not instant death) and Link has an impact on the game world (good for F).
Judging (55% of pop) plan then move, single task at a time, ahead of deadlines, targets and routines to manage life	Perceiving (45% of pop) plan as you go, multitask, work better before deadline, avoid routine and commitment	J want to beat the game (get all the secret bonuses) and complete objectives. P want to improve their abilities, and enjoy the process. For P, goals completed = feedback that they're on track. Non-linear structure is good for P because if they don't like a level, they can try another and keep progressing. J needs to know what to do to progress. Ex: in Tony Hawk or GTA, players need to collect points (good for J) but they can collect them the way they want (various kinds of skate figures or driving/killing missions or sandbox play, good for P).

TJ vs FP: TJ want challenges to overcome (what most current games provide), FP want easy fun (cf Sims or casual games).

Study hypothesis: hardcore player is a 14-28 year old tech savvy male who plays up to 8 games per month. Supposedly, he plays on his own (hence I), is methodological, goal-oriented enjoys conflicts (T), plays games until completion and looks for perfect score/overachiever (J). Previous quantitative work from the Bartle test by Andreasen showed the average hardcore MMO player is IST. Therefore, let's suppose hardcores are IT. Overall, 15% of women and 35% of men are of type IT.

ch4 - DGD1

DGD1 is intended as a tool to aid in market-oriented game design.

Methods: between 2002 and 2004, ask 408 participants (incl 122 women) to answer a 32-question Myers-Briggs personality test, as well as questions on purchasing and playing habits, and do you consider yourself hardcore, casual, or no idea?. Only look at people who play at least one game per year. Survey advertised on hardcore and casual websites/game portals + university students.

Results: clustering gave a sketchy and incomplete result, and FE and SI dimensions did not help to cluster, but 4 clusters appeared anyway: conqueror (TJ), manager (TP), Wanderer (FP), and participant (FJ). Hypothesis rejected: hardcores are found in E and S (and not only I and T). Still, I and N are higher for hardcores and MMO players than casuals. For each of the four types, twice more respondents reported they were casuals than hardcores.

The DGD1 demographic model

Type	Hardcores Desc	Casuals Desc	Progress	Story	Social
Conqueror	ITJ. Want meaningful challenges, strategies and puzzles, want to complete the game. Want lots of content, try to beat themselves. The game is too easy if they don't die at least a few times. Anger, frustration, boredom, and fiero.	ISTJ. FPS and racing games, they play to compete and win. Rely on genre conventions and do not like deviations from the genre. Fiero (although it's oblivious to them) and schadenfreude in PVP, or in GTA for rampages	Rapid advancement: stats in RPG, better gear in FPS	Focus on plot twists/events, not on characters	Online: vocal hardcores from forums and blogs. They also like to win discussions
Manager	ITP. Strategy and tactics. Winning is less important than mastering the game systems: process-oriented, not goal oriented. Conquerors consider them rivals and targets. Patient. Look for challenging but not impossible. Don't look for hidden features but rather refine their current knowledge. Fiero. Civ series.	ISTP. Want familiar settings and realism. Like construction and management games like SimCity. Hate being stuck even if they suck. Hate interruptions and like smooth difficulty curves.	Steady. Give up if no reliable strategy is found quickly.	Plot, not characters.	None?
Wanderer	INFP. Easy fun and toyplay, not challenges. Variety keeps the fun going. Complete levels in aesthetically pleasing ways. Cf Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move: simple controls, bright colors, and actions with direct and satisfying changes to the environment. See also Mario Party and Super Monkey Ball. Need to be able to give up the current task for another different task. May turn to Conqueror or Manager relatives for help. Emotions: finesse, aesthetics, wonder, awe and mystery, but no fiero.	ENFP. Want to accomplish something in the game world without the need for challenges. Games = way to relax. Feeling of progression or else boredom. Lack of market vectors to reach them [although nowadays there's Facebook]	New toys, colorful and imaginative environments	Emotions. Empathy to characters or investment in world/immersion.	Talk about what they like but avoid arguments
Participant	FJ. Games as social entertainment. Cf DDR, The Sims. Little survey data about this group.		Narrative of group of players	Characters and emotions, but in control of them, not just spectator.	Multiplayer, but must face other players in person, not just online (no MMO)

ch5 - Player abilities

Flow = subjects believe they can complete their activity. Subjects have clear goals and direct and clear feedback. Effortless involvement. Goals should be short-term for participant and conqueror, but long-term for Wanderer and manager because they like to figure out the short-term goals themselves.

