The Design of Time: Understanding Human Attention and Economies of Engagement

[Music] so my name is Chelsea house I spent the last eight years in the free to play space doing a bunch of different projects and I'm now working at alchemy labs in VR and one of the things that was consistent throughout my time in free-to-play was just that this idea of time it's the underlying foundation for a lot of free-to-play mechanics and yet one thing that I noticed is that people don't usually think about time overtime we think a lot about short-term gains little spikes but we don't really understand human attention and behavior past kind of the daily to weekly stage I think one of the major things that I saw was this tendency to underestimate how quickly humans adapt to stimulus which is just a fancy way of saying people get bored and as we see time becoming more foundational and things beyond free-to-play in console and triple-a I think it's really vital to look at human behavior and psychology and understand how experiences can really engage people long term after all the holy grail would kind of be a game that lasts and is lucrative forever depend independent of developer content I don't know how to do that if I did I wouldn't be here but here's some pillars so I want to start with player engagement over time now when I talk about player engagement I'm talking about any I'm not talking about any discrete metric so no dia you or ma you or some of the other things we've used in the past when I talk about player engagement I'm talking a little bit more abstractly about the time attention and mental effort a player gives to a game regardless of whether or not they're playing so essentially the psychological energy they're putting towards your game at any given point in time and I want to start by thinking about this through the lens of another area of our lives where we use the term engagement after all marriage is supposed to be this thing that lasts for life even if statistically we haven't been doing a super great job of that but the lens of relationship psychology is still really helpful as we think about our games after all historically developers wanted to see players fall in love with them to really grab them and get them engrossed and for each day to be better and more exciting than the one before and we know that that's not really how relationships work but love in the short-term does start with infatuation and this is a typical peak we see when players first pick up a game we see them binge we see longer player sessions more frequent sessions per day but this phase of engagement is inherently transient the getting-to-know-you rollercoaster never lasts because we as humans are designed to adapt and find pattern we're designed to get bored this is how our brain optimizes to live in our world even the most beautiful rock in the world is going to become background noise if it's on your finger every day and that's just a result of how we as humans process stimulus at the most basic level whenever we received stimulus we tend to pass it through the list of our basic needs can I eat it mate with it or will it kill me once we've done that our engagement starts to fall off we run it against some of our higher order cognitive needs and I want to point out that this graph is not accurate the peak and amplitude the rate of decay all of that is dependent on different personal factors and factors with the stimulus and content itself I'm going to use those two words stimulus and content relatively interchangeably any piece of content is going to be a stimulus that evokes some form of player attention and engagement now the other half of this curve if we know that the stimulus is coming up is this idea of anticipation this essentially means that we get engagement before we actually even give the player something now I mention that it doesn't usually look like a bell curve at all but the one thing regardless of that decay rate and amplitude or the rise of the anticipation is it's going to go down over time it will decay and this is just a natural result of some of our neurological tendencies so here's a few different perception based reasons for this this is a small small subset if you're interested in this I highly recommend looking up a few basic UX books on principles of human attention so the first thing that I want to talk about is that were hardwired to find patterns in the world as soon as we find a pattern it means our brain doesn't have to do so much work and we can attend to other things once we find a pattern we only pay attention to the way that some sort of stimulus deviates from it this also means that as soon as we recognize a piece of content that follows a pattern we're not going to get the full amount of engagement we normally who saw this a lot early on and so-called golden mechanics it turns out that golden mechanics were really just easily repeatable patterns and the initial spikes of engagement that we got from them didn't hold up over time the next thing we do is that we chunk things the iconic example of this in UX is the idea of phone numbers it's much easier to remember three chunks of numbers than 10 individual numbers however this also means we don't get 10 individual spikes of stimulus nor the sum of 10 individual parts we get something a little bit less than that you can see this in games in something like Pokemon where when I spin a specific pokey stop I don't get an individual spike of engagement for each item that drops I just get this collective chunked idea of a pokey spin and I think the biggest one is that we tend to normalize put simply everyone has a different base emotional level and that base emotional level isn't what determines how we feel what determines how we feel on any given day is the way that the stimulus were exposed to deviates from that baseline so on the plus side this means that no matter how great or terrible your life is on any given day you're designed to exist and survive to continue moving forward so just being able to feed your family might feel as good as someone with a relatively no experience low experiential baseline as closing a million-dollar acquisition for someone with a relatively high experiential baseline now unfortunately if we continue to give people these spikes that doesn't mean that we're going to give them bigger and bigger emotion what it means is that we're going to elevate their baseline so essentially just