Player psychology

What comes to mind when playing a video game?

If we try to find an answer to this question, first we have to spend a lot time thinking about player psychology:

• What is their motivation for playing?
• What are they expecting from my game?
• Is this what they are looking for?
• How can I communicate my ideas through the environment or the mechanics?

These, and many more questions, are the initial steps towards analyzing our target players, but first we need to have in mind some common ground between all players.

A video game is a digital world in which, restricted by rules set by the creators, the players can take their own decisions and actions, and experience the reactions of the environment. Within these rules, they will go through different emotions and feelings, which will remind them why they are playing.

Now, going back to our first question, what comes to our mind when playing a video game, we should have in mind these main emotions we need to make the players feel:

• Motivation
• Immersion
• Satisfaction

Motivation

Player motivation is the key reason why they will start our game and keep on playing. Of course, we can state that they already have an initial motivation that makes them buy or download the game, and later initialize it. So, now it is up to us to convince them to stay.

Our first step is to know our target audience. Everything we do is for them, every single detail decision in our game must be made only if it will be something good for our target. Don't get me wrong—this doesn't mean that we must give them everything they may want or need; what I mean is that they are the main reason we are creating this game, so we must keep our promise and provide them with what they came looking for in the first place. For example, if I am a hardcore gamer, I might want a video game to push me to the limit, and be extremely challenging and long, with different gameplay mechanics. Imagine we buy the next Bloodborne and, when we play it, it feels really easy, there's no blood in the game, no monsters, and no hunters. We wouldn't feel motivated to keep on playing and would end up quitting within the first hour.

Motivation comes in many different forms, depending on our target audience. Here are some key points:

• Casual game consumers: Simple mechanics, not heavy content, fun, challenging (but not frustrating), and few control settings
• Indie game consumers: Simple or normal complexity mechanics, fun, challenging, good story to tell, nice and innovative art style, and normal control settings
• Hardcore game consumers: Complex mechanics, extremely challenging, great story, filled with emotion, lots of content, rewards, and game plus (starting the game again with every skill and item we had on our previous play)

This and many more are some basic keys, but of course are also affected by the genre of the game, the platform on which the game is going to be played, and the age of the audience, among other factors.

Immersion

Once we have players' attention and have motivated them to keep on playing our game, what we have to try to do is get them so interested in our game that they eventually feel immersed in it. The stronger the immersion is, the more motivated players are, the longer they will play, and the better their experience of our game will be.

But, how can we get our players' motivation so high that they feel they are inside the game? This is one of the hardest questions to answer, because it depends on our ideas, our mechanics, our gameplay, and our story. But there is another question as important as this one: once we get them immersed, what do we have to do to keep them that way?

There are some standards that we should follow, to both create interesting content to generate an immersive game, and to prevent us from taking the player out of that immersion.

The environment is our strongest weapon in this case. Through our environment, we can talk in many ways, we can communicate with the player and influence their decisions. Background music, art styles, epic backgrounds, wonderful characters and enemies, props, and objects. All of must be used to make the player feel the world is alive, changing around them. Interaction with these characters, and objects—being able to break some glass, throw some chairs around, change some local town's history by saving the princess—are the key to generating an immersive world.

The interaction between the player and the game is delimited by some standard rules we, as designers, set. These rules control the environment in which players will have to do some decision-making, which means, at some point, they will try to do something our rules won't let them. This is the reason why we need to show or teach these rules to players as soon as the game starts, because if they keep on playing, that means they silently agreed to all the standards that we established in the first place.

As I explained in the previous section, everything and everyone within our video game must follow the same rules. Breaking this rule would mean breaking the player-rules agreement, and would immediately take the player out of their immersion by making them frustrated, angry, or just wonder what happened. We must try to avoid this at all costs. So, if we are thinking about objects, enemies, or NPCs, make sure they follow the same basics as the player.

Satisfaction

There is no satisfaction without punishment.

Punishment in a video game is as essential as satisfaction if we want the player to feel motivated. Do we mean players need to suffer throughout our game in order to enjoy it? Of course not; unless our idea is similar to Nioh, Dark Souls, or Bloodborne. What I am trying to say is that there are more ways to make a player satisfied than just giving them rewards.

Haven't you ever felt the need to beat that level that took you so long? I am sure when you did, you felt extremely satisfied. And what about finally beating that enemy against whom you held a grudge? Shut up and take that Liquid Snake! I am sure you felt satisfied when you finished a game, and of course, when you were rewarded with some cool skill or weapon for saving the day.

We shouldn't confuse aiming for player satisfaction with giving them rewards or making everything easy for them; actually, they usually don't want that. Of course, we can't continually keep on challenging them, non-stop, because this would cause an inverse process: the intensity that the player experienced may be too much for some players.

So, thinking about pacing is a solution. We have to balance moments of action, fun, tension, and small versus difficult challenges—basically, balance every situation. Every extreme is a bad decision.

What we should also consider in these moments is that, if we are aiming for a great artistic moment, which could be musical or visual, we should give the player some time to enjoy that; walking around a digital world with a great Original Soundrack (OST) is always appreciated by the players. After, player will be ready for the next challenge, so we better be prepared world, here we come!