Last week I stumbled across
this fascinating article by John Hopson, a game designer at Microsoft with a doctorate in behavioral and brain sciences. In the article Hopson outlines a few fundamentals of behavioral psychology and how they can be used by game designers to keep players hooked.
Hopson's ideas may be a little frightening if you're the kind of person who thinks that the fact that people are sacrificing days or even months of their lives to working on their virtual Facebook farm or leveling up in World of Warcraft portends another dark ages for humanity.
The fundamentals of behavioral psychology, however, can be applied to any kind of experience we can imagine. And the extent to which the experience is meaningful and fulfilling to the participants, and even our society in general, is only limited by the intention of the designers.The yin and the yang of behavioral psychology are rewards and contingencies. Rewards reinforce the activities you want to encourage. And contingencies are the rules that govern when those rewards are given out.
The contingency schedules can be based on either quantity of activity, a Ratio Schedule, or on time, an Interval Schedule. These two approaches can achieve different results.
If you want to see sustained steady engagement, then the best approach is a Variable Ratio Schedule. In this approach the number of activities required to trigger a reward changes randomly, so the first time the player may have to kill 10 monsters to get an extra life, but the next time they only have to kill 5. The promise of the next reward is always on the horizon.
Interval schedules, in which rewards are given out after the player has been playing for a set amount of time, can also be variable in order to sustain engagement. Though, unlike a variable ratio schedule where there is always an activity for the player to do, interval schedules lack that initial motivator in the moments directly after a reward has been given.
There's lots more good detail in the article, and I recommend you read it for yourself.
We talk a lot about designing for engagement, but there's a lot more than just compelling ideas or entertainment that comes into play when you are trying to motivate a person to invest their time and energy in anything that they aren't forced to do.
Once we've chosen a great creative idea, we should start planning the actions we want people to take, the rewards that we can offer, and the rules we will use to decide how rewards are doled out, and allow those variables to shape the overall design.
