Monday 19 January 2015

Working with the fear of missing out - The Elder Scrolls Online special.

Time for another game design article! This time, I'll talk about a topic that is very relevant in modern society, which is the phenomenon of "non-commitment." It essentially means "when a person never commits themselves to a particular choice, so that every option is perpetually open to them." This time around, I'll be using The Elder Scrolls Online as my prime example for a good solution.


As  usual, I'm going to start off the article with a bit of reading-music, for those of you who like a backing track to your studies. As we're doing a bit of an Elder Scrolls special, I thought it fitting to use Jeremy Soule's music this time around:



A few generations back, it used to be that you grew up to take over the job of your parents, but now you have to choose for yourself. The choices (if you live in Denmark, at least) are virtually endless. But what does that do to our minds, when we're suddenly granted such an important responsibility to commitment, yet so many choices?

As you might have guessed from the term "non-commitment", people tend to suspend themselves, never being able truly commit to one thing: Committing themselves to one choice, is synonymous with letting go of another. This is true whether the individual acknowledges it consciously or subconsciously. It is the fear if missing out that keeps them suspended.

Unfortunately, this idea of suspending oneself in the choice of not making a choice, is a really massive flaw in our psychology: Time passes no matter what we do. However, most people grasp time entirely from a subjective standpoint, when they evaluate its passing (see "How to Christmas spirit" for a more in-depth explanation of the subjective passing of time). Yet you'll miss out on everything if you do not commit yourself to something.

Now if only I had a time machine to demonstrate it with.

To turn this in the direction of game design, many games are based around a series of meaningful choices. Whether its a moral choice, picking a character-class or choosing your companions, the choices are there. Mind that the problem only seems to persist in games, where the users are aware that they need to spend a lot of time dealing with the effects of their choices. This is very common in role playing games, particularly MMOs, or any other game where your choices will be reflected in your experience for a long period of time.

More casual titles do not tend to suffer from these issues, as they only require user interaction for a small period of time, or contain no significant choices.

The theoretical stuff:


In a well-designed game, the users quickly commit themselves to their choices. They do this much more confidently than they would ever pick something in real life - like when they have to choose a career path.

Oh god, the red beans are forming a worker's union!

But why is the virtual world so different to people?

The simple answer is: The games that make people behave this way, knows how to treat their users with care. It used to be that games could be extremely complex to boot, yet you'd still find a fair share of users enjoying the process of understanding the whole system. These people still exist, but the size of their audience is dwarfed in comparison to the younger ones, who suffer from having suspended themselves in this "choice limbo" in real life. That forces us to evaluate how we can include the bigger group, without letting go of the complexity that the smaller group has grown to love.

The most common way to tackle this issue, is through tutorials and procedural introduction of content. You can still make advanced systems, if you just introduce their individual elements one at a time; If you give people one piece at a time, they always just have that one new piece of information to reflect upon. If they have more than one new piece to deal with at once, they might overlook the functionality of one of them.

But as long as the users feel competent enough to make projections about what causes what, your design is generally in the safe-zone. When evaluating if your users can grasp this "action/reaction"-relation in your design, think about whether or not all of the game's elements have been presented in an isolated instance, before used alongside something else.

Another way that many games deal with the issue of indecision, is simply by letting the users have it all. Unlike real life, games are often a tangible, limited whole. If you just feed the users one piece at a time, they'll eventually have passed through the entirety of your system, never having had to make a choice in the first place. A lot of people will call this "too much hand-holding," however, and it will make for an very linear experience. What we want to know, is how we can let the users have these complex choices and be able to deal with them as well.

I don't think an explanation is necessary.

Again; to really overcome the problem, you must design your system to segment the experience into separate, tangible pieces. Every interaction that occurs, must first occur on its own, before occurring in tandem with other interactions. Use this as a rule of thumb, if you ever want to introduce something new.

However, even as we take these precautions to make sure that people understand the individual elements, the real danger lies within having too high a density in "the number of impactful choices that occur at the same time, at any one point in the user experience." When ascertaining impactful means, we need to look at it subjectively. Something that has impact, is something that behaves unexpectedly:

When a user is faced with multiple choices, where the outcome of each is relatively unpredictable, we observe two simultaneous negatives occurring within the mind of the user:
  1. I don't know enough about this choice to commit myself to it, as the effects are uncertain.
  2. I don't know enough about the other choices to exclude them from my personal interests.
If the users ever establish this kind of relationship with a set of choices, they are going to fatigue, eventually. Many people, after committing themselves to a choice made with the above points in mind, will also be in a constant state of curiosity and regret that they did not choose the other, thinking "what if." This can arguably be used as a driver for replayability in some games, but it might be bad in very long-term experiences that require commitment for the users to truly experience the game's content properly (namely MMOs).


