I must start with a disclaimer. I am not an academic. What I am is someone with a psychology degree, experience in a decision lab, and someone who "knows just enough to be dangerous". If you are here for an academic work, you may find the work of Chris Summerfield and his team more to your liking (http://decisions.psy.ox.ac.uk/). This said, what I am interested in discussing here are my own mental heuristics of how decision making applies to gaming - I hope you find them useful as thought exercises, but please don’t expect me to be submitting them to Nature any time soon. Right, let us begin... Decisions are everywhere in games. Often cited design advice is that good games are a series of interesting decisions, but we rarely dig into what we mean by “decision”. We often use the word just for conscious decisions that we make, for example, leaving a thoughtful or angry comment below; however, if we take a psychology definition, it is “the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several alternative possibilities”. This is immensely broad, and covers more than it may appear on the surface. Let's take killing Toriel, the player character's adoptive mother in Undertale, as an example of the layered decisions that occur for any action:
Decisions happen every time we classify, every time we act, and every time we perceive. I don’t find this particularly exciting on its own (broader definitions generally provide less value), but it does allow for an interesting scale if we look within: You can see here I’ve classified decisions as either “automatic” (we do them without thinking) or “conscious” (where we feel we make an active “choice”). It’s easy to see this is a crude classification - speed is not always the main factor, and for many, some of the “slow” decisions may be fast/automatic. This brings me onto the main point for this article: Practice makes priming, priming makes automation For those comfortable playing video games with a controller, “pressing X” is easy. We think “I need to press X” and then we do it, rather than having to decide where “X” is, what an “X” is, or which finger to use. We have “pressed X” so many times that the smaller decisions required have become automatic; our brains are “primed” to press the buttons we need for a game, and so all of the little decisions required fire off so quickly we don’t even perceive them. If you have ever passed a controller to someone who doesn’t play controller-based games (or doesn’t play games at all), you will quickly see that your ease of “pressing X” is learned, not innate. When I say “the brain is primed”, I mean it on a physical level. The way modern media tends to talk about brains, it is easy to imagine them as lumps of neurons not doing much until a stimulus comes along; but our brains are constantly changing both the way neurons are connected, and the activation of those neurons. This manifests in two primary ways, building the quick pathway between wanting to “press X” and it happening instantaneously:
Someone who hasn’t played with a controller won’t have the strengthened connections or the context, making “pressing X” much harder. To use another example, playing a high-skill game against an expert (be it League of Legends or speed chess) can feel impossible, as the expert seems to move faster than you can think. This is because, in a way, they are; they have practiced enough that moves you have to think about are automatic for them. Switching to the perspective of a designer, this means that the task of moving people up skill curves in our games is partly about moving as many slow physical/boring processes into automatic processing as quickly and smoothly as possible. This can be helped with a number of aspects:
These tips are not requirements for good game design, merely suggestions to ease the learning curve. As designers, we must consider what to use at different stages - if you streamline too much decision-making in your game, players can feel they have nothing left to learn and can get bored. I would recommend these processes are used mostly for the parts of games you don’t want players to be bogged down by, particularly the physical elements of computer games and the “core rules” of board games; leaving the more “high-concept” decisions/strategies trickier and murkier (and more interesting). To conclude, let me rephrase an old saying: “Easy to learn, hard to master”
becomes “Easy to automate the basics, hard to master the fun stuff"
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