For commercial video games, the designer’s objective usually is to make money. The traditional gaming market is highly saturated and dominated by a few well-resourced companies, and I’m not assuming (or advising) that UX designers try to compete in that market. But there is a growing demand for niche gaming applications among businesses, schools, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. In these cases, your objective to generate revenue would share space with the client’s objective to achieve a different goal.

In any event, you’ll need to think through the revenue model for your game. The model may include:

Games can be a highly effective way to elicit action in the real world, such as exercising more often and more vigorously, or adopting more fuel-efficient driving habits. In Chapter 11 I discuss how games can be designed to encourage these actions.

A substantial and rapidly growing industry is dedicated to creating games that educate and train people. I cover such applications in depth in Chapter 12.

Games can be a wonderful way to convince players to adopt a particular point of view. See Chapter 13 for a complete discussion.

How old are the players? Are more of them likely to be male or female? What’s their level of education? How well do they understand the language in which you’re writing the game? Do they have any motor, sensory, or cognitive impairments? Each of these questions will have different implications for the themes, challenges, length, and level of support provided in the game.

Why would people want to play the game? It’s not enough to say simply, “Because it’s a game.” People have a vast number of games to choose from. Why do you believe people will take an interest in your game in particular? Survey the people in your target audience about the types of games they like to play and why they enjoy them. Look for themes like those described in Chapter 4. Then consider which factors you can incorporate into your game’s design to draw the interest of players and to sustain their interest over time. Will the game appeal to people who value social interaction, puzzles, playing with language, cutting-edge graphics, or compelling story lines? How do these priorities match up with the demographics you’re targeting?

How much experience do your players have with video games? Are they people who spend dozens of hours every week in virtual worlds, or do they do a little casual gaming once or twice a week? Are you offering games to people who have had no real exposure to them before? Consider how the answers to these questions should influence the complexity of the gameplay and the controls. A design that’s too simple won’t suit hardcore gamers, but any significant complexity could completely exclude the least skilled players. Which group constitutes the larger portion of your likely audience? Are there ways to design the game so that it could appeal to a broader segment of players—such as allowing people to play at a level that’s comfortable for them?

How will people play your game? Do players have access to a personal computer? If so, what platform? How sophisticated is the hardware? Will they be playing the game in a location where they have access to the Internet? How likely are they to own a smartphone, a tablet, or a handheld gaming system, and how likely are they to carry it around? Do they have a home game console? Think about the effect that the available technology will have on the gameplay. For instance, games that require a full keyboard or a large screen can’t go mobile, but games that require continual access to the Internet work especially well on mobile platforms.

How much time do players have on their hands? How many of your players are young people with time to kill, and how many of them are older people with families and jobs that demand most of their attention? Will the game be promoted through an organization, such as a school or business, that will carve out time for people to play? If there is no such organizational accommodation, consider how much of a commitment players would be willing to make or could be persuaded to make to your game.

After people get past the graphics and the story line, they’ll spend most of their time negotiating the game’s conflict. So it’s worth developing something that will make the time spent playing feel worthwhile. Much of the appeal of Tetris, for example, comes from the fact that its conflict is fundamentally interesting: fitting blocks together in the most efficient way without running out of space to manipulate them (Figure 6-1). This conflict appeals to people’s natural interest in order, geometry, and the struggle against mounting adversity. If you have a game idea, ask yourself what makes its conflict interesting.

TETRIS HOLDING

Figure 6-1. Despite its simplicity, Tetris has an intensely interesting conflict at its root.

Think about whether the conflict gives the players a fair chance of prevailing. Remember that in video game design, the system always has inherent advantages over the players because it’s the final arbiter of the rules. It’s easy for people to become frustrated with a game that’s overpowered and to perceive it as unfair. In multiplayer games, people need to feel that they have roughly equal chances relative to one another. People usually expect games to function like a meritocracy, awarding victory on the basis of an individual’s skill, cleverness, or ruthlessness. For example, games that allow players to pay for certain advantages risk violating a core value of gaming, because most people believe it’s unfair to pay to win. Ask yourself whether your game is fair to its players, and whether it fairly distributes power between opponents.

The more complex a challenge is, the greater its demands will be on the player’s attention. The conflict in chess, for example, is relatively complex. The objective to capture your opponent’s king is complicated by the constantly shifting configuration of pieces. Bocce, by contrast, is relatively simple: try to throw the colored balls as close as possible to the white ball. A complex conflict can draw players deeper into a game, but it can also be exclusionary. Compared to chess, bocce is much easier for a novice to pick up and succeed at.

The conflict needs to keep people playing for the intended duration of the game. Consider the factors that could make the experience too short-lived. Is it possible for players to completely surmount the game’s conflict too quickly, and be left with nothing to do? Does the conflict come to an end when the player finishes the game, or can players reconfigure the game and start over? Also think about whether the game could run too long. What are the chances that players will become stuck and be unable to continue? Repetitive conflicts in games, such as fighting the same enemies over and over, can grow tedious. Do you think that players could become bored and drop out of your game before completing it?

