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 Developing Meaningful Player Character Arcs in Branching Narrative

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 Developing Meaningful Player Character Arcs in Branching Narrative

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March 21, 2013 Page 1 of 3
A little background: During my years at BioWare, I found that despite the enormous amount of talent housed in the writing department, there were certain subjects for which we lacked a common language of craft -- a clear and broadly applicable way to discuss what worked, what didn't, and why. This article is an effort to remedy that problem for one particular subject. Due credit goes to my former BioWare colleagues Cameron Harris (now of ArenaNet), who provided feedback on my notes for a previous iteration of this article; and Daniel Erickson (now of Bluepoint Games), who reviewed a near-final version and suggested I take it to Gamasutra. Thanks to Greg Rucka as well, whose on character arcs in Mass Effect helped inspire elements of this discussion.
Let's start with the basics.

Stories -- traditional stories, archetypal stories -- are about protagonists who go through difficult circumstances and who change or resist change because of those circumstances.

The change can be positive or negative. The protagonists can be heroic or villainous. The circumstances can be dramatic or humorous. Sometimes the "change" isn't so much a change of nature as it is the gradual unveiling of true character and motivations. But while there are exceptions, the sweeping statement above covers most stories pretty well.

Star Wars is about a farm boy who's caught up in a galactic war that pushes him to find the inner strength he's always lacked. Breaking Bad is about a science teacher who engages in an enterprise that changes him from an underachieving family man into a criminal mastermind. Friends is a sitcom about a group of young adults who are forged by the tumult of their jobs and personal lives into more comfortable, confident, mature members of society.

Most video games (particularly decision-based RPGs such as Star Wars: The Old Republic, Mass Effect, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Alpha Protocol, et al, which are this post's focus) are, structurally speaking, very traditional narratives. An RPG typically features a single protagonist throughout who makes difficult choices under trying circumstances.

Yet many RPGs fail to deliver a compelling character arc for the protagonist. The reason is clear enough: When a player is given control over the protagonist and the choices he or she makes, that player isn't (and shouldn't be) focused on the storytelling craft of generating a dramatic arc. Instead, the player is engaged in the moment, fulfilling whatever fantasy or aspiration drove the player to buy the game in the first place ("I want to be cool like James Bond" or "I want to be the scariest criminal around.")

It's very likely that the player will make the same sorts of choices throughout the game -- the player who starts playing Mass Effect as a heroic Commander Shepard who frowns on human xenophobia is probably going to make mostly positive Paragon choices throughout -- unless given a reason otherwise. The player who begins Deus Ex: Human Revolution as a brutal killing machine is doing so because that's the character he or she is keen on playing. Why would the player even want to change?

That's fine, of course, but it limits the nature of the story being told. There can be no tragedy, redemption, growth, or catharsis when a player unthinkingly maintains the same approach throughout a story. Nonetheless, I believe a transformative character arc is very much achievable in a branching narrative RPG, and results in a highly rewarding experience.

So if most players aren't ordinarily inclined toward change -- if players act as change-resistant human beings, not authors of a script looking to generate the most drama -- how do we develop a genuine character arc? And how do we dramatize the protagonist's inner life in such a way that the arc isn't merely in the player's imagination, but grounded by clear in-game results?

How do we change a game from a thought experiment ("I want to be a good guy soldier") to a genuinely immersive exploration of character?

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Developing Meaningful Player Character Arcs in Branching Narrative

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Can you deliver both choice and a character art that has depth and meaning in the same game? Alexander M. Freed, formerly of BioWare, explores the possibility space, drawing from examples from existing games and adding in his own ideas.

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra's community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
This post originally appeared in two parts on Point Line Square.
It's been several years since I first talked about games and attention. At the time, I noted that games compete for our attention with other games, other media, and interruptions from friends, family and work. Despite all the advances in friction reduction over the past decade, games are hard pressed to thrive - nevermind get noticed - in this noisy media environment.

Looking ahead, the trendline is not positive. Content creation costs keep dropping, so the amount of content available keeps rising. Our choices are unlimited but our time is not.

Traditional solutions to the attention problem fall into two buckets:

Reduce friction (a.k.a. the casual solution)

Add depth (a.k.a. the hardcore solution)

In general, good casual design affects a player's willingness to play, while good hardcore design affects their desire to play.
The Casual Solution
The friction reduction method requires games to:

Have few barriers to entry

Be commitment friendly

Be attention span agnostic

Have a short build-try-fail loop

That's all good. However, while these characteristics reduce friction and increase a player's willingness to play, they don't actually generate a desire to play (or to keep playing). In an effort to meet the requirements above and make the game more accessible, most designers simplify the game's mechanics and the way those mechanics combine, effectively reducing the play dynamics as well (in the MDA sense). The result is a shallow product with a small possibility space and little long term retention.

