Veteran game designer Sid Meier gave the keynote of the Game Developers Conference Friday morning, and dispensed lessons he’s learned about player psychology. He described the “unholy alliance” between the player’s suspension of disbelief and the designer’s willingness to defy their own logic and the laws of math to satisfy the player’s expectations.
“A lot of what I thought I knew was wrong. And the reason was because I really hadn't taken into account what really happens in the player's game,” said Meier. Meier, the Director of Creative Development at Firaxis Games and creator of the Civilization series, said that it’s crucial to give players the feeling of winning – even though he seemed skeptical about the practices that achieve this.
The first rule of game design is to make the first 15 minutes “really compelling, really fun - almost a foreshadowing of all the cool stuff that's going to happen later in the game. These rewards are really a way of making the player feel comfortable in this world, of letting them know they're on the right track. … You can almost not reward the player enough in the early stages of the game.”
The punishments and setbacks a player experiences must be delivered with care. “Players are very much inclined to accept anything you give them gladly and feel it was their own clever play, their own incredibly strategy that earned them that cool reward. On other hand, if something bad happens to the player, your game is broken, there's something horribly wrong, the game is cheating. It’s really important to be very careful with the setbacks the player experiences.”
Meier also spared players from moral dilemmas. If an opponent like Genghis Khan was on the brink of defeat, he would stay cocky instead of pleading for mercy. “Would you like them to say, 'Please don't hurt me, I only have one city left and there are women and children there?’ … It's more satisfying to win against cranky Genghis than if there was a moral cloud over the actions that you were taking.”
Meier described several attempts to challenge players in Civilization. The game originally had a “rise and fall” arc, where players would build a civilization, experience disaster, and come back mightier than ever. “What we found was, just at the cusp of the crumble, most players would reload a save game. They would never experience the glorious rerise that we had in mind for them.” Likewise, random disasters would make them “paranoid.” “The player feels the computer rolled that random number just to make their life more difficult just when they were about to win. Random events have to be treated very, very carefully. If they're significant, basically the player will find the worst and most paranoid explanation for what just happened in the game.”Even the odds of battle are interpreted differently by a player than by a rational designer. In user testing, Meier found that players who enjoyed 3:1 odds were surprised if they lost. If a player faced 2:1 odds, they could accept losing a few times – but if the odds were presented as 20:10, they expected to win almost every time.
But Meier didn’t always give in to the player’s wishes. For example, when the team discovered that players would save before a tough battle and then reload after a loss, they changed the code to ensure that the battle would play out the same way after every reload. Getting to retry every battle is “not the experience that I think is most interesting. It really doesn't require you to have a flexible strategy, doesn't require you to think ahead. The game is a lot less fun.”