A Game is like a Trojan Horse for tricking the brain.
The Greeks kept striking Trojan city walls for 10 years until the trusted Kind advisor Ulysses proposed. "If we cannot conquer Troy by force, we should try deceit".
The plan was to hide the strongest soldiers inside a giant wooden horse belly and gift it to the Trojans. The soldiers would then open the gates from the inside, and the Greeks would conquer the city. But how could the Greeks be sure that Trojans would behave as expected by accepting the gift and bringing it inside the city walls? They couldn't.
Greeks strategically built up a believable setting that contained enough nudges and clues to make the Trojans behave however they wanted. You could say they were lucky, and that's a factor for sure, but the point is they intentionally did it.
However, they couldn't be 100% sure because they hadn't direct agency on the Trojans' behavior.
And that's exactly what happens when you engage in a Game Design Process.
A Game Designer has limited control over the Player Experience.
And understanding those limits makes you more conscious about what you do and why you do it while focusing on what matters. The key goal is to remove the reliance on intuition and gut feelings by showing you how your mind works when designing a game. This makes you improve how you communicate to the player through your designs. This works because the core of everything a Game Designer does is rooted in the Theory of Player Experience, one of the first crucial concepts to understand in your Game Designer journey.
So, in this blog post, we’ll look at the Player Experience and its components and progressively build the 3 Laws of Player Experience.
By being aware of what you can control, you can “conquer the player’s brain” like the Greeks conquered Troy.
By the end of this article, you'll understand:
- The Game And Its Player Experience
- How The Game Generates The Player Experience
- Designing An Experience Is Always An Indirect Process
Without further ado, let's jump right in.
The Player Experience Components
When playing, you feel something called Player Experience.
Imagine yourself while playing a game. I bet your brain is in constant motion, as are your hands on the controller.
You're reasoning about game strategies, feeling emotions about the art style, thinking about the game's meaning, etc. This complex set of things is the Player Experience.
The player Experience has 3 components:
- Sensations: All the physical perceptions the human body can experience (sight, hearing, proprioception, etc.)
- Emotions: All the cognitive responses about those sensations (fear, joy, happiness, etc.)
- Meaning: The cultural interpretation of those sensations and emotions (Themes and Messages)
The high range of these elements makes the nearly infinite spectrum of experiences you can think of.
But how do they relate to each other?
They’re all crucial, but they have different roles.
Sensations and Emotions are body signals. Therefore, their purpose is to inform you about the world around you so you can make meaning out of it and make decisions. So, when it comes to the Player Experience, the Meaning is the goal. Instead, Emotions and Sensations are tools to identify and better understand the Meaning.
This doesn’t mean that Emotions and Sensations are not important; it’s not a ranking. They just have a different role and a pretty important one since they can influence the Meaning.
As you can see, there’s no actual game element in here.
This leads us to the First Law of Player Experience.
The game is not its Player Experience.
In other words, a game and its Player Experience are not the same thing. This might seem an obvious concept.
And it is, to a certain extent, but it’s often understood as a purely theoretical concept with no real applications. To me, a theory not adherent to practical use is not a useful theory in the first place. However, this is not the case because this concept lies at the base of the Game Design process. As we’ll see in the last chapter of this blog post, this deeply affects how the Game Designer engages in the design process.
But hold on; if they’re 2 different things but related, how does one lead to the other?
Let’s make another crucial point.
The game doesn’t directly generate its Player Experience.
This is the base ground of the Second Law of Player Experience. The Player Experience emerges from the cooperation between the game and the player.
This is a fundamental concept to understand. The experience of a game is not inside the game itself. There’s no “essence” that makes you define what a game’s experience is by looking at the game alone. It’s called the “Player” Experience for a reason; it needs the player to interact with the game. Yet, when you design a game, no actual player will reveal the experience until you playtest or ship the game.
But you still need something to strive for and base your design decisions on. Hmm, it seems we’re running in circles here.
So, what does this mean from a Game Designer standpoint?
Let’s unravel this puzzle by going deeper to understand what lies between the game and its experience.
The Player Experience has 3 components: Emotions, Sensations, and Meaning. The Meaning is the goal, while Emotions and Sensations are tools to better identify and understand the Meaning.
How The Game Generates The Player Experience
The Game Designer shapes the game elements to make the game generate the Target Game Experience.
First things first, what’s the Target Game Experience? It’s what you (the Game Designer) want to communicate with your game, and it’s represented by the Game Direction.
It still has the same 3 components (Sensations, Emotions, and Meaning), but it’s a projection from your mind to the Ideal Player, an imaginary player you assume will play the game. I want to point out that this is not a best practice or something. It will happen whether you want it or not because you can’t help but imagine a series of actions and events in a game environment (that you need to test, of course).
This demarks the fundamental difference between the Player Experience and the Target Game Experience. And it’s a direct methodological consequence of the First and Second Law of Player Experience.
But how can you bridge the gap between the two?
That’s where the Ideal Player comes in.
The Game Designer works with the Ideal Player in mind.
As we’ve said, the Ideal Player is an imaginary player you assume will play your game. The Ideal Player has all the required competencies (knowledge, skills, etc.) to understand your game and experience it as you envision it (your Target Game Experience).
Your purpose is to make the Player Experience as close as possible to your Target Game Experience. To do this, you need to base the entire design process on the Ideal Player by assuming he, not someone else, will play the game. But it doesn’t end here.