Casual games succeed by demanding less from the consumer - they don't ask you to sacrifice attention you might prefer to devote to other things, complementing rather than competing with other media. The best of these products tend to have large audiences with low unit economics and short user life cycles.
The Hardcore Solution
The depth approach, on the other hand, means the game:

Has extensive and varied play dynamics

Has a lot of content to consume

Gives the player a reason to make a deep personal investment (often through persistence, identity and relationships).

Again, a good list. Games of this type tend to create a strong desire to play. Unfortunately, they also erect a lot of barriers to someone's willingness to play. To create a wide range of play dynamics, many designers simply pile on the game mechanics (i.e. they keep layering on the rules and systems). That's a lot for someone to learn and then remember from session to session, and with a lot of mechanics to comprehend, 100% focus is required. The only players willing to do that are the few that will make a large personal investment in the product. The result is a deep product with a large possibility space and great long term retention, but it bounces most consumers at the start.

Hardcore products succeed by being more compelling than other media - they ask for your undivided attention and tell you it's better spent on them than competing options. High quality hardcore products tend to have small audiences with high unit economics and long user life cycles.
Hardcore + Casual
There's nothing inherent to these two approaches that makes them incompatible, but you can see how solving for one can easily lead to problems with the other (it doesn't help that, as an industry, we've set up a false dichotomy that places casual and hardcore products at opposite ends of the same spectrum; mid-core is the latest iteration along these lines).

Much of the problem starts with the game's mechanics, where most casual games have simple mechanics and simple dynamics, and most hardcore games have complex mechanics and complex dynamics. There's a reason for that: they're much easier to design and balance (simple dynamics imply a small possibility space, which presents fewer outcomes to balance; complex mechanics make it easier to isolate systems for independent tuning, particularly when dealing with the large possibility spaces associated with complex dynamics).

What we really want are games with simple mechanics and complex dynamics, because simple mechanics are easy to learn and remember, while complex dynamics are deep and engaging.

How? Make better use of emergence in our designs.
Attention and Emergence
To enable emergent play, a small set of core components are recombined to produce an unlimited number of novel play dynamics. Here's what we get with this approach:

Simple and easy to understand game mechanics (ideal for casual play)

A massive possibility space, with complex dynamics (ideal for hardcore play)

Games of this type avoid rule complexity (and burdensome learning curves/commitment) by working with only a few mechanics. The rich output gives the game legs and enables deep, engaging play.

The classic example is Go, a game with only two rules but an incredibly varied output in terms of games and play styles. A modern example would be Magic: The Gathering and other CCGs. More recent: Little Big Planet, Minecraft, The Sims.

Examples of games that are minimally emergent, if at all: Pac-man, Heavy Rain, the board game Life.

Most game designers are already familiar with emergent concepts, and indeed, all games have some degree of emergent play. But we tend to shy away from designing heavily emergent systems because the large possibility space is difficult to balance (many designs introduce top-down constraints to control this, like classes in RPGs, but that simply reduces the possibility space and undermines the benefits of an emergent system).

It's also important to recognize that emergence by itself will not help a game attract players interested in both casual and hardcore play. To be effective:

You really have to constrain the number of core elements and their respective functions. Many games are deeply emergent but they get there with a crazy amount of rules and systems that undermine any potential for casual play.

More output doesn't mean more choice. Farmville has great emergence in terms of user expression, but it's functionally meaningless. Backyard Monsters' non-orthogonal design elements lead to a relatively small set of strategic choices (a few dominant play strategies).

Emergence doesn't automatically mean accessible and deeply engaging. You still have to avoid other annoying frictions (like bad UI design), and a large possibility space isn't much good if it's boring.

Ultimately, making stronger use of emergence won't expand the potential audience for your game: a player still has to like abstract strategy games if they're going to play Go. But it will increase how many of those potential players choose your game over all the other media choices they have at their disposal.

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra's community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. This post originally appeared in two parts on Point Line Square. It's been several years since I first talked about games and attention.

