My Journey of Designing Game Experience
My journey starts at being a newbie to the industry. Having qualified as a Computer Science Engineer, it was given to have a career in technology. But, I liked the creative side of the industry more and evolved my career into an Experience Designer.
Currently I’m working in one of the leading gaming companies in the world. It’s a jovial place to work, especially as you are making games for others to have fun playing. We have this great environment in which we help each other learn by, sharing knowledge and expertise. And one such interesting thought I picked up down the line was, why do people play games? And that might be the defining difference between conventional UX and game UX!
People and Games!
When it comes to any service product, for example a mobile banking application, people have the need as a major motivation to drive the engagement. Consider the scenario in which they have to transfer an amount to a friend. For that they will install the app, logs into it and tries ‘Money Transfer’. That’s when they finds out, the person has to be a beneficiary. User then adds the person as a beneficiary and waits for defined time to transfer money, which is frustrating!
But will they drop off? Not likely! No matter what all red tapes you put forth in a service application people tend to mentally map it on to how office works and make their peace with it. The need of completing the task overshadows all the experience hiccups. But, thats not always the case with games!
So, why do people play games? May be for fun, or to pass time, or for social acceptance(or for some other reason I’m yet to discover). But it’s never for the same reason people uses a service application. There is no ingrain need that drives their engagement.
Now a days mobile games are plenty. The entry barrier for publishing a game is so low that anyone with a desire can publish a game. The market being that saturated with competitors, if player gets annoyed even a bit, they will migrate to some competitor. In that scenario, if we block users from having fun or passing time or getting socially accepted, they won’t play the game. That brings us to ‘THE QUESTION’, how do you give users the ideal experience?
Game experience is never about solving the problem for users. It’s about letting users solve the problem. User interface shouldn’t be the distraction rather a guiding factor that helps users to the problem.
Consider any game, let’s take puzzle game genre for an example. Puzzles are problems and mastering puzzles is the aspiration why player plays the game. As an experience designer, our job is not to solve those puzzles for users but, to allow them to concentrate on the puzzle with minimal distraction.
Let me try to explain it a bit more. Hypothetically, imagine a scenario in which we need more revenue from this puzzle game and team decides to surface three banner advertisements along the existing one in the game’s home screen. How good of an experience that would be!
Or imagine this, if the same puzzle game has lot of other features (option to add friends and compete with them, a leaderboard to show how good you are compared to the world, ability to select more themes for the game, connect to Facebook, or adjust game settings) and all are given equal priority as play-game button. Would that be an ideal experience!
It’s not like in home screen you can’t put three advertisements or you can’t add lots of other buttons other than ‘play’ button. You can! And you surely should, if your business demands you to. But, how to do it eloquently?
Do remember the heuristics Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen put forth. Designing the systems adhering to those principles is a safe way out. At the end of the day, game is just another product which humans use.
On the other extreme, some hard core games have managed to build their own ecosystems where they train players to find their way around and figure things out from the clutter. Those players aspire to master the interface and build their own shortcuts in doing it.
What’s right and what’s wrong is up to the user group you are designing for. Understand the nuances behind your users and fine tune the game interface to suit their needs. It may not be conventional at all times but, it’s alright to take that extra effort in being unconventional.
To put it simple, let users play. That’s the primary action they intend to do. Don’t make it difficult for users to perform the primary action. If you do, they get frustrated and there are always a lot of other apps to choose from.
