First hour of gaming
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The document discusses factors that influence a player's experience in the first hour of a new game. It finds that expectations, specific experiences like frustration or engagement, and the outcome of abandoning or continuing play shape this critical period. Positive experiences like accomplishing tasks and getting rewards can encourage continued play, while deal-breakers like unskippable cutscenes risk causing abandonment. The first hour should focus on helping players acquire skills, understand the game's point, and experience fun core gameplay to build attachment and intrigue them to keep playing. Simply aiming for "fun" is not enough - providing information and an intriguing on-ramp are also important to engage new players.
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First hour of gaming
- 1. The First Hour Experience How the Initial Play can Engage (or Lose) New Players Gifford Cheung The Information School, University of Washington Thomas Zimmermann Nachiappan Nagapan MSR
- 2. the “initial experience” the “first time user experience” “tutorial time” the “5-5-5” (five seconds, minutes, hours) “the first 10 seconds, the first minute, the first ten minutes, the first hour” “setting the hook” also known as
- 3. a Critical Hour “If your game is abandoned in the first hour that’s a pretty low moment. It’s a complete rejection of the game play in all ways, you know, game play, narrative, style. … It’s a pretty catastrophic failure.” Designer C
- 5. What did we know so far? High level measurements Positive/negative reviews don’t affect the first 15 minutes of play (Livingstone et al., 2011, Influencing experience: the effects of reading game reviews on player experience) achievement, enjoyment, & social interaction lead to continued motivation to play (Wu et al., 2010, Falling in love with online games: The uses and gratifications perspective)
- 6. What do we know so far? A sliver of the first hour “Are tutorials effective?” “For complex games like Foldit, yes.” (Anderson et al., 2012, The impact of tutorials on games of varying complexity) “Also, restricted modes don’t help much.”
- 7. Games (Xbox 360) Perspectives (Players, Designers) Exploratory Approach (Qualitative Method)
- 8. Player’s Perspective 212 Amazon reviews of Xbox 360 games Searching for “first”, “hour”, “minute”, “start” Genre Reviews Action 28 Modern First-Person Shooter 32 Sci-Fi First-Person Shooter 21 Modern Action Adventure 17 Role-Playing 16 Sci-Fi Shooter 16 Fantasy Action Adventure 10 Puzzle 9 Adventure 9 Rhythm / Music 7 Sports 6 Racing 5 2D Platformer 4 Shoot-'Em-Up 3 Strategy 3 Beat-'Em-Up 3 Driving 3 GT / Street Racing 3 Action Role-Playing 2 3D Platformer 2 Wrestling 2 Football 2 Snowboarding 2 2D Fighting 1 Sci-Fi Action Adventure 1 Modern Shooter 1 Historic First-Person Shooter 1 Rhythm / Dancing 1 Fantasy Online Role-Playing 1 Olympic Sports 1
- 9. 00 - I click New Game and the first hour of Call of Duty 4 begins. We're looking at a view of Eastern Europe. A voice over is introducing the situation and explaining everything that is going on in the area. The game zooms in to a U.K. training ground. I have control now, a man tells me to take a rifle from the table. He points me to a shooting range and I take aim. 01 - We conduct various aiming exercises. Looks like there's some auto aim built in when you look down the sight. 02 - I knife a watermelon. "Your fruit killing skills are remarkable!“ 03 - I follow my objective pointer and meet Captain Price. I have to run an obstacle course now. First hour review of Call of Duty 4 First hour reviews 35 Collected, 13 different authors
- 10. 6 Game Industry Professionals Designer A, B, C, Test A, B, and User Researcher A 10-20 years of experience, AAA-class games 3+ major game studios
- 11. Method Qualitative Method: Grounded Theory - Open, Axial, Selective Analysis (Amazon + First hour reviews) - Invited an auditor to review the process and emergent categories for comprehensibility and closeness to data. - Used the interviews in part to check the findings (Selective)
- 13. Findings
- 14. The First Experience Arc 1) Expectations 2) Experiences 3) Outcome
- 15. Expectations and Anticipated Elements • Franchise, Genre, Predecessors • Gaming community, “Everyone”, Friends, Buzz • Trailers, Rentals, Demoes, Friend’s house Notable: Specific Anticipation
- 17. Positive Experiences Momentary Engaging “cool”, “awesome”, “wow”, “exciting”, “fun”, “impressed”, “neat” “hooked”, “engaged”, “interested”, “addicted”, “immersed” Condemned: Criminal Origins “I hit Y to reload my gun, only to realize that it doesn't actually get reloaded. Instead, my character checks the amount of rounds in the gun. According to the game, I'm limited to the ammunition that is found in weapons. Hmmm...I'm going to have to be a little bit more conservative with my ammo and quit hosing down these perps with a steady stream of lead. Very interesting game concept...”