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by William H. Coles

Stories with significance have theme and meaning. A character-based story, where coincidental happenings and fatalistic plot progression is secondary to character strengths and weaknesses, is one way, if not the best way, to achieve this. For most writers, the meaning of a character-based story is vague. A genre writer, dependent on plot twists and surprises that characters live and react to rather than effect, would believe characters in a mystery, suspense or thriller story, especially superheroes, would qualify as "character-based." Batman saved Gotham City. What can be more character-based than that? But the emphasis is different when trying to achieve meaning, theme, and enlightenment with a story. In this type of story, the plot actions are driven, or at least affected, by the character's human characteristics . . . the foibles, flaws, or special gifts, usually related to goodness. Of course, Batman is a good guy with special (superhuman) gifts. But his humanity has little to do with saving the city. Instead, evil threatens the city and he happens to be in the right place at the right time to prevent destruction. He is a creature of the plot rather than the heartbeat.
Once upon a time, in a village near the deep dark woods, Little Red Riding Hood wanted to take Grandma, who was very ill, a basket of goodies. She would have to walk through the woods for half an hour to get to Grandma's house, which was in another village. 'Be careful,' her mother said. 'Go straight on the path and do not talk to strangers.' So Little Red goes into the woods and meets a wolf who wants to eat her but can't because there is a woodsman nearby. The wolf asks her where she's going, whom she will visit, and where. Red tells all. The wolf runs off and Red continues her journey, leaving the path to chase butterflies, and pick bluebells, and dip her toe in a cold refreshing stream. When she gets to Grandma's house, the wolf has already arrived because she failed to heed her mother's warning about staying on the path. He imitated Red's voice to gain entrance, and he devoured Grandma. Then he dressed in her night clothes and crawled in bed under the covers. Little Red arrives. He tells Little Red to come in. As the wolf exposes himself little by little, Red listens to his smooth talk when she asks him about his big eyes, hairy arms and big teeth. Unsuspecting, she gets in bed and he devours her.
Here is a story that has lasted for hundreds of years. It will serve as an example to clarify the meaning of character-based story.

What has held this story in the collective consciousness of humans for centuries? First, it carries three significant messages. Listen to your parents. Innocence and naïveté can cause irreversible harm. Don't trust a wolf in grandma's clothing . . . you can get devoured. There is also the effective metaphor of the wolf for a child predator. But the significance of the story is mainly carried by the narrative story structure. Little Red is a character-based story. The plot moves forward because of Red's human characteristics - especially her human foibles: she holds onto her childhood innocence, and she disobeys her mother.

This story could be framed as genre fiction. It could still be interesting, but it might not be as lasting because of the structure. Here is a possibility.

Red Riding Hood is kidnapped from the woods near her house. A few hours later some bones and scraps of skin are found at her grandmother's house a mile away. The police are called and discover from the gray hairs trapped in grandma's hand-woven throw rug that the wolf did it. The wolf escapes. Red's mother grieves.

This version is a statement of happenings. Red is a part of the plot, but she is not driving the plot with her disobeying her mother and her wallowing in her innocence . . . and also the author would lose the effectiveness of the wolf metaphor when the story moves from fantasy to a more reality-based police procedural.
Red decides to go to Grandma's house for a visit. In the deep dark forest she meets a woodsman. The woodsman is tracking a wolf that has eaten two children in the last two weeks. Red wants to help find the culprit. The woodsman agrees and sends her out as a decoy. The wolf tries to attack Red, but she stabs him with a knife the woodsman has given her. The wolf runs away, but the woodsman is able to follow the trail of blood. He finds the wolf near Grandma's house, and after a life-threatening duel, the wolf is killed. Red falls in love.
Here is another genre framework for the story. An action-adventure genre story. Something like this.

In this story, again, all that happens in the plot is circumstantial. Who Red really is makes little difference. What she says, thinks, or wants would be irrelevant to the story. The same story could be written with Pinocchio as the major character.
Red Riding Hood's grandma, who lives in another village, is very rich and has a new dress, a box of Swiss chocolates, and bath oil waiting for Red Riding Hood for her birthday party the following week. But Red wants her presents now, even though her mother tells her to wait until her father can go with Red through the woods, which can be very dangerous. But Red goes anyway to get her presents early, meets the wolf in the forest, and is devoured.
To drive home the point, an author could restructure so that Red's decisions do drive the plot to become more character-based again, but in another way. And the story gains meaning.

Red is back driving the plot again, and there is significant meaning related to Red's human attributes. Greed and impatience can be disastrous. The writer seeking to write great literary fiction can take two important points from Red Riding Hood story: Structure the story to display what it means to be human through character-based plot, and make the story significant. In Red's case, the significance is partially related to the dire consequences of getting eaten by a wolf after Red's seemingly almost innocuous actions.

Click here to learn more about narration of stories and characterization.

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Stories with significance have theme and meaning. A character-based story, where coincidental happenings and fatalistic plot progression is secondary to character strengths and weaknesses, is one way, if not the best way, to achieve this. For most writers, the meaning of a character-based story is vague.

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra's community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
This piece was originally posted on SinisterDesign.com. It is reposted here with the author's permission.
The RPG is an inherently inelegant creature. It is something of a Frankenstein monster, a suite of different gameplay systems stitched together into a shambling chimera. Character creation, simulated markets, item management, navigation, combat, stealth, dialog, puzzles, class and skill trees-as a developer, it is difficult enough simply to make all of these systems, let alone integrate them and balance them so they work well together.