Hold on to your hats, because here's a theoretical explanation of how you should look at user-progression in your game:

You can ensure the integrity of the flow of the user-experience, by examining it as a chart of occurring instances of choice, as well as weighing the importance of each choice, based on previous exposure to similar choices - or exposure to the possible consequences of said choices, before committing to them (in other words, telling the user that; "doing this may/will cause that to happen"). This enables you as a designer, to see where an overload might occur, where the user doesn't know what to commit themselves to, because they lack information.

The practical stuff:


That got really convoluted, so here's how you should do it in practice: 

It can be done very simply, by making a flow-chart of possible user progressions through your system's environment. By listing everything that your users have been exposed to through certain paths, you force yourself to recognize when new elements are introduced. You can even do this with completely non-linear sandbox games, simply by looking at how a character might evolve through its interactions with the environment. Just ask yourself "what can the user possibly do at this stage?" and write the answers down as connected bubbles in a flow-chart. This will help you visualize what elements of play are relevant when.

You can go a long way by examining your game this way, but you will only really know the outcome of your design, once you've tasked a group of users - over time - to gauge their experiences. But an even more effective way to get the information you need, is to data-mine how many "do-overs" each user has: Did they quit without saving? Do they have multiple saves on the same character? How many characters have they made? Did they reset their progress and at what stages did the resets occur? If things like these are happening often, your users might be suffering from non-commitment, and so they might quit half-way through.

And often discover things you weren't even looking for in the first place.

The biggest problem with overcoming non-commitment as a developer, is that time is such a big factor. And to make matters worse, users will often not suffer from this problem if they know that they have to start over anyway, when the game is released. Offering some form of persistence through the testing and into the final release, could help alleviate this issue.

Example-time!


Now we've spent a while talking about the problem and how to approach it, so I believe it's time we take a look at some existing solutions. This time in particular, I am taking a look at The Elder Scrolls Online (I'll refer to this as TESO from now on). While we won't be looking at what design-processes were used to create these systems, we will take a look at how they affect the user experience.

Respeccing:


So what does TESO do, to deal with these issues? Let's begin by looking at a very simple example, which is not uncommon in role playing games: "Respeccing."

If you've never heard of respeccing before, it means resetting your character's progress, while reclaiming the points you've invested. In other words, if you've spent 5 skill-points on skills that you no longer want to use, respeccing gives you those points back to be reinvested elsewhere. This means that the users always have this mental concept of "my choices have consequence but are reversible," granting them the freedom to experiment.

The average user-experience when starting a new game.

However, TESO takes this one step further, by having three stages of point-implementation and respeccing, instead of just one.

You see, while it is typical of role playing games to have two separate types of points for character progression (the second being attribute points, which typically affect certain statistics on your character), TESO introduces something called "skill morphing." A skill morph is an upgrade, that adds extra mechanics to your existing skill. To attain a morph for each skill, it requires an additional skill-point, and the original skill has to have been used for a moderate amount of time. This is brilliant for several reasons:

In terms of respeccing, the system can be broken up into three parts. While some games require you to invest a hefty sum of gold to reset everything, TESO lets you choose whether you want to reset your attribute-points, all of your skill-points, or just reset your skill-morphs for way less gold.

This means that for every step of personal commitment that exists in this system, there is an action to reverse it.

Now I can get my skillpoints back AND afford wizard-college!

The only exceptions to this rule would be when you choose a class (which is irreversible), define the anatomical features of your character, pick an alliance or perform certain moral choices in the story line. But if you consider the fact that people can have several characters on the same account, you'll see many of these issues - if not solved - marginally alleviated.

The second reason while this system is so brilliant, is thanks to the mechanic; that skills have to be used for a certain amount of time, before unlocking the morph. This forces the users to come to terms with how the skill works. Once you've actually reached the point at which you're asked what you want to morph your skill into, you've already come to terms with how you prefer using it. This makes it much clearer what the different morphs can potentially add to your play style, making the choice easier.

Multi-role classes:

Now here is something that I really like about TESO. Although picking a class and a race, locks you down with a certain pool of skills to choose from, the game itself is completely open with what items you can interact with and use. Which in turn means that every class can essentially fulfill any role in a team.

If you're not familiar with the classical roles in role playing games, they are typically sorted like this:

  • Damage dealer - specializes in dealing as much damage as possible
  • Tank - tries to take the punches for everyone else, as a buffer
  • Healer - keeps everyone alive, especially the tank

That's the typical assortment. In most role playing games, picking a class would often lock you into one of these roles. This means that before you choose, you have to already have some idea of what your preferred play-style is. But in TESO, you are allowed to discover your play-style through experimentation. Any combination of existing elements in the trio above, is possible, regardless of your choice of class and race.