- 18. Negative Experiences Annoying Frustrating Tedious
- 19. Outcomes Abandonment Continue WHOLE & IN PART (Music, Narrative, Voice- Acting, Levels, Mini-games, etc…)
- 20. Deal-breakers Frustrations that supercede all positives. “An UNSKIPPABLE cut scene. Annoying. So, we continue playing and now there are UNSKIPPABLE cut scenes every few plays of the players taunting each other before the ball is hiked! Really? I needed to see his defenseman saying something foul to my running back RIGHT NOW! NO, I don't! We made it through the rest of the game some how and decided that it was one of the worst playing experiences of any game we've ever played. Reselling this ASAP! BTW, the football game play was actually pretty good. Running, throwing and fielding all seemed to work well. In fact, I would say that it worked better than Madden. Its such a shame that they made the rest of the game so unplayable.” (Blitz: The League, Amazon Review)
- 21. Holdouts: Why play a game you hate? Anticipated Elements “I can't stop before meeting some aliens, right?”. Crysis 2 A good game mechanic “Would I keep playing? I guess so. I really do like the combat system, which captures Captain America's acrobatic grace and power quite well, but the limited enemy variety is allowing that repetitious feeling to sink in. … I'll soldier on for a bit, but I don't expect to finish this fight.” First hour review of Captain America: Super Soldier Narrative Completionists (External) Social reasons (External)
- 22. Expectations Specific Anticipations Experiences Momentary & Engaging Annoying, Frustrating, or Tedious Outcome Abandonment Continuing Exceptions Deal-breakers Holdouts
- 23. Figuring out the Game Acquiring the Skills Getting the Point of the Game Gateway to Attachment “once you get the hang of it you won't be able to pull yourself away” Far Cry 3, Amazon Review Or Not “once the patterns were figured out, the enthusiasm died down quickly.” Kung Fu Panda 2 (Kinect), Amazon Review
- 24. Acquiring the Basic Skills to Play Understanding the Point of the Game
- 25. Acquiring the Basic Skills to Play Understanding the Point of the Game
- 26. From fun to real fun “You need to look at it and go, “Oh, that looks like it’s for me and that looks fun.” Then when you actually play it, I as a designer either need to have lured you in with that and that is exactly what you get to do or I lure you in with that because you’re familiar with it. Then I transition you into the things that are actually more fun.” (Designer A)
- 27. FRUSTRATION Direction vs. Discovery DISCOVERED! Easter Eggs Beauty Player Abilities (“I can double jump!”) FUN DIRECTIONS, PLEASE. Lost Impasse Confusion Mistakes
- 28. Pitfall: Mistaken Information …but wait, you *can* skip cutscenes.