By the time one gets to the point of having to credibly present a believable, coherent world, things can start slipping through the cracks. Monster races get developed only in flavor text; NPCs each get a single line of dialog (or worse, share the same generic dialog tree); allegiance to vague notions like "light" and "darkness" comes to substitute for actual characterization; and so on.

Much of this, undeniably, is a matter of limited developer resources. It is very time-consuming to produce RPG content. But it is also a failure of imagination on the part of developers. It's the details that really make a world come alive, and a little goes a long way. Here are a few areas where RPG developers could stand to focus some effort making those details come alive.
Enemies
RPGs are almost universally centered around conflicts with hostile characters. Given that fact, you might think that enemies would be the most carefully thought-out part of the whole game, story-wise.

Sadly, they aren't. In most RPGs, we see dozens (if not hundreds) of different monsters with varying temperaments and varying levels of mental sophistication actively cooperating, oftentimes in completely nonsensical combinations, to attack the heroes at every single opportunity as they wander the world. Monsters and human enemies alike are uniformly, suicidally aggressive.

To explain this curious state of affairs, developers tend to rely the same old hand wave: "the evil wizard/demon king/dark god has released a plague of monsters upon the land." Oh. Well, okay. That tells us almost nothing.

Developers really need to ask themselves more questions to suss out details here. How did the Big Bad get access to all of those monsters? Is he paying them? If so, with what income? What about the low-intelligence monsters that don't need or understand money? Is he breeding them? Why are all of the monsters so perfectly loyal? What about their self-preservation instincts? With so many different species of monsters, aren't there any conflicts, natural predator-prey relationships, or factional disagreements among them?

Consider the time-honored tendency of RPG developers to throw demons and dragons into the same end-game dungeons together. That makes some sense from a design perspective: you're at the end of the game. End-game encounters should be the most challenging, and demons and dragons are perennially the most powerful monsters in RPG worlds.

But from a narrative perspective, this is actually quite problematic. In cultural and literary tradition, dragons tend to spend their time hoarding material wealth, and demons are notorious for tricking others into signing unfavorable contracts. It would probably occur to a developer who had done his homework that, sooner or later, a demon would trick a dragon into signing away his hoard, leading to an explosion of racial animosity within the antagonist's ranks.

I want to see RPGs where where hatred between different monsters under the antagonist's command leads to internecine fighting, or even a segregated dungeon. (A few RPGs-Fallout, Din's Curse and Planescape Torment, for instance-have attempted something like this.) I want to see RPGs where the differences between different monsters and groups extend beyond elementary combat considerations. In short: I want to see RPGs where enemies feel like they are unique living creatures inhabiting the game world, and not just cannon fodder to pad out the total play time.
NPCs and Plot
Games in general (not just RPGs) have an unfortunate tendency to rely on event-driven plots. This leads to a handful of bad outcomes. First, event-driven plots tend to be formulaic and difficult to relate to. Because they are driven by events rather than characters, characters in event-driven plots inevitably end up doing things that make no sense in the service of hitting every bullet point on the game's list of plot events. Worst of all, tying the plot to particular events forces the game onto rails, damaging the player's capacity to role-play and the game's capacity to respond convincingly to player choices.

Luckily, there is a viable alternative to event-driven plots: character-driven plots. As I've argued before, fleshed-out and consistent NPCs can drive plot in a way that both makes internal sense and supports nonlinear gameplay.

Let's compare a familiar premise approached from an event-driven perspective, and then from a character-driven perspective. "An evil wizard plagues the land with monsters" is a prime example of an event driving the plot. All we know is that the wizard is plaguing the land with monsters. We don't know who he is, or why he's doing it, or how. It's just something that happens. Evil is evil, and as a player, there's really not much you can do with that beyond trying to kill the wizard.

But hold on a moment. What if the wizard is not just a cardboard cut-out inserted into the "evil antagonist" slot? What if he is a real character? Suppose, for instance, that he is charismatic, but that he has some unfortunate paranoid tendencies that have driven away anyone he's ever tried to become close with. Suppose that his inability to maintain a good relationship with others has resulted in his alliances collapsing. Perhaps his troops are running low on food, and his generals are starting to lose faith in him. Perhaps he's feeling his campaign crumbling around him, and he can't see any viable exit.

Suddenly, certain things begin to make sense. Those roving bands of aggressive enemies are hungry former soldiers of the wizard's who have mutinied and turned to banditry out of sheer desperation.

Moreover, there are now some real role-playing possibilities. Perhaps the player can engineer a revolt among the wizard's ranks. Or perhaps the players can play on the wizard's increasing insecurity and paranoia and convince him that he must flee to avoid an attempted assassination by his own generals. Or maybe the players can arrange a marriage for the wizard and broker an armistice. (There's an ending you never see in RPGs.) There are all kinds of different ways the plot can go if there are characters driving it; the players can then actively influence the plot by interacting with those characters.