You also need to assume that all players will be the Ideal Player. It sounds weird, but if you think about it, you can’t do otherwise because you can’t tailor the game to every single player.
In marketing, this is translated to the concept of the Target Audience.
But if it’s only in the mind, how does this Ideal Player take concrete shape?
The Game Designer defines the Ideal Player by strategically designing the game.
This is where the Third Law of Player Experience comes into play. The game form and content strategically define the Ideal Player.
You can’t just hope the Ideal Player exists; you need to structure the game so the game itself builds it. Meaning that what you put in the game and how you structure it defines the competencies required to understand it. This is true not only for obvious things like skills requirements, type of game, etc. but also about the game’s meaning. What the player interprets from the game is influenced not only by his knowledge and thinking skills but also by the form and content of the game.
So “strategically designing the game” means subtly pushing the player towards the meaning you want and excluding the interpretations you don’t want. The type and effectiveness of this communication highly depend on how well you linked your Thematic Structure with the game content (gameplay, narrative, visuals, levels, balancing, etc.).
So, we can say that the game produces one or more competencies.
And this brings us to the final piece of the puzzle.
The interaction between a player and the Target Game Experience generates the Player Experience.
As you might imagine, the Ideal Player doesn’t exist (it’s a design tool, if you will). Yet, sooner or later, someone will play your game.
At that moment, an actual player interacts with the game, “absorbing” the Target Game Experience. As the Second Law states, this interaction is emergent, and cooperation between the author (through the game) and the player lies at its core. Depending on how far he is from the Ideal Player competencies, his experience will be more or less closer to the Target Game Experience. So he could understand the game’s meaning, not understand it, or acquire the competencies during player and then understand it.
Nonetheless, the Player Experience will always be a subjective one. This happens because we all humans are different, and we can’t help but perceive experiences only from our perspective.
We can think of a game as a generator of experiences.
Let’s now take a look at how the Theory of Player Experience dictates the Game Design process.
You can’t just hope the Ideal Player exists; you need to structure the game so the game itself builds it. Meaning that what you put in the game and how you structure it defines the competencies required to understand it.
Designing An Experience Is Always An Indirect Process
You can only manipulate the design of the game.
You can’t turn on or off sensations and emotions into players at will. You can’t make meaning spawn into the player’s mind. You can’t directly shape someone else’s experience. You’re dealing with human beings, not robots. It’s a building process because experiences can’t be transferred but only reconstructed in the player’s mind.
And since the construction process is mediated by interpretation, the player won’t have the exact same experience you envisioned. He will have his own unique and subjective experience to which he can be the only witness.
Hence, the fundamental difference between Target Game Experience and Player Experience.
You can’t directly touch what you’re creating.
And this is true not only for games but every art form. Every artwork is an intermediary object that, because of its content and form, influences the final experience (Player Experience). Every artist knows that he can’t directly shape people’s experience and can’t measure it either because of its emergent characteristics.
And experience is always much more than the sum of the components an artist can manipulate.
So, all the Game Designer’s tools are based on a series of nudges and pushes.
You can never interfere with the Player Experience directly, but you do so through an indirect process. Therefore, you can’t make the player do what you want, but you can influence his behaviors to lead him to do something. You are like a puppeteer because you can’t control the direct outcome when manipulating the game elements.
You’re at a certain distance, like the puppeteer.
This is why the Game Design process is what it is.
That’s the underlying reason why the prototyping and testing phases in the Game Design Iteration Cycle are so crucial. You must confront the real world and change your mind in the face of the evidence.
Yet, always remember that those “pieces of evidence” are never absolute because you’re considering your mental projection (Ideal Player). Players are not software to program but human beings who react differently to each stimulus. And the game they’re playing is just one among many stimuli.
That’s okay because, as we’ve said before, you can’t tailor your game to every subjective Player Experience.
This leads us to the most powerful tool a Game Designer has.
The Game Direction is the Holy Grail of Game Design.
You should base your entire design process on it, and it should drive every team decision. The Game Direction is the concrete manifestation of the Target Game Experience and is the first thing you should aim for.
This makes game development a sort of "reverse-engineering process". You first define the experience you want to achieve and then develop the best game that generates it. A game is like an orchestra with all the instruments working together to make the desired experience emerge. But, you need to be aware that, until you release the game, you lack a fundamental "instrument": the Player.
Understanding that the experience you're defining is the Target Game Experience and not the Player Experience makes you realize the amount of control you have. You know that, when testing your assumptions during iteration, you're designing a clue and not a cause-effect relationship.
That's why designing a game, especially a meaningful one, is so damn hard.
In the end, here is one of the most crucial things you need to remember.
Your goal is not the game but the Player Experience.
A game is just the tool you've chosen to generate meanings. You don't design a game to design the game but to create an experience you think it's worth living.
A game and its experience are coupled in a mutual relationship where a change in one affects the other. Game Design is like water; it always takes the shape of the container you put it into. You can't change the shape of the water (game) without changing the container's shape (experience). And every time you change the shape of the container (experience), you force the shape of the water (game) to change.
The experience you want defines the game you want to make. And this is the core nature of Game Design as a discipline.
A game is just a means to an end, which is the Player Experience.
A Game Designer cannot touch the Experience he’s creating. Designing a game is always a reverse engineering process requiring strategically placing nudges and clues to generate the desired experience.