- 29. Player Agency The Blame Game (“more than a little embarrassed my video game skills are less than that of a 2YO child.”) Pre-play work and Practice Death is expected and accepted. Slow Respawns on the other hand… Skipping ahead (to play the actual game)
- 30. Design Elements First Elements Locked Elements Slow Starts Rewards
- 31. Rewards ENGAGING FUN Self-Discovery Figuring out the Game Experiencing the Core Game play Working out (Kinect games) Sneaking Past a Guard (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) New Weapons! New Powers! New Play Modes Coins, In-game Resources
- 32. Emotively Neutral? I hit some airlock controls and unlock the Daddy's Home achievement. Bioshock 2 I zoom in on a guy and get the Close Up Achievement after killing him. Bionic Commando We get a "morality-" for that, but then two "morality+"s for saving the civilians, so, obviously, we're the good guys. Army of Two: 40th day I walk over and tap A in time with on screen prompts to start the generator. I get 10 Gamerscore points for the "Let There Be Light" achievement Alan Wake I hop in and get another achievement, this game is just doling them out. Assassin’s Creed 2 Haha! The game is telling me how to control the baby, A moves the legs, Y the head, and X and B the arms. The baby cries, and I get the Birth of an Assassin achievement. Well, that was tough. Assassin’s Creed 2 Achievement called “Albus Percival Wulfric Brian” is unlocked. Woo! LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 I’m definitely not obsessed with achievements, but going a whole hour and not unlocking any? Seems a bit odd, but maybe they really are going for the real “you have achieved something actually hard” route.
- 33. Tasks in the First Hour Directions are checkboxes Formal Achievements as neutral messaging Misinformation to be avoided (e.g., Blitz: The League) Making a bee-line for the heart of the game So… oddly enough, in conclusion…
- 34. Takeaway Fun is not the answer to a good first hour. (not completely) Instead, focus on Information & Intrigue to quickly on-ramp the players and to convince them to keep playing.
Editor's Notes
- Hi, my name is Gifford Cheung, I am an Phd Candidate at the Information School in the University of Washington. I am presenting the work that we did over the summer to study the first hour of gaming.
- The first hour goes by many names. There is the “initial experience”, the “first time user experience”, and so on. *we* use the phrase “first hour” to mean the initial play session. This is more than a momentary impression. It is first time the player actually plays a game for a sustained amount of time.
- It is a *critical* hour. Failure in this hour is largely considered a complete rejection of the game. According to one of our interviews, this is catastrophic, the player is rejecting gameplay narrative, style – everything.
- So we ask, what do players care about during the first hour of play? What are the features that matter? What are the pitfalls to avoid? Our goal is to explain the first play experience of gamers. We contribute a rich description of the progression of the first hour and insights about designing a good one.
- What did we know so far? We knew generalities. Researchers gave good and bad reviews to people and then had them play a game for fifteen minutes. And, nothing really changed. Others hypothesize that “player’s initial gratification (trial) experiences in playing an online game will positively affect their continuance motivation”. And they did. And of course the details are scarce in the survey. So achievement, enjoyment, and social interaction lead to continued motivation. Sadly, their survey instrument never breathed a word about “when you first play the game”
- We know something about tutorials. The guys at UW in the Foldit lab ran a multivariate study the impact of different kinds of tutorials on Foldit, their gene folding game, and two other flash games released on Kongregate. And only for Foldit did their tutorials appear useful. And in their tests, they found that restricted modes didn’t make a difference. And that’s largely it, including some theory about how people get into a flow state or immersed in games, we have mostly high level theories, but nothing comprehensive or indepth at the feature level about the first hour of play.
- Flow They characterize immersion as a series of deepening degrees that are divided by barriers. For example, the minimal stage of immersion is engagement which occurs early in time. Brown and Cairn identify barriers at each stage. For the engagement stage, do the gamer’s preferences (e.g. genre or theme) prevent them from getting involved? Do the controls offer enough feedback to allow them to learn to play? Also, players think about investment of time, effort and attention. Naturally, they look forward to a reward for these investments.
- So, to get a picture of the first hour we wanted a lot games, a lot perspectives, and an exploratory approach.
- For the player’s perspective, we collected 212 Amazon reviews of Xbox 360 games. We used a list of genres that we scrapped from GameSpot to help us get a representative of across genres. And searched for reviews with the words first, hour, minute, start, to manually pick out the ones that talked about the first experience.