The key to getting started with this is to imagine who lives in the world, character by character, and to keep asking yourself detailed questions about each of them. For instance: where does this character's income come from, and how does that affect this character's views of his or her place in the world? (A character born into great wealth might feel guilty and undeserving; he might view it as a sign of his innate superiority; or he might just take it for granted that everyone lives like him.)

Other things to know: What has this character experienced during his/her life? What resources does this character have? Does this character have anyone that he/she trusts? Does this character have anyone that he/she distrusts? What does he/she want? What other characters have what this character wants, and how does this character feel about them? How would he/she go about trying to get what he/she wants from those other characters?

Once you get a sense of what this character is all about, move on to the next. Figure out a web of relationships; plot it all out (no pun intended) on paper if it helps. You will eventually start to see the strands of a multitude of different plots emerging out of the tangle. That's the power of characters, and it's a power that RPGs are uniquely situated to take advantage of.
Puzzles
Generally speaking, there are two broad categories of puzzle in RPGs. First are lateral thinking puzzles: getting past a locked door, for instance, or getting an item from an uncooperative NPC. Second are single-solution arbitrary puzzles, the sort you find littering dungeons (find the pressure plate, hit the buttons in the correct sequence, put the correct inventory item in the circle, play some variation of Tower of Hanoi, and so on).

Lateral thinking puzzles are challenging to pull off well simply because a developer needs to account for all of the ways a player might sensibly try to solve them, given their character's ordinary suite of in-game abilities. Forcing the player to use the one way you thought of shatters the coherence of your game world in a small but significant way. If you really must give the puzzle only a single solution, at least let the player try alternatives and provide a plausible explanation for why they won't work.

Beyond that difficulty, however, these kinds of puzzles are generally pretty easy to reconcile with the game world, especially when they involve NPCs (see the last few paragraphs of the previous section).

Arbitrary puzzles are another matter. These are commonly used to add a new type of challenge to RPGs, forcing the player to employ spatial or logical reasoning and recall in order to progress. By their very nature, these kinds of puzzles are difficult to justify in any sort of locale outside of a horrifying death trap, such as a dungeon (the RPG kind, not the real kind).

Still, one can use even purely arbitrary puzzles to flesh out the world and its characters, making them feel more real in the process. Above, you can see a portion of an otherwise arbitrary puzzle that accomplishes both of these things. In short order, the player learns more about the world of the game, as well as learning more about her character's backstory. Just a few small details help the puzzle feel like a real feature of the game world, and not purely something the developer arbitrarily tossed in to challenge the player.

Another example from Telepath RPG: Servants of God occurs in the crypt of the ancient poet-king Azur, when the party is confronted by a door with a riddle about one of the dead king's poems. In order to successfully answer the riddle, the player will either need to learn more about the author or ask his companions for help, possibly both.

Depending on whom the player asks (and how much they like him), the other characters will offer information and suggestions of varying usefulness. In any event, the player learns more about how the other characters think and what they know about the game world. The upshot: in addition to overcoming the challenge, the player learns more about the world he's in, the characters he's with, or both. The puzzle is not just a challenge-it also becomes a tool for fleshing out the world and enriching the role-playing experience.
Conclusion
According to the old proverb, the devil's in the details. But so is role-playing. The developer who pays attention to those details can forge herself a hell of a game world.
Author Craig Stern is an indie game developer working on the strategy RPG Telepath Tactics, currently on Kickstarter. He can be found on Twitter.
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Using Details to Craft a Coherent Game World

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra's community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. This piece was originally posted on SinisterDesign.com. It is reposted here with the author's permission.

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Gamify everything! at http://gamification.org/

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What processes and tools do you use to help you design games?

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What processes and tools do you use to help you design games?

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What processes and tools do you use to help you design games?

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Answer (1 of 12): I use a modified version of the Systems Development Life Cycle, a tool used in software development. There are 4 phases in this version: Planning, Analysis, Development, and Implementation. PHASE 1: PLANNING This is where you lay down everything in your game. And I mean EVERYT...

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What factors made the original Half Life an exceptionally good game for its time?

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Answer (1 of 5): Some things that struck me about Half Life (I played it in 1999 on a PC, and have played all versions except Blue Shift): 1. A sense of place. An atmosphere. With the possible exception of Unreal (the single player shooter), no other game had so much of a sense of place in the o...

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Use the Unity Editor to create 2D and 3D games, apps and experiences. Download the Editor at unity3d.com.

The Unity User Manual helps you learn how to use the Unity Editor and its associated services. You can read it from start to finish, or use it as a reference.