A shared physical space like a living room has important implications for play, because much of the experience will happen outside the borders of the game world. When people play together in a shared space, they taunt one another, joke around, high-five, obstruct each other’s view, yell, scream, and cheer. Meaningful moments in the game are magnified, as when one player suddenly leaps ahead of another or makes a mistake and ends up at a disadvantage. The more of these moments the game offers, the greater the effect it will have in a shared space.

Also think about how the game’s display will support multiple players in a single space. Sharing a computer screen and playing “pass the mouse” makes for a pretty lousy experience. Instead, is it feasible for all players to have their own display, perhaps using multiple laptops or mobile devices? Would players share a split screen, or would the game’s display allow multiple players to use the same screen at the same time? How would that work, and how would individual players be able to tell what they personally were affecting?

Since the late 1990s, more and more people have experienced video games through online play. The online environment removes a lot of ambiguity from game design because players have their own display and controls. It can also be very convenient for players because they don’t need to jump into a car and drive across town to play a game with their friends. Players miss out on the nonverbal language and rich personal interaction of a shared space, but the convenience of remote play also means that more people can play together more often.

In online games like Unreal and World of Warcraft, players interact in real time. Real-time interaction allows events to develop quickly, lets players react to one another’s actions immediately, and enables a large number of player-to-player interactions at any given time. These interactions are very conversational, contributing to the players’ feeling that they’re participating in an active community. However, real-time interaction works only if many players are logged in at the same time, so synchronous multiplayer games lend themselves to configurations that maximize the number of players available at any particular time. This may mean allowing lots of players to participate at once, or allowing strangers to interact with one another.

In some games, players make their respective contributions to the game asynchronously, taking actions as their time allows. Their moves are then stored on a central server until other players can go in and check them, also at their own convenience. Asynchronous play has the great advantage of not requiring players to schedule time to play together, and it lends itself to play among small circles of friends. Interactions between players must be fairly simple and involve small numbers of moves; asynchronous play doesn’t work well for fighting pitched battles or for anything that unfolds in the moment.

Many players feel more comfortable playing a game with people they know. You may prefer to allow people to play only with friends from work, school, Facebook, or their personal address books, especially if some players could be children.

A large number of highly successful commercial games pair players with complete strangers online. For many players, the opportunity to meet new people through a game is a major part of the appeal of online play. Furthermore, allowing open association broadens the pool of potential players immensely, making it much more likely that enough people are in the game at any one time to sustain the experience. Concerns about safety can be mitigated if people have limited means of direct communication with one another as in Club Penguin, Disney’s virtual community for kids, which allows players to communicate only through canned phrases (Figure 6-3).

DISNEY

Figure 6-3. Players in Club Penguin can interact with one another only by selecting canned phrases from a list.

Competitive games drive everyone toward greater skill and effort, and they encourage players to size up one another’s strategies. Players need to dive into one another’s psychology and exploit the weaknesses they believe they have identified there. They keep secrets, bluff, obfuscate, hide, and otherwise employ trickery to win. Think about whether these qualities would complement the design of your game.

In some contexts (for example, a workplace or charitable organization), you might assume that putting players in a competitive stance would be thematically unpalatable. But keep in mind that the shared experience of play tends to bring people together.

Cooperative play creates a very different kind of experience. To succeed, players must build a relational culture between one another that is based on how they can work together. Doing this means understanding each other’s skills, developing a shared set of dependable routines, and creating a specialized vocabulary for communicating within the game. By living the practice of sharing, trusting, aiding, and leading, cooperative games can generate strong bonds between players.

In some games, players neither compete against nor cooperate with one another, but are merely present in the game at the same time. In Animal Crossing, for example, players can visit one another’s cities, see how they’ve decorated their houses, and leave messages for one another (Figure 6-4). The point of the multiplayer model here is to facilitate a social experience and foster a sense of community, not to advance the gameplay.

It can be fun to have both cooperative and competitive stances between players. In Team Fortress 2, players operate cooperatively on either the red team or the blue team, and the two teams compete against each other in battle. In a clever twist on these stances, players may take on the role of a spy and disguise themselves as members of the opposing team (Figure 6-5). Enemy medics may actually be tricked into healing a spy, who is only there to wreak havoc on the enemy team.

NINTENDO

Figure 6-4. Players can post messages for one another in Animal Crossing. Although they’re aware of one another’s presence, the players neither cooperate nor compete.

VALVE SOFTWARE

Figure 6-5. A spy disguises himself as a member of the enemy team in Team Fortress 2. To players on the opposing team, he appears as the character on his mask.

In most games, players start out with roughly equivalent amounts of power. This balance gives a game a sense of fairness and makes it an unbiased arbiter of who has the greater skill. Battleship, chess, and Pong are examples of games in which the assigned roles of the players and the power they have are completely symmetrical.

Not all games need to specify the same role for all players, or grant them the same amount of power. Hangman is an asymmetrical game, for example, because the two people play completely different roles. In Dungeons & Dragons, one player serves as the dungeon master and the other players are the denizens of the dungeon master’s world. Baseball has many asymmetrical elements, as when the batter faces off against nine other players, each of whom has a very different role on the field.