Caillois' table of the four categories of play helps understand how flow is related to toyplay. In the table, there really is a continuum between Paidia and Ludus.

The relation between the four play styles of DGD1 and Caillois' categories of games

Conqueror Agon	Manager Agon (Alea tolerated)
Participant Mimicry	Wanderer Mimicry (Alea tolerated)

Caillois' table of the four categories of play

-	Agon (competition)	Alea (chance)	Mimicry (simulation)	Ilinx (vertigo)
Paidia (spontaneous play)	Spontaneous races	Counting out rhymes, coin flipping	Masks and disguisement	Children whirling, swinging
Ludus (structured play)	Sports	Betting, lotteries	Theatre	Skiing, mountain climbing

People with high Myers-Briggs Feeling scores prefer avoiding conflicts, therefore they don't like Agon. They're also more likely to like Mimicry since they focus on people. For example, Wanderers appreciate finesse, which is a component of Mimicry. Ilinx resembles immersion, it appeals to everyone.

Temperament theory gives patterns of behaviors, while Myers-Briggs gives patterns of perception or judgement.

Temperament theory

Temperament	Core needs	Myers-Briggs traits	Skills	% of pop
Rational	Knowledge, competence	NT	Strategic: Think and plan ahead, identify the means to achieve a goal, coordinate actions strategically	10%
Idealist	Unique identity, search for meaning and significance	NF	Diplomatic: Resolve conflicts while recognizing individuality, empathy, find similarities through abstraction	15%
Artisan	Freedom to act and ability to impact	SP	Tactical: Read the current content and manage the situation, work out the next step and take action, improvise to overcome problems	25%
Guardian	Belonging and sense of responsibility/duty	SJ	Logistical: Organizing and meeting needs, optimizing and standardizing, protect and ensure safety	50%

Temperament, Myers-Briggs and DGD1

Type	Myers-Briggs traits	Hardcore temperament trait	Casual temperament trait	Flow provenance	Examples
Conqueror	TJ	strategic	logistical	Capacity to see in advance how to address problems (strategic) and iterate/repeat to improve/optimize the solution (logistical). Willingness to fail and repeat	Production of units in RTS, monsters or bosses with patterns (cf Doom monsters)
Manager	TP	strategic	tactical	Planning ahead (strategic) and reacting to rapidly changing situations (tactical). Hardcores like to get lost in their thoughts, ideally without time limitations. Casuals have flow in the action, and need short-term goals.	RTS have both spontaneous maneuvers and long-term strategies. Civ, Chess or puzzles for hardcores.
Wanderer	FP	diplomatic	tactical	Immersion, explicit short-term goals (tactical). Completion of goals is not a big thing, it happens almost as a side-effect of exploration. Give them time to explore.	Platformers (goal is obvious and challenges relatively easy)
Participant	FJ	diplomatic	logistical	Feeling of belonging, toyplay, optimize relationships (logistical) with other characters or players, immerse themselves in social situation	The Sims, Animal Crossing

Casual audience is best approached with familiar settings and content, and with gameplay that revolves around optimization or thinking on your feet (tactical). Hardcores prefer original games that give them a sense of identity (diplomatic), and problems to solve (strategic), e.g. Final Fantasy focuses on story and strategic battles.

Hardcore/casual misconceptions

There are a few well-known gamer stereotypes out there. Let's review the misconceptions about those types and see which useful parts remain.