If it's your first time using Unity, take a look at the introductory documentation on Working with Unity, and see the Unity Tutorials.
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Learn about packages: Working with the Package Manager

Find documentation for a specific package: When a package passes release cycle testing for a specific version of Unity, it receives the See in A See in Verified packages Preview packages preview package is in development and not yet ready for production. A package in preview might be at any stage of development, from the initial stages to near completion.
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Glossary and

Learn how to build a custom package: Creating custom packages

Best practice and expert guides
Unity User Manual sections

All of the Unity Editor's 2D-specific features including gameplay, A 2D graphic objects. If you are used to working in 3D, Sprites are essentially just standard textures but there are special techniques for combining and managing sprite textures for efficiency and convenience during development. See in sprites More info
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Useful if you are maintaining legacy projects.

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Unity Answers or Unity Forums - here you can ask questions and search answers.

The Unity Knowledge Base - a collection of answers to questions posed to Unity's Support teams.

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Is a feature not working as you expect it to? It might be an existing Known Issue. Please check using the Issue Tracker at issuetracker.unity3d.com.

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Use the Unity Editor to create 2D and 3D games, apps and experiences. Download the Editor at unity3d.com. The Unity User Manual helps you learn how to use the Unity Editor and its associated services. You can read it from start to finish, or use it as a reference.

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Charles Mauro CHFP

The usual question: Over the past 40+ years as a consultant in the field generally known as human factors engineering (aka usability engineering), I have been asked by hundreds of clients why users don't find their company's software engaging. The answer to this persistent question is complex but never truly elusive. This question yields to experience and professional usability analysis.

The unusual question: Surprisingly, it is a rare client indeed who asks the opposing question: why is an interface so engaging that users cannot stop interacting with it? This is a difficult question because it requires cognitive reverse engineering to determine what interaction attributes a successful interface embodies that result in a psychologically engaging user experience. This question pops up when products become massively successful based on their user experience design - think iPhone, iPad, Google Instant Search, Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Kinect.

The interesting question: Recently clients have asked about the phenomenally successful casual computer game Angry Birds, designed for mobile phones, tablets and other platforms. For those who don't have a clue what Angry Birds is all about, here is a quick synopsis. The game involves employing a sling shot to propel small cannonball-shaped birds with really bad attitudes at rather fragile glass and timber houses populated by basically catatonic green pigs. The basic thrust of the game is to bring about the demise of the pigs as quickly and expertly as possible by collapsing the pigs' houses on top of their (sometimes) helmeted heads. Obviously, this sounds like a truly dumb concept. However, there is a catch.

Why is it that over 50 million individuals have downloaded this simple game? Many paid a few dollars or more for the advanced version. More compelling is the fact that not only do huge numbers download this game, they play it with such focus that the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia (Neiman Journalism Lab). I say these Angry Birds are clearly up to something worth looking into. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Creating truly engaging software experiences is far more complex than one might assume, even in the simplest of computer games. Here is some of the cognitive science behind why Angry Birds is a truly winning user experience.

Simple yet engaging interaction concept: This seems an obvious point, but few realize that a simple interaction model need not be, and rarely is, procedurally simple. Simplification means once users have a relatively brief period of experience with the software, their mental model of how the interface behaves is well formed and fully embedded. This is known technically as schema formation. In truly great user interfaces, this critical bit of skill acquisition takes place during a specific use cycle known as the First User Experience or FUE. When users are able to construct a robust schema quickly, they routinely rate the user interface as "simple". However, simple does not equal engaging. It is possible to create a user interface solution that is initially perceived by users as simple. However, the challenge is to create a desire by users to continue interaction with a system over time, what we call user "engagement".

What makes a user interface engaging is adding more detail to the user's mental model at just the right time. Angry Birds' simple interaction model is easy to learn because it allows the user to quickly develop a mental model of the game's interaction methodology, core strategy and scoring processes. It is engaging, in fact addictive, due to the carefully scripted expansion of the user's mental model of the strategy component and incremental increases in problem/solution methodology. These little birds are packed with clever behaviors that expand the user's mental model at just the point when game-level complexity is increased. The process of creating simple, engaging interaction models turns out to be exceedingly complex. Most groups developing software today think expansion of the user's mental model is for the birds. Not necessarily so.

Cleverly managed response time: A universal law of user interface design is "the faster the response time, the better". True enough, there are applications where this is patently true. For example, Google has made this a mantra for their systems. However, surprisingly few software developers realize that response time management is actually a resource that can be leveraged to add to the quality and depth of engagement of a user interface. The surprising point that is often misunderstood is that not every aspect of the user interface needs to be or should be as fast as possible. Programmers uniformly have a really hard time with this one and few game designers take advantage of this potent variable. In most commercial software interfaces, response time management is completely overlooked even by those who claim to be UI design experts. The developers of Angry Birds managed response time in a way that goes far beyond simply "faster is better".

