Fun Meters: Data Driven Design for Tilt: Flip's Adventure in 1.5 Dimensions

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  Fernando Muro , Director RRHH en Televisa at Grupo Televisa

  6 years ago
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  Pietro Guardini , Games User Researcher at Independent

  7 years ago
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  Ian McGee , Manager at Home

  9 years ago
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  Alexander Ainslie , Director, A3Capital Limited at CE Partners Ltd. (BVI)

  10 years ago
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  Eugene Kim , Changemaker at Faster Than 20

  10 years ago

Fun Meters for games we needed to data to answer 4 Questions 1. Challenge: How was the ramp? what we call the hard fun of the game (points strategy) 2. Imagination, story, exploration, the sheer joy of the controls: what we call Easy Fun (bubble wrap) 3. Reward: was there enough sense of progress and accomplishment? Did players feel like they were making a difference? Serious Fun 4. Social Interaction: how were players interacting around the game? Where they talking about it? Showing with their friends? People Fun

http://gamesfromwithin.com/making-a-living-comfortably-on-the-app-store Notice that the App Store feature for Flower Garden (full version) in January had virtually no effect on downloads of the free version. It seems that people are willing to buy something full price without trying the free version first if Apple features it. Both versions of Flower Garden (free and full) have in-app purchases in them. Even though there 痴 a higher percentage of users with the full version that buy in-app purchases, the free version is much more popular and the majority of the revenue comes from the free version (orange). This is a trend that was already noticable around the holidays, but now is much more clear, with over 50% of the revenue coming from in-app purchases in the free version.

For this world-wide beta test on the iPad we needed to data to answer 4 Questions 1. Challenge: How was the ramp? what we call the hard fun of the game (points strategy) 2. Imagination, story, exploration, the sheer joy of the controls: what we call Easy Fun (bubble wrap) 3. Reward: was there enough sense of progress and accomplishment? Did players feel like they were making a difference? Serious Fun 4. Social Interaction: how were players interacting around the game? Where they talking about it? Showing with their friends? People Fun The 4 Fun Keys is a PX model for how games create the emotions people most like. Game designers cannot design the emotions that players feel directly. Instead they design the mechanics that offer players choices (in the center of the diagram). It is in the making of these choices that players feel the emotions coming from gameplay. It is this new way of creating emotion that separates games from other media. What is most important here is designing the center to create emotion in at least 3 of the 4 quadrants. Turns out that by watching people play there are over 30 emotions that come from the choices that players make in games. Designers who understand the relationship between their game mechanics and these emotions can craft these emotions as early as the concept stage rather than waiting for the end of design or even production where changes are harder to make. At XEODesign we can track how players really react to the game in context. We looked at what create emotion in players and mapped that to what they liked the most about games. There are seven emotions in the face and more in the body. We look at these emotions and match them to game mechanics to hack the “what’s fun?” problem from the player’s perspective. Watching emotions as people play we find that emotions are fluid and braided over time, one emotion blending into the next.

Hard Fun Offers the Opportunity for Challenge and Mastery Unlike usability, challenge and frustration makes games fun. Can’t just go from point A to point B. Need to have some challenge to overcome make games fun.

Easy Fun: Inspire Exploration and Roleplay Adding curves makes game more fun. In Grand Theft Auto players not only complete missions, while driving from point A to B the game offers things like plate glass windows, freeway exit ramps, parking meters. Like Improve theater players can throw all their Sims in the pools and pull out the ladders to see what happens. In Basketball it’s fun to dribble the ball, shoot hoops without keeping score, pretend you’re a Harlem Globe Trotter and do tricks.

Make it more fun Adjusted the hard fun Scene 3 Level 11 Tufts by dropping the points so more players would succeed. A good idea, but still not a metric tied to Easy Fun

Player Observation was the only way we found to look at Easy Fun from controls required one on one player observation We added a new mechanic by listening to player expectations

Serious Fun: opportunity to change how players think feel and behave Brain Age to get smarter or play Dance Dance Revolution to loose weight Reward systems that create value before during after play How to enhance what players feel when they get there. How it changes how they think feel behave

More fun to play, also easier to cooperate/compete w/these emotions Some emotions require two people. They coordinate action between people teamsowrk More emotions than the other 3 keys combined These emotions drive social media

Prototypes for the meta game Different approaches create different emotions Looking for ways to enhance those feelings of playing together. Increase social bonding between friends