Hardcore

Dedicated, competitive, and often tech-savvy. Hardcore gamers are also social: they are in charge of their guild, debate on forums, and, more generally, want to be in. They do not only play the game, they also play the metagame. If they have a console, they may buy the latest console FPS or RPG, or at least try it out, and talk about it. If they only play MMOG, they watch for and try out betas, compare game designs, and complain about the lack of innovation. There might be console-fighting-game-only, MMO-only, FPS-only, and other types of hardcore players. Hardcore is an umbrella term for many and diverse player segments. A hardcore niche only makes sense with respect to a particular genre (e.g. FPS), game (StarCraft), or even gameplay mode (auction house golden boys of WoW). In a Marvel vs Capcom 3 tournament, the audience consists mostly of hardcore fighting-game players, not RTS hardcore players.

Pro gamer

Pro gamers are not hardcore gamers. First, they have a manager and are financially sponsored by a brand or a big game studio. Second, they do not share their strategies until they have applied them in tournaments. Lastly, although training is a key part of their success, they may actually play less than hardcore gamers because the metagame is often more important than the game itself. In WoW, for instance, the metagame for pro gamers involves tracking forum posts from game developers or playing only with the basic UI, as tournaments forbid UI addons. Pro gamer teams also track each other's stats.

Casual

Looking at online dictionaries, casual can have different meanings. For gamers, there's at least two distinct categories within the casual umbrella: occasional gamers, or unconcerned gamers.

MMO players who can play for a couple hours every other week are occasional gamers. They may be very focused and play really well during those few others, though. Post-hardcore gamers, who used to consider themselves as hardcore but have found a partner, just got a child, etc. have become occasional gamers. Others like to play games, but have little time to spend in them, and/or do not want to spend too much money in them. This last category of players is referred to as mid-core or softcore.

Unconcerned gamers do not play seriously. They know it's just a game, and the magic circle is often quite thin. As far as time is concerned, 1-minute games while waiting at the bus stop, in the doctor's office, during the commercial breaks, etc. may add up to hours of play per day. Of course, an addiction to Angry Birds does not sound as bad as neglecting one's kids to play Aion 18 hours per day. Short, easy (dumb?), and kawaii-graphics games spread out thanks to smart phone and Facebook apps. Some of those games eventually have a social component (e.g. trading resources in Farmville to complete quests), but it's not what makes them played.

Once again, many do not see the difference between midcore/softcore, post-hardcore, and unconcerned gamers. Casual is a large umbrella term containing many player types. So-called casual games such as Plants versus Zombies sometimes hide intricate mechanics (easy to understand, hard to master). A game like Mario Party 4 could be played very differently by four friends at a party: one could play nonchalantly because she's bored, another competitively because he rocked at the first Mario Party for N64, etc.

Conclusions

• The casual/hardcore distinction is not deep enough (and sometimes inaccurate). Models such as Yee's motivations of play in online games or Bateman's player patterns seem more relevant.
• I suggest the use of personas to conceptualize a typical player. Personas follow a player-centric approach based on qualitative assumptions. When market surveys and large datasets can be expensive, personas are cheap, and everyone in the team, from marketing to design or graphics can benefit from them.
• All players are social. The difference relies in how they are being social.

[Literature] Game Balance ch5 - The human-side of probabilities

My notes from course 5 of the Game Balance class of Summer 2010, by Ian Schreiber.

The more randomness in a game, the more casual it is: there are fewer strategic choices. Less randomness means more of the fate of the game lies in the player’s choices. That’s not always the case, though. Ex: TicTacToe has no randomness, but is not about skill. Other counter-example: a Poker hand is random, but there are skilled Poker players.
Skill dominates (over luck) if the player is rewarded for predicting and/or responding to the randomness. Ex: one can base his decision on probabilities in Poker, but not in Black Jack.
There is no skill in executing a difficult pattern that you’ve practiced (eg counting your hand or memorizing cards in BlackJack). Skill appears in planned, successful and unexpected decisions.
Luck can be carefully increased to even the playing field. Ex: headshots make it possible for weaker players to sometimes luckily kill better players. Head shooting is also a high-level skill. How much luck or skill a game should have depends on the target population: social games and kid games = luck, hardcore games = skill.
How to transform skill into luck:

• replace player choices by dice rolls
• throw less dices (so that there is no law of large numbers, hence less prediction)
• increase the impact of random events on the game state
• increase the range of randomness (like changing a d6 roll to a d20 roll)

Human biases

Humans tend to remember things that happen the least often, or forget those who are unpleasant (eg match loss), hence they tend to overestimate their level. Humans have a flawed understanding of probabilities, hence showing the actual probabilities will actually make them feel like something is wrong/broken. Here are a bunch of biases humans are subject to:

selection bias	improbable but memorable events are seen as more likely than they really are
self-serving bias	"unlikely" (5%) is interpreted as "nearly impossible" (0.01%) when the odds are in your favor. However, "unlikely" (5%) is interpreted as "possible" (30%) when the odds are not in your favor.
attribution bias	positive random result is assumed to be because of a player’s skill, negative random result is assumed to be bad luck/cheating
anchoring	over-evaluation of the first/biggest number seen. Ex: losing 2/3 of the trials is not as bad as losing 20/10 of the trials. Consequence: small base dmg but high bonus dmg = player likely to underestimate.
gambler's fallacy	assumption that a string of identical results reduces the chance the string will continue
hot-hand fallacy	assumption that a string of identical results increases the chance the string will continue

Ethics

Dishonest game design = make the players believe they are very likely to win. It increases excitement and anticipation of hitting a jackpot. Hence it keeps them engaged. Ex: dishonest car dealership: show VERY big prices first to anchor the customer, then show "normal" big prices: they look like small prices.
Honest game design = tell the player one thing, but actually do something else. Examples:

• If the player has 75% chance of winning, under the hood roll the number as if it were 95%.
• If the player gets a failure, make the next failure less likely, and the one after that even less likely (= avoid long streaks)
• Hot-hand streaks should happen in a positive feedback loop, to counteract the greater chance of a miss after a string of hits (ie give bonuses when series of wins)

But also, stay ethical as much as possible. Display wins, losses and various stats to enable players to grasp their actual skill and to "prove" the game is not unfair/imbalanced or that the AI is not cheating.

Saving

In a game where the player can save anywhere at any time, players are likely to save just before an important roll, and keep reloading until their roll succeeds.

• Naive solution: do not re-generate the random number each time they reload => new problem: players can now anticipate future rolls (the seed has not changed).
• Alternate solution: the player can save anywhere, but the total number of saves is limited (cf the original Tomb Raider) => new problem: players need to know how far apart they should save on average so that in the end of the game, they still can save.

[Literature] A theory of Fun for Game Design

Raph Koster. 2004. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Paraglyph Press.

Quotes taken from Koster's book. I did not try to put them together in a meaningful way, I just copy-pasted those I found most interesting.

ch3: What games are

The only real difference between games and reality is that the stakes are lower with games.
The more formally constructed your game is, the more limited it will be. Long-lasting games integrate variables from outside the magic circle.
Fun from games arises out of mastery.
With games, learning is the drug. Fun is just another word for learning.

ch4: What games teach us

Most of the game designers working professionally today are self-taught.
Games are viewed as frivolity.
Games almost always teach us tools for being the top monkey.
Most games encourage demonizing the opponent. Can we create games that instead offer us greater insight into how the modern world works?
There has not been a topologically different 2d shooter since [the first 2d shooter to have power ups and bosses and scrolling]. Unsurprisingly, the shooter genre has stagnated and lost market share.
Algorithm for innovation: find a new dimension to add to the gameplay

ch5: What games are not

One of the most self-defeating rallying cry in history: "it's just a game"
The part of games that is least understood is the formal abstract system portion of it, the mathematical part of it. Games need to develop this formal aspect of themselves in order to improve.
This is why gamers are dismissive of the ethical implications of games. They do not see "get a blowjob from a hooker then run her over", they see a power up.
Since games are generally about power, control, and those other primitive things, the stories tend to be so as well.
When games and stories are good, you can come back to them repeatedly and keep learning something new.
Getting emotional effects out of games may be the wrong approach. Perhaps a better question is whether stories can be fun in the way games can.
Different kinds of enjoyment:

• fun is the act of mastering a problem mentally
• aesthetic appreciation
• visceral reactions are generally physical and relate to the physical mastery of a problem
• social status maneuvers, intrinsic to our self-image and our standing in a community

Aesthetics is about recognizing patterns, not learning new ones.
Delight does not last. Recognition is not an extended process.
Fun is the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes. Real fun comes from challenges that are always at the margin of our ability.
Fun is contextual. The reason why we are engaging in an activity matter a lot.

ch6: Different fun for different folks

Since brains have different strengths and weaknesses, different people will have different ideal games.
People will usually choose to play the games they are good at, that reflect their strength.

ch7: The problem with learning

Players try to find the optimal path to getting to the ultimate goal.
Exploiters are often the most expert players of a game.
Since we dislike tedium, we'll allow unpredictability, but only in the confines of predictable boxes, like games or TV shows. Unpredictability means new patterns to learn, therefore unpredictability is fun.
Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.
If there is not a quantifiable advantage to doing something [reward], the brain will discard it.
Successful games incorporate:

• preparation [choices made before a given challenge], otherwise it's chance. Can the player prepare in different ways and still succeed?
• a sense of space, otherwise it's trivial. Does the environment affect the challenge?
• core mechanics
• challenges [= content] otherwise it's too short. Can the rule set support multiple types of challenges?
• a range of abilities (otherwise it's simplistic). Can the player bring multiple abilities to bear on the challenge? At high levels of difficulty, does the player have to bring multiple abilities?
• abilities should require skill. Not requiring skill from a player should be considered a cardinal sin in game design.

A learning experience require:

• variable feedback (a greater skill should lead to better reward). Are there multiple success states (ie no guaranteed result)?
• high-level players can not get benefits from easy encounters or they will bottom feed.
• failure must have a cost. Player should have the ability to try again (with another preparation round).

ch8: The problem with people

Particular problems and solutions appeal to particular brain types.
Games are not there to fulfill power fantasies.
[The increasing complexity of games within a genre] has led to a priesthood of those who can master the intricacies. Newcomers can not get into them - the barrier for entry is too high.
Designeritis [= being] hypersensitive to patterns in games.
Given the lack of codification and critique of what games are, game designers have instead operated under the more guild-like model of apprenticeship. They do what they have seen work.

ch9: Games in context

The following chart can be applied to any medium.

User goal	Collaborative	Competitive	Solo
Constructive	Community Team game design	Job Commercial game development	Hobby Modding
Experiential	Performance PVE	Sport PVP	Audience Single player games
Deconstructive	Teaching Strategy guide writing	Criticism Hack and cheats	Analysis Writing this book

It's a lot easier to fail to respond to a painting than to fail to respond to a game.
The closer we get to understand the basic building blocks of games (...) the more likely we are to achieve the height of art.

ch10: The ethics of entertainment

For games to really develop as a medium, they need to further develop the ludemes, not just the dressing. By and large, however, the industry has spent its time improving the dressing [...] It's just easy relative to the true challenge.
The best test of a game's fun [is] playing the game with no graphics, no music, no sound, no story, no nothing.
Ethical questions [in games] are aimed at the dressing.
The ludemes themselves can have social values.
As a medium, we have to earn the right to be taken seriously.

ch11: Where games should go

For games to really step up to the plate, they need to provide us with insights into ourselves.
When you feed a player [with a game], right now, we only know "fun" and "boring". Mastery of the medium of games will have to imply authorial intent. The formal systems must be capable of invoking desired learning patterns.

ch12: Taking their rightful place

Games need to develop a critical vocabulary so that understanding of our field can be shared.
Games will never be mature so long as designers create them with complete answers to their own puzzles in mind.

Epilogue

The challenge game designers face is "how do we create games that do not have one right answer?"
[Game designers] are not geeks in the basement rolling funny-shaped dice. Games deserve respect.