For example, in Angry Birds, it was possible for the programmers to have made the flight of the birds fast - very fast, but they didn't. Instead they programmed the flight of the angry flock to be leisure pace as they arc across the sky heading for the pigs' glass houses. This slowed response time, combined with a carefully crafted trajectory trace (the flight path of the bird), solves one huge problem for all user interfaces - error correction. The vast majority of software user interfaces have no consideration for how users can be taught by experience with the system to improve their performance. This problem is a vast and complex issue for screen-based trading systems where error correction is not only essential, but also career threatening.

In Angry Birds game play the pigs also take a long time to expire once their houses are sent to bits. In many play sequences, seconds are consumed as the pigs teeter, slide and roll off planks or are crushed under slow falling debris. This response time of 3-5 seconds, in most user interfaces, brings users to the point of exasperation, but not with Angry Birds. Again, really smart response time management gives the user time to relax and think about how lame they are compared to their 4 year old who is already at the 26th level. It also gives the user time to structure an error correction strategy (more arc, more speed, better strategy) to improve performance on the next shot. The bottom line on how Angry Birds manages response time: fast is good, clever is better.

Short-term memory management: It is a well-known fact of cognitive science that human short-term memory (SM), when compared to other attributes of our memory systems, is exceedingly limited. This fact has been the focus of thousands of studies over the last 50 years. Scientists have poked and prodded this aspect of human cognition to determine exactly how SM operates and what impacts SM effectiveness. As we go about our daily lives, short-term memory makes it possible for you to engage with all manner of technology and the environment in general. SM is a temporary memory that allows us to remember a very limited number of discrete items, behaviors, or patterns for a short period of time. SM makes it possible for you to operate without constant referral to long-term memory, a much more complex and time-consuming process. This is critical because SM is fast and easily configured, which allows one to adapt instantly to situations that might otherwise be fatal if one were required to access long-term memory. In computer-speak, human short-term memory is also highly volatile. This means it can be erased instantly, or more importantly, it can be overwritten by other information coming into the human perceptual system. Where things get interesting is the point where poor user interface design impacts the demand placed on SM. For example, a user interface design solution that requires the user to view information on one screen, store it in short-term memory, and then reenter that same information in a data field on another screen seems like a trivial task. Research shows that it is difficult to do accurately, especially if some other form of stimulus flows between the memorization of the data from the first screen and before the user enters the data in the second. This disruptive data flow can be in almost any form, but as a general rule, anything that is engaging, such as conversation, noise, motion, or worst of all, a combination of all three, is likely to totally erase SM. When you encounter this type of data flow before you complete transfer of data using short-term memory, chances are very good that when you go back to retrieve important information from short-term memory, it is gone!

One would logically assume that any aspect of user interface design that taxes short-term memory is a really bad idea. As was the case with response time, a more refined view leads to surprising insights into how one can use the degradation of short-term memory to actually improve game play engagement. Angry Birds is a surprisingly smart manager of the player's short-term memory.

By simple manipulation of the user interface, Angry Birds designers created significant short-term memory loss, which in turn increases game play complexity but in a way that is not perceived by the player as negative and adds to the addictive nature of the game itself. The subtle, yet powerful concept employed in Angry Birds is to bend short-term memory but not to actually break it. If you do break SM, make sure you give the user a very simple, fast way to accurately reload. There are many examples in the Angry Birds game model of this principle in action. Probably one of the most compelling is the simple screen flow manipulation at the beginning of each new play sequence. When the screen first loads, the user is shown a very quick view of the structure that is protecting the pigs. Just as quickly, the structure is moved off screen to the right in a simple sliding motion.

Coming into view on the left is a bevy of bouncing, chatting and flipping birds sitting behind the slingshot. These little characters are engaging in a way that for the most part erases the player's memory of the structure design, which is critical to determining a strategy for demolishing the pig's house. Predictably, the user scrolls the interface back to the right to get another look at the structure. The game allows the user to reload short-term memory easily and quickly. Watch almost anyone play Angry Birds and you see this behavior repeated time and again. One of the main benefits of playing Angry Birds on the iPad is the ability to pinch down the window size so you can keep the entire game space (birds & pigs in houses) in full view all the time. Keeping all aspects of the game's interface in full view prevents short-term memory loss and improves the rate at which you acquire skills necessary to move up to a higher game level. Side note: If you want the ultimate Angry Birds experience use a POGO pen on the iPad with the display pinched down to view the entire game space. This gives you finer control, better targeting and rapidly changing game play. The net impact in cognitive terms is a vastly superior skill acquisition profile. However, you will also find that the game is less interesting to play over extended periods. Why does this happen?