- We also found a bunch of long form game reviews that only focused on the first hour. These reviews were structured as minute-by-minute reports. We thought of these as a source of insight by expert players about the first hour of games [NEXT] 35 first hour reviews were analyzed from game review sites (firsthour.net, gamesforlunch.blogspot.com, videogameimpressions.blogspot.com, shakkirules.com, and GameSpot). Game reviews are a genre of games journalism [13] that has value in informing game design [14]. These “first hour” reviews focused primarily on the first hour of gameplay. Many of the reviews describe the gameplay in a minute-by-minute format (See Figure 1 for a sample). The reviews were written by 13 different authors.
- Then, later down the line, we conducted interviews with game industry professions to help round out our understanding from a different perspective and to follow up on some of the concepts that were emerging from our ongoing analysis. [NEXT]
- Here is a summary of our method. There are three steps. In the open stage, I go over the reviews and tag excerpts with low level categories – this is a feature, they called this awesome, he said boring – Then, in the axial phase, I start to bring the analysis together in a hierarchy of categories to find larger themes. In the selective phase, I’m making logical inferences from the developing categories and going back into my data to find out if those refinements to my category structure are supported by the data.
- Here is a picture of my process. This is a first hour review of Captain America, that has been tagged with the categories on the upper left.
- For a variety of reasons, the first hour is interesting to design, test, and user research. The first hour is the most played portion of the game. Of all the people who play a game, only a small percentage finish the game. Designers can count on all players experiencing the first hour. Players who don’t finish the game are in the majority. According to Designer C, as long as they enjoyed the experience, a quitter in the latter hours is still a success story. In contrast, a quitter in the first hour is a catastrophic failure: “If your game is abandoned in the first hour that’s a pretty low moment. It’s a complete rejection of the game play in all ways, you know, game play, narrative, style. … It’s a pretty catastrophic failure. ….So if someone got 75 percent or 50 percent through and called it a day I don’t consider that a failure. ... Somebody gets 30 minutes into a game that they spent $60.00 for and said oh to hell with this. Yeah that’s a pretty – that’s awful. … the guy who played it for eight hours may tell his friend yeah it’s a really good game but I didn’t finish it but it’s definitely worth you trying. I can live with that. – the guy playing for 30 minutes saying this is rubbish, you shouldn’t try it that’s a kind of epic fail.” Designer C. All interviewees describe the first hour as a chance to hook a player. They understand that this has implications on a large scale, affecting sales on the order of millions of units. The first hour gets more design attention than other aspects of the game because of the way that the development process is structured. In quality assurance testing, game testers may not be able to skip directly to the portion of a game that they want to test. As a result, the first level is replayed heavily in QA testing. In user research, each new set of participants who are invited to try a game will play the game for the first time. The majority of the evaluation is based on the first hour. This initial playtest is evaluated for the learnability of the game and as representative of the entire game experience.
- So now let’s get to the findings.
- We identified a first experience arc of expectations, experiences, and outcome
- Players bring expectations to the game before they pick up a controller. They have opinions about the franchise, the genre, version 1 of the game. They’ve heard something from reddit, from “everyone”, friends, and so on, and they’ve had small tastes. Trailers, game rentals, demos, friend’s houses. One type of expectation is a specific anticipation. If play Skyrim, what specifically are you looking forward to doing? [NEXT]
- You want to kill a dragon. If you’re thinking about playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution , you want to play a stealth mission. These are specific expectations that are very specific and you’ll see that they are important to the first hour. By the way, as far as I understand, you don’t really fight a dragon in the Skyrim until way past the first hour. Well, anyways, you start playing and you have postive and negative experiences [NEXT]
- Players quit, “eject”, “shelve the game” or they continue. By the way, they can abandon just a part of the game – turn off the music, ignore the story, mute the voice-acting, skip levels, mini-games, etc…) The CONTINUE option is not necessary a smiley face, and we’ll get back to that. As for the quitters, they may have just encountered too many annoyances or frustrations or was blah about the game. More dramatic, we also have the:
- Dealbreakers. Which we’ve defined as frustrations that superceded all positives. In this quote, the player could not skip these annoying cutscenes that constantly interrupted his game. It was too much pain and killed it for him. Interestingly, [CLICK] he thought the game was actually pretty good. But that’s why the cutscenes were a dealbreaker – despite the best the game could offer, and it’s pretty good – better than Madden games – he ejected. Now, back to the yellow smiling continue icon. Because, people who continue to play are not necessary enjoying themselves that much. We found players who quit the game, despite some good elements, and we saw players who said, well, we’ll keep playing, sure, but we’re not having fun right now. That tells us that frustrations and annoyances are being held back by something that keeps them in. That is an interesting pattern, here is a feature that is compelling enough, for now, to keep a flagging player in the game. We called these features, holdout features. [NEXT SLIDE]
- Players won’t quit when there’s something specific they want to do. They haven’t killed a dragon yet in Skyrim. They haven’t seen an alien yet in Crysis 2. Or, they have one enjoyable game mechanic that will keep them in for a little bit longer. Captain America is acrobatic, graceful, powerful – I want to enjoy that just a little more, at least until I really bored. And of course, the story can keep you in and if you are a self-described completionist, you may stay as well. Also, your friends may push you to wait it out a little longer or maybe its fun because you and your wife enjoy the LEGO adventure games together.