like in adrenaline junkies the first high that we get is never going to be the same okay so that sounds a little bit dire but I want to look again at relationship we know that some of them have to work after all we still exist so what does that transition look like how do we get players from that initial infatuation to a place where they're willing to be more intimate and committed the first thing we need to do is not panic when that initial spike wears off in the early days of getting math data we saw this all the time we'd see the slightest little dip and engagement and we set off all of the alarms people would get called in the middle of the night the end result was that we were constantly trying to show bigger better grander things players all the time during any micro dip in their attention now the result for players with exhausting we wound up making our average players feel like they were missing out and driving our highly engage players into this unsustainable frenzy and the downside is that once you start on this path there's really not a lot of options besides continuing you've elevated the expectations for you're highly engaged players who basically train them to constantly want more at the same time your average players start seeing a higher and higher gap between their experience and the experience of these highly engaged players they start seeing fewer and fewer reasons to stick around so instead of more more more more MORE what we have to do is start looking at ways to say enough to our players instead of striving for this ever-increasing engagement we need to get them into a habituated series of cycles of engagement in the same way that we need rest in order to be able to act we need relief between these periods of attentional arousal so there's a lot of really common ways to do this in a game like choices you can read whatever you want but you can only read a chapter every few hours and something like wow you can battle your pets all the time but on weekends going to be faster and more rewarding and in something like clash Royale you can continue to attack as often as you want but that high reward the chess are inherently limited and I want to talk about that one specifically because I remember being in design meetings and hearing other designers say myself included actually I can't believe how blatant this chess limit is they're not even trying to hide it anymore and I want to talk about why that's brilliant because another cornerstone of healthy relationships that are designed to last is trust and consent now I know that those are heavy words but we as developers really want engagement after all we live in an engagement economy attention is essentially our coin so we really really want those players to like us so we try to get their attention and we don't always do it in a healthiest of ways now a lot of us are familiar with high csikszentmihalyi apologies for his work on flow but he also did a lot of work on taxonomy zuv attention though there are essentially two categories of attention one is voluntary we choose to attend and folk on something and the other one is compulsory which means our attention is essentially demanded by some sort of perceived emotional biological or social need now I want to point out that by definition compelling attention is non-consensual and for that reason compelling attention will always perform better in your a/b tests of course forcing someone to do something is going to get you the results you want more than letting them choose to do it and this is why we see these techniques all the time in games it's why we see them all the time on TV and it's why we see them all the time in our social feeds and this is repulsive this is using sensationalism and implied risk to force us to attend to something this shouldn't fury eight all of us this diminishes our agency and our autonomy as humans if those are the very things that make us human but the data the promise of profit is not permission for unethical action if you're going to treat data as permission to act immorally and unethically to put your business ahead of the people that you are supposed to be serving then I want you all to think about what the future is going to look like in this data-driven world if you use data as an excuse as a way to alleviate your own responsibilities in a situation that isn't creating a relationship this is 21st century enslavement we no longer need to hook people up to get their physical labor but we live in an engagement economy and we are stealing people's attention so I don't care what your data says data is a manifestation of action it's a means of tracking behavior and data is oblivious to the human condition just because you can do something just because something would make you more money doesn't mean that you should do it because regardless of how ubiquitous these techniques are they are fundamentally dark designs all dark design does is slowly erode trust and faith in people's autonomy over their time and will reduce people to just those animalistic impulses those things that we cannot control we are reducing people to animals we are removing their personhood and we're already starting to see the horrific results of this as our own capacity to focus our attention is lost to this constant barrage of alarm and fear in media we are sinking into a world ruled by those fears if you are at any of the UX talks these past two days one consistent theme was that when we are afraid we do not grow we do not learn and we do not flourish so think about what that future looks like this was supposed to be about gain so let's go to class right huh everyone was right they aren't trying to hide anything and in doing so they're actually giving players more control over whether or not they choose to attend to a game they're letting players decide whether or not engagement is worth it instead of obfuscating and disguising their demands for time when we're clear with our boundaries and limitations we're actually being more respectful we're being less deceitful more upfront and allowing informed negotiation that is what builds trust and faith over time II if it can be harder to stomach at first so let's talk about that harder to stomach let's talk about player perception of time now the role of time in free-to-play games is essentially a pacing tool it controls the consumption of content like any temporal art pacing is really vital to a well-designed