Game Design
Lens #16: The Lens of the Player
To use this lens, stop thinking about your game, and start thinking about your player. A good game designer should always be thinking of the player and should be an advocate for the player. Skilled designers hold The Lens of the Player and the Lens of Holographic Design in the same hand, thinking about the player, the experience of the game, and the mechanics of the game all at the same time. Thinking about the player is useful, but even more useful is watching them play your game. The more you observe them playing, the more easily you'll be able to predict what they are doing to enjoy.
- In general, what will your players like?
- What don't they like? Why?
- What do they expect to see in a game?
- If I were in their place, what would I want to see in a game?
- What would they like or dislike about my game in particular?
When developing Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold for DisneyQuest, we had to consider a wide range of demographics. Many arcades and interactive location-based entertainment centers have a somewhat narrow demographic: teenage boys. DisneyQuest’s goal was to support the same demographic as the Disney theme parks: pretty much everybody, particularly families. Further, DisneyQuest’s goal is to get the whole family playing games together. With such a broad range of skill levels and interests within any given family, this was quite a challenge. But by carefully considering the interests of each potential player, we found a way to make it work. Roughly, we broke it down this way:
Boys: We had little worry that boys would enjoy playing this game. It is an exciting “adventure and battle fantasy ” where players can pilot a pirate ship, and man powerful cannons. Early tests showed that boys enjoyed it a great deal, and tended to play offensively — trying to seek out and destroy every pirate ship they could find. They engaged in some communication, but always stayed very focused on the task of destroying the enemy as skillfully as possible.
Girls: We were not so confident that girls would like this game, since they don’t usually have the same zeal for “blowing up bad guys. ” To our surprise, girls seemed to like the game a great deal, but they played it in a different way. Girls generally tended to play more defensively — they were more concerned about protecting their ship from invaders than chasing down other ships. When we became aware of this, we made sure to create a balance of invading ships and enemies that could be chased to support offensive as well as defensive play. The girls seemed very excited about the treasures you could gather, so we made sure to pile them up conspicuously on the deck and make them visually interesting. Further, we designed the final battle so that flying skeletons would charge the ship and snatch the treasures off of the deck. This made the skeleton shooting task much more important and rewarding to the girls. The girls also seemed to enjoy the social aspects of the game more than the boys did — they would constantly shout warnings and suggestions to each other, occasionally having face-to-face “ huddles ” where they would divide up responsibilities.
Men: We sometimes joked that men were just “tall boys with credit cards. ” They seemed to like the game in the same ways the boys did, although they tended to play the game in a slightly more reserved way — often carefully puzzling out the optimal way to play the game.
Women: We had very little confidence that women, mothers in particular, would find much to enjoy with this game. Mothers tend to have a different theme park experience than the rest of the family, because their main concern is not how much fun they personally have, but how much fun the rest of the family has. In early tests of Pirates, we noticed that women, and mothers in particular, tended to gravitate toward the back of the ship, while the rest of the family moved toward the front. This usually meant that the family members manned the cannons, and that mom steered the ship, since the ship’s wheel was in the back. At first, this seemed a recipe for disaster — mom doesn’t have much videogame experience, and a poorly steered ship has the potential to ruin the experience for everyone.
But this isn’t what happened at all. Since mom wants to see everyone have a good time, she suddenly has a vested interest in steering the ship as well as possible. Being at the helm, which has the best view, she has a chance to keep an eye on everyone, to steer the ship to interesting places, and to slow things down if her family is overwhelmed. Further, she is in a good position to manage her crew, warning them of oncoming dangers, and giving orders ( “Dylan! Give your sister a turn on that side! ”) designed to make sure everyone has fun. This was a great way to make mom really care about how the game turned out.
Accepting the fact that women would be steering the ship more often than boys, girls, or men meant that we had to be sure that steering the ship was easy for someone who was not a frequent videogame player, but this was a small price to pay to include a key part of our audience. Frequently, we would hear kids comment when coming off the ride: “Wow, Mom, you were really good at that! ” By paying close attention to the desires and behaviors of our various target demographics, we were able to balance the game to suit all of them. In the beginning, we just had ideas about where there might be problems making the game appeal to all four of these groups — it was only through attentive prototyping and playtesting that we started to realize the possible solutions to these problems. We watched closely to see how each demographic group tried to play our game, and then we changed it to support each group’s style of play.
(The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell, Carnegie Mellon University, 2008. Page 106-108)