- So now we have a basic picture (which I plan to add two or three overlays to in a moment). Expectations to experiences to outcomes. And really, the outcome decision comes because the player just finished his session and will decide if he wants to comeback. We have two exceptional impacts: deal-breakers and holdouts. Next, there is a very specific goal that is common to all of these games, it is that of: [NEXT]
- “Figuring out the game” Players need to acquire the basic skills to play the game. And, they need to figure out what the game is about. Killer Instinct is about the combos. Crackdown is about exploring and finding fun things to do in a city. Is this racing game about drifting? Tricks? Spectacular crashes? A common pattern in our data is: Initial Confusion: Figuring out the Game: Attachment. And of course there’s Confusion: Figuring the Game: and Rejection.
- Two key elements are skills and understanding the point. Note also that game designers know exactly what the point of the game is. I’m going just drop this blue diagram over the orange one. It is not meant to be precise. You can imagine lots of variations here.
- I’m going just drop this blue diagram over the orange one. It is not meant to be precise. You can imagine lots of variations here.
- A typical design strategy for this is to draw players in slowly. Give the players something fun to do, and bring them into the actual game experience that you care about. Now, for two particular insights about figuring out the game:
- We found an interesting dichotomy when choosing between direction and discovery. Should you leave the player to their own devices or guide them along to figure the game? On one hand, if they discover things for themselves, we often find their discoveries along with positive experiences, momentary fun. On the other hand, if they get stuck, lost, confused the reaction that we found was frustration. And all they want is directions. Which when they get them, is taken in a very utilitarian way – ok thanks next step. No fun, but no frustration either.
- Also, another tragedy is that you can skip the cutscenes in Blitz the League, the guy who quit, just didn’t know what button push. So we are beginning to see an information layer that is critical to the first hour experience. The last overlay is what I call player agency. We’ve put enough pressure on the game designers, we should emphasis that players are trying to make the best of the first hour, too:
- Players have a personal assessment of their skill level. They judge the game differently because of this. If a player can’t beat the Walking Dead, it’s showstopper, but if he blames himself, he will still tell people how much he enjoyed the game. Players turn down the lights, they adjust the difficulty level. They get into a practicing mentality. They skip ahead and try to play the game.
- There are a number of design elements that we can look at last, but I will just mention rewards.
- Rewards give the players an enjoyable experience and engage them. In our data we see positive statements associated with everything here. One reward is missing from this list.
- Formal achievements are missing from this list. And this is what we get in the minute-by-minute comments. I got an achievement. Ok. And that may be just fine – most of the way that the designers used achievements as a messaging technique – tutorial by achievement or acknowledge that, yes you are doing something cool.
- I think that’s a potential closing takeaway for us here. We have a picture of an experience arc, orientation or “figuring out the game”, and player agency. A bunch of new terms: specific anticipations, holdouts, a little more acknowledgement of player agency. Lastly, there is this little thread of the mundane aspect of the first hour. Directions are checkboxes Formal Achievements as neutral messaging Misinformation to be avoided (e.g., Blitz: The League) Making a bee-line for the heart of the game