experience but for games that depend heavily on developer created content it's also one of the only ways to survive which means we have a very large capacity to try to get that pacing in ways that aren't always healthy so how do we surface time in a way that perlier is perceived positively how do we integrate it into that healthy relationship we want to create there's a few different techniques for surfacing time there's direct timers and that's exactly what it sounds like a little two hour countdown there's indirect inclusion of time which is where something might take 200 mana and you generate 100 mana per hour again those are functionally identical they both delay your consumption of content for two hours what they feel and can feel very different one thing that affects the way timer feels is verisimilitude in context verisimilitude is a fancy way of saying does it fit with an existing player model if you have something like crops needing time to grow that fits with our existing mental model it's going to feel better than something like keys randomly sprouting every three hours the other difference between direct and indirect timers is that indirect timers actually let us have some autonomy over our time equity we build up that 200 mana and we don't necessarily have to use it on one specific thing we can use that investment of time that we have whatever way we want the final way to surface time is implicitly so this means that some mechanic in your game literally takes time to complete so something like just walking around and catching poke you on a Pokemon go takes time it takes time to move your body from one location to another and this used to be considered the golden kind of golden standard in console era but what it means is that we don't get any benefit from a game unless we are playing full paying full and complete attention to it and that arm doesn't always feel good either so essentially which I'm saying is what I'm saying is that none of these are specifically right it's all about how you use them not which one you use and some of them successful games ones that feel the best utilize all of these in different ways but because of direct timers tend to get that unusually bad reputation like they did in clash I want to point out another benefit of being completely upfront with how much time you have until your next piece of stimulus that's the creation of rhythm in ritual essentially if we're told every day that we can come back and get a little a little bit of new content that's going to help create that habituated cycle of engagement that's what we want and when ideally what we do is we layer those over time so we create pieces of content at different time intervals as those stacks you wind up with a steadily increasing curve that looks a lot like a flow curve this is awesome so the things that I mentioned previously were all usually either a moment-to-moment session or daily types of stimulus so I want to just point out a few examples of people who are doing longer time scale rituals relatively well in summoners war you have a bunch of other games you have things that change every day so if you need a specific resource you can say I need to come back on Wednesday in-game like Hollywood University leveling up characters is required to unlock new content but leveling up a character can take up to two weeks at later levels in games like ingress or Neopets which has been around for well over a decade you have different badges and forms of social signifiers that can take from half a year in this case to over a gear in the case of new events look at that you just have to have a snow bunny for a year then you have games like fall in London where rewards can stack over multiple years so when you come back the next year you actually get something that wasn't available to first year and taking this to its most extreme you can look at something like EVE Online where the total time to complete all skills is estimated between 18 and 25 years all right so 25 years is a really long time it's not something that we tend to talk about I've never heard someone look at that time scale in a design discussion unless I was the one instigating it by imagining a long-term relationship with players we can start surfacing little things that help prime them for the idea that maybe this game is worth more than just a few days or a week month of their time if they go in assuming something is going to be a quick quick fling that's probably going to be what their behavior is so I said the word surfacing so I want to point out that no matter how many of these rhythms you have if you don't surface them people can't anticipate them and they've done studies that have shown that people who take pictures of their food actually enjoy that food more specifically because they have that moment of appreciation and anticipation I don't know if you any of you guys remember what Christmas Eve was like as a small child but I was pretty sure it was going to last until I died so as you design remember to give them the ability to anticipate remember to surface things so that players know they exist and remember to do it in a way that's not really creepy if you start talking about being buried next to each other on the first date that might be a bit of a turn-off okay so how do you make anticipation a little bit more sustainable I talked about how variety in the pattern grabs our attention variability does the same thing for our anticipation and that's essentially because we're optimists if I say imagine a plate of spaghetti you're probably not imagining a few dry cracked strands on plate you're probably imagining that optimal version of spaghetti you probably imagine a heaping plate with a little bit of sauce and depending on what you like maybe a few meatballs so when there's variability and we know the potential outcomes we tend to aim for the the best one even if that is very very very rare now of course this has huge opportunities for abuse so again this is something that you can't just implement blindly you'll see one of the themes about this whole talk is actually taking responsibility for the decisions you make as designers and thinking about their impact on players and whether or not that's in a player's best interest okay so there's a lot of different ways to add variability one of the most effective quote unquote is variable ratio which means you tell people they're going to get something after a