 | In the newbie’s shoesSeptember 19th, 2006 |
I think one of the hardest tricks in the world of game design is to put yourself in the shoes of the player. It’s particularly hard when we’re designing games for an audience that isn’t like us — and the audience that is usually least like us is the newbie.
There’s a blog of relatively recent vintage called, appropriately enough, Newbie, that illustrates this. It’s the experiences of a 46-year-old named Tom Miller who is not a gamer. He has trouble with puzzle games, and The Sims 2 utterly defeats him.
I strongly encourage designers to go back to the first post and work their way through the narrative chronologically. It’s a great illustration of how much expertise counts in the games we make today — even the “mass market” ones.
One of the common tactics for helping solve this problem is “tissue testing.” This is the practice of bringing in a group of testers to try out your game while you stand behind them saying nothing, taking notes. What you invariably find is that they approach the game in ways you never imagined. In UO, people couldn’t figure out how to chat, even though it was just typing. Recently, I had occasion to speak to developers of a chat social space, and they told me that in fact, not knowing how to chat was a huge barrier for people, even though they themselves looked at the screen and thought it couldn’t be more obvious.
The reason it’s called “tissue testing,” of course, is that you use these people once, like a tissue, then never use them again. You can only have a first impression, a first learning curve, once.
I had a puzzle game I did once which made use of a somewhat unusual screen layout. Once you understood what was going on, it was easy to understand (and in fact, I ended up very happy with it). But that unusual screen layout was a tough barrier to get past. I pretty much always had to verbally explain it to whoever I was showing the game to. And that’s the kiss of death. It means that something is not obvious or intuitive enough. As soon as the input the game is giving you is “noise” to the user, you lose them. I never did crack the tutorial mode for that game, even though I think it would probably appeal to a lot of folks.
I have this problem frequently with little puzzle games I make, actually, because I am always trying to come up with new mechanics. The problem with new mechanics is that nobody knows how to play them.
Prompted by a recent comment here on the blog, I decided to explore making games based on Karp’s 21 NP-complete problems. The one that I decided to try tackling first was based on set packing. In this game, players draw cards or tiles from a bag, and each card or tile has on it one, two or three colors. The player is trying to build sets where each set has one given color on every card in the set, but has no repeats from any of the other colors. There’s wrinkles in the actual game, of course, such as being able to trade tiles, cashing in sets, and so on.
The problems with the game design right now, though, are partly just of interface. We’ve not yet played a match where someone didn’t misbuild a set. And the reason is in large part because my first test set of pieces consisted of little square bits of card with lists of colors on them, and my second test set is round wooden tiles with colors on them.
What the game really needs is cards, with each color always in the same place so that when you lay them down you can tell at a glance whether you have any repeats in your stack.
I’ve toyed with turning this into an arcade puzzler, but the interface and learning curve issues jump out at you even more. In a board game, people are willing to at least glance at the rules once. A casual puzzle game has maybe five seconds to persuade the user that they know what they are doing. I’ve been turning the idea over in my head, and I think I have come to the conclusion that the real challenge here isn’t whether the game would be fun (I am pretty sure it would be) but whether or not you could actually convey what to do to the user without using a scrap of text.
The one benefit to working with outre game ideas like this, though is that you yourself are perpetually in the role of utter newbie. And that can only help with the problems that someone like Tom Miller faces. The more you can you yourself be lost and clueless when facing your basic game experience, the more likely you are to empathize with the real newbie who comes to it cold, and know how to give them a helping hand.
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Knowing that this blog has a relatively small audience, I am always tremendously grateful to those who link to it and who send in comments. Sony game designer Raph Koster recently discussed Newbie on his blog
Raph Koster’s post
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[...] I just found it refreshing that New Zealand actually asks someone who works with games to analyze these things, instead of handing it off to the CDC (and thus, by implication, assert that video games a disease to be controlled). As Raph recently pointed out, there is a lot of assumed knowledge about video games that you can’t just pick up in a few hours. [...]
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