Lightning-powers and a giant hammer? Yes sir.

With a system this dynamic, we remove a lot of the pressure and consequences that such an early choice would otherwise carry with it. And by letting the characters become good at everything, if they spend enough time practicing, it shifts the choice from permanence to being a question of investing time. This is something that people can handle much better, because they miss out on much less. While some combinations of classes and roles might fare better than others, the fact alone that the possibilities are there, really helps defeat non-commitment.

The champion system:

This system is not actually in the game yet, but the premise of it is so closely tied into this article's subject, that I just have to include it. I'll start by outlining the system itself:

Originally in TESO, once you reached level 50, any level gained afterwards would count as a "veteran rank." Veteran ranks are essentially like character levels, but harder to gain and give a much more significant boost to your character's attributes. But now veteran ranks are on their way out.

To replace them comes the champion system. Now, when you reach level 50, instead of gaining veteran ranks, you gain champion points. These points are spent in the champion rank system, to advance your character. This is where it gets really interesting:

The champion system consists of a total of nine "pools," each containing passive skills for you to invest your points into. But these nine pools are separated into three major categories, each containing three of these pools each. These categories are thematically reflecting the three major attributes in the game:


  • Magicka
  • Health
  • Stamina

Whenever you gain a point - and this part is very important - it will be dedicated to one of these categories. This happens in a cycle: If the first point you gain is locked into the Magicka category, the next one might be dedicated to the Health category, while the third one would then be dedicated to Stamina, before starting the cycle over.

If only real life skills were colour-coded.

As you can see in the illustration above, there are the three categories. The genius of this structure and the way you have to cycle through it, is that it focuses the decision-making process of the users to the individual categories.

If we look at the categories individually, we have the three pools contained within. Each of these pools are segmented into three tiers - each tier containing a number of passive skills. In order to unlock the next tier in a pool, the user will have to spend a certain amount of points into the previous tier. This segmentation further helps with the decision-making, simply by restricting access to a certain tier early on.

Combine the three primary categories with the tier-progression on the individual pools, and you make a very "easy-to-think-about"-system that entices the users to cut loose and experiment. And you can still preview the later tiers, letting the more advances users plan ahead - you just can't invest in them right away.

To top it all off, points earned in this system are account-wide. However, the points spent are only spent on the individual characters (they are still available for other characters to be used differently). This means that you can invest your points with a complete disregard for whether or not it benefits your other characters, once again leaving you with one less thing to worry about.

Preventing this from happening.

While this system was designed to balance user progress, you can clearly see how this ties into helping against user indecision and non-commitment. But one of the primary reasons that the system is as viable as it is, is the fact that it only becomes active when people have already reached the maximum level.

This way you can describe what the skills do in a very concise way, as we can suddenly rely on the users knowing a great deal about the system already. Concise information is very important when you want to ensure clarity in your communication, so the fact that we can cook the info down to not contain further explanations, helps the decision-making process even further.

Rounding off:


Alright, time to summarize what we've learned:

The world is changing, and these changes affect us. The fear of missing out, causing non-commitment to significant decisions, is a pretty big issue to recent generations in the modern world. But while it is problematic when it comes to real life decisions, we can use it as a force for good in game design.

By knowing what triggers these issues, we can look at what equates the opposite and use that in our design. In this case, segmentation is key. The most important thing to consider, is where the "mental frontier" of a particular user might be, when they perform certain interactions within the system. What this means, is to look at previous interactions, so we can make assumptions about the user's current understanding. 

 Realizing what the users know, helps us on two different fronts: It helps us cook down the information we deliver to an "as-needed" basis, but also makes us realize from a development standpoint, if there are any potential holes in the knowledge of the users, which might otherwise be required to understand what is happening at specific moments in the user-experience.

If information is missing, we have to present it in an isolated instance, before representing it in a broader context.

When we have ensured that our design adheres to these rules, we must always examine the amount of possible interactions that can occur at the same time. If too many options are presented simultaneously, the indecision kicks in. Information and interaction density are the two primary rules we must look at, to prevent non-commitment-driven user behaviors.

Keep in mind that a very large, complex system can still exist - just as demonstrated by TESO. But then you must present your content in bits and pieces, in a sequence that plays on information that has previously delivered.

Defining user information:


Now I've mentioned "what the users know" on several occasions. Mind that this refers to "what you have previously told the users, through interactions with your systems." Do not confuse this with what we can assume certain cultures to know beforehand. While culture is still important, as long as you design for an audience that has the same cultural background as you do (the western market, in my case), you can inherently make assumptions from your own experiences. 

But knowing your target audience is a whole topic in its own right, so we'll leave it at that.

Bonus video:


What's an article without a little extra inspiration. Here's a short video about the fear of missing out, for you extra curious people:


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