certain number of actions and you don't tell them how many actions that is and it always changes now that leads to the most engagement which means players will do that action again and again and again and again they'll binge right so that's the same behaviors we talked about earlier they'll binge and they'll burn out and that doesn't mean that variable ratio is bad it means that perhaps if you use variable ratio mechanics they should be for a weekend blitz event or one day a week you get this variable ratio because those spikes of engagement are enjoyable when you hit your 20th anniversary and Valentine's Day comes around that can be a fun time to spike your engagement to do things you don't normally do so again none of these things are inherently bad but you need to think very consciously about the effect on the overall player experience if you look at the worst implementation of variable rewards you get fixed interval which essentially means you tell people when they're going to get a reward and they tend not to engage as much until that time comes around that is something that is much gentler and something that could work as a through-line that's constantly present in your game ok so you do all of these Wow we are running out of time all right I'm going to switch this into quick mode so you have two solid cadence of contents and events it starts looking like a flow curve but even if we just give people a tiny little bit of stimulus they're still going to wind up with this huge hoard of it and that gets into all sorts of problems once you add social because your elder players are you can't ever catch up to them as a new player and that leads to all sorts of problems in this healthy kind of social ecosystem that we'll talk about a little bit later so let's he'll talk about how we can take that progress and turn it from something that's completely linear into something that has a little bit more loops this is my beautiful art thank you the first one is decay so decay is a form of maintenance which means the stack goes down over time and must be continuously boosted this is used in Kim Kardashian where if you don't come back to the game your partner will leave you it is a horrific experience especially because they ask you for premium currency to resolve this but again the mechanic is not negative by default in something like Neopets they use verisimilitude in context just like I mentioned before to make it feel better we're used to in the real world pets needing food so of course it makes sense that I need to consistently feed my pet durability is basically user driven decay this tends to feel a little bit better because instead of decay being driven by time it's driven by things that we do as players a great example is tools in Minecraft the next one is bounded decay so this essentially means that a stack goes down over time up to a point this was something that we saw a lot in old RPGs progress getting from point A to point B once you hit a save point the progress you've made towards point B couldn't be revoked only the only the progress between that save point and the next one could the next type of decays market-driven decay you see this lot in stock stock markets and style what this means is that the actual value the actual kind of properties of an item don't change but the value changes because of the perspective of others so you could have the hottest jacket in the world one week and then the next week it's out of style the colors wrong and the cut doesn't look so good anymore next type of decay is other driven decay so this is basically zero-sum I think you all know about this and in the final type of decay that I want to talk about is mandatory decay so we're seeing this a lot in Idol games where you actually have to give up all of the progress that you've made in order to continue you do get a little bit of meta currency at the end which then fuels into your next run through the game the interesting thing about this is it gives players control over the pacing of their own experience in a really valuable way eventually as you're moving through that first progress bar in an idol game the return on your time starts to get worse and worse and worse you decide when it's no longer worth it and when you do you exchange all that progress you've got given for that new meta currency that also shucks you back to the beginning of the progress bar which as I mentioned before tends to be that period where we get much higher volume of stimulus it feels really good I also want to point out that idle games have some of the best retention in the single-player market it's a good example of how when we actually give autonomy back to players they reward us with their attention over time okay and progress is just one form of satisfaction there's lots of different taxonomy of satisfaction perma ocean self-determination theory but progress is always a part of those theories and the other parts is always consistent is this idea of relatedness so I want to talk finally about communities over time any game that is lasted for more than a few years has relied on either algorithmic content like solitaire or social content and whether that's a co-op game or an MMO or something as time sports the content the stimulus doesn't come from the basic systems it comes from the fact that other people are using them each individual in the world is this infinite well of potential content and once you can harness that you've got the ability to generate content forever it's very exciting so how do we make relationships form there was a great report out of project horseshoe this year that broke down some of the fundamental pillars of friendship I highly recommend that you read it's based on some psychology studies from the 1950s that have held up over time which is always exciting the first thing that you need is proximity so this means people need to see each other frequently so if you've got millions and millions of players you need to find a way to shard or subsection your player set so that people encounter each other again and again when people start to recognize each other that builds affinity the next thing is similarity so this means I need some form of self-expression that other people can relate to this can be as simple as something like team mystic or valor and Pokemon and it goes all the way down to kind of complex badges and signaling tools and user customization the next thing is reciprocity so we need to be able to form a symbiotic relationship which means I can do something for you you can do something for me this doesn't mean to be item exchanges this is something as simple as a chat window I don't know how excited you guys get when you're talking to someone that you love or respected admire and you see the little dots at gchat start to move that's very exciting that's a form of anticipation stimulus then the final pillar is this idea of disclosure which is Simplot essentially means that I can take risks with you I can express more of myself with you and those are some of the underpinnings for things like trust and compassion and empathy which should be familiar as things that create longer term relationships now before we can do any of those we have to be able to communicate essentially if people can't communicate their ideas and their feelings in your game they're not going to be able to build complex relationships it doesn't matter if this is private messages message boards chat rooms the ability to communicate the fundamental necessity and if you can get that into your game the less people are going to turn to outside services which means the more your game becomes less of an activity and more of a place to hang out relax and exist together once you've got that under foundation you can start to look for signs of societies and it turns out they look a lot like real life you have social activities cultural activities economic activities and the great news is that you don't need to build incredibly complex systems in order to evoke some of these social behaviors we as social creatures inherently tend to produce these even with basic systems as soon as you have a power curve for instance you can start getting different political elements if I am more powerful than you I can exert some sort of will or force I can lead you as soon as you get public spaces and the ability for self-expression you start getting cultural elements aesthetics fashions if people can proclaim things in chat you start getting morality and belief systems as soon as you have item exchange you start getting economies you can do charity banking investments and as soon as you have some form of player customization you start getting things like group identities specialization celebrities that you recognize and these are all really really cool things but what's that kind of through line if we look at player customization and I hope that the I hope that it's bright enough here what this guilt has done is they've all worn a black Tabard with some yellow pixels on it but those aren't as yellow pixels for this group those yellow pixels imply a shared history a shared set of values shared trust and understanding those yellow pixels have meaning meaning means that an item has greater value or greater importance than what the raw materials imply meaning is psychological value not physical value in the same way that attention is our psychological energy as opposed to our physical energy so to create meaning players must invest time and attention into something and if they do that together it works as a sort of multiplier that's why we have religion and why we love our countries sometimes and so if we want attention one of the best and healthiest ways that we can get it is to enable social structures that generate meaning this creates this beautiful upward spiral meaning baguettes attention which generates more meaning and once you have that escalation you have the best underlying foundation increased engagement over time meaning enriches life it's this innate human need and the more we can facilitate it the longer our product is going to last this is the reason that Facebook is still going we fill it with meaning we fill it with our friends and our photographs our idle chatter we fill it with memories and little anecdotes we fill it with meaning and that investment is very hard to leave behind when we give something our time and attention when we create meaning together with someone and when we're treated with respect and love and return that's the true recipe for long-term relationships so please be good earn the attention of your players don't demand it be trustworthy communicate clearly and transparently with your players find a balance in the relationship that works for both of you be farsighted don't follow these short-term spikes and don't don't believe in a long-term success of malicious interaction patterns plan a journey that's going to last for years and for the love of God please do better as we design games that can last for years we need to migrate from being storytellers and content creators into engineers of new societies societies where people trust each other or at least know the risks of wandering into wild territory societies where people can play together and challenge each other and unite together to form these complex social structures we need to be architects city planners psychologists and anthropologists and we need to look towards the horizon instead of staring at our feet we live in an engagement economy whether we like that or not attention is our coin so please be mindful of where you spend yours and what you're incentivizing when you spend your attention you are literally paying attention and people are going to use that value that they get from you and please be honorable to those that you ask for their attention our society right now is a reflection of the systems that we've created so go and create systems that are better create systems that are going to help our world thrive not just right now but over time thank you [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: GDC

Views: 25,906

Rating: 4.8978724 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, game design, ux, attention span

Id: gIrfxZ4KbOA

Length: 30min 8sec (1808 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/BlissnHilltopSentry]

Good talk, nice to see people talking about methods to increase player retention without being unethical.

[u/tbone28]

Great talk! While working on games for clients I have been doubling down on this kind of information for the last two years. Some of the highlights that impressed me the most was just how cohesively she presented 'dark design' and it's inevitable collapse as a game design strategy. I have seen so many games starve their players of rest by creating ever more complex skinner boxes leaving behind a trail of dead bodies of past players.