Mystery: You probably do not know how to recognize it, but Angry Birds has it. To add context to this idea, mystery is all around us in the things we find truly compelling. The element or attribute of mystery is present in all great art, advertising, movies, products, and not surprisingly, interactive games. The idea of mystery in a user experience as an attribute for increasing user engagement is embedded in the idea of mystery (conceptual depth). We all experience the impact of mystery when we view a cubist period Picasso, recall the famous Apple 1984 super bowl ad, or listen to Miles Davis. He is said to have described jazz as playing the spaces between the notes, not the notes themselves. Mystery is present when you pick up an iPad for the first time. Why are the icons spaced out across the screen when they could be clustered much closer together to save space. Why does the default screen saver look like water on the inside of the screen?

Mystery is that second layer of attributes that are present but undefined explicitly, yet somehow created with just enough context to consume mental resources in subtle and compelling ways. At its most basic level, experiencing mystery in what we interact with makes you ask the question, "Why did they do that?". What we mean here is, "Why did they do that? - A good thing, not "What were they thinking? - A bad thing. If you think carefully about the experiences you have in the ebb and flow of life, you realize that the most compelling are those that force you to think long and hard about why a given thing is the way it is. For example, why did Frank Gehry create the Guggenheim Museum Bilboa using the shapes he did? The famous architect could have created any shape concept, but why did he choose those shapes? It's a mystery - we do not know and probably neither does he. What we do know is that his creation is cited as one of the most important works of contemporary architecture. In the same way that a building can captivate millions of sightseers, the element of mystery (conceptual depth) can help sell a few million copies of a simple interactive game.

Angry Birds is full of these little mysteries. For example, why are tiny bananas suddenly strewn about in some play sequences and not in others? Why do the houses containing pigs shake ever so slightly at the beginning of each game play sequence? Why is the game's play space showing a cross section of underground rocks and dirt? Why do the birds somersault into the sling shot sometimes and not others? One can spend a lot of time on the Acela processing these little clues, consciously or subconsciously. When users of technology process information in this way, it is very likely that they are more deeply engaged than without these small questions.

How things sound: Over the past 15 years, the neuroscience of music has taken a huge leap forward. This new research is just beginning to tell us why music adds such a strong emotional component to movies, advertising, theater, and of course, new media of all types, including casual computer games. Employing the power of audio stimuli including structured music often adds a critical level of engagement for users of all forms of technology. Angry Birds' audio effects and music seem simple but are, in fact, very complex. The use of audio effects and carefully varied melodic music lines works to enhance the game play engagement level. Many games do this but few do it expertly. The audio in Angry Birds serves to enhance the user's experience by mapping tightly to the user's simple mental model of conflict between the angry birds and the loathsome pigs. This concept, known in film production as "action syncing", provides enhanced levels of the feedback for users at just the right time. For example, in Angry Birds, we hear the birds chatter angry encouragement to their colleagues as each prepares for launch. We hear avian dialogue as the birds arc toward their targets and hear the pained response from their victims when they strike their targets. The pigs are by no means silent. When the avian interlopers fail, they are often egged on to try just one more time by the snickering, grinning pigs. These consistently applied audio elements reinforce the player's interactions and deepen engagement by emphasizing the anthropomorphic qualities of the main characters of the game and providing clever enhanced feedback during critical on-screen behaviors. What about the actual melodic music shifting from the foreground to the background without apparent reason? This musical thread running through the game play experience is mysteriously familiar and easily understood in the context of the overall theme of the game. Where have I heard that melody before? This combination of audio feedback is varied just enough that parents sitting in the next room are rarely prone to demanding an end to game play based on distracting musical repetition. Perhaps this explains the high number of hours spent playing the game!

How things look: Angry Birds has a look. One might characterize the visual style of Angry Birds as a combination of "high-camp cartoon" with a bit of greeting card graphics tossed in for good measure.

This leads to a more interesting question: How does visual design impact success in the marketplace? I routinely get this question from clients who are undertaking large redesign or new development projects. Decades after it first surfaced in automobile design, visual design is still the most contentious aspect of designing compelling user experiences. Designers (mostly of the UX stripe) routinely sell clients on the concept that the visual design (graphic style) of a given interface solution is a critical factor in success. This assumption seems to make good intuitive sense. However, the actual working principle is counter-intuitive. In most user experience design solutions, visual design (how things look) is technically a hygiene factor. You get serious negative points if it is missing, but minimal positive lift beyond first impression, if a user interface has great visual design. When we conduct user engagement studies for clients (not the same as usability testing), we routinely see data that strongly supports this theory. This concept does not apply to all user experience design problems, but in most cases it holds well. The ultimate question is how much visual design is enough? Even more important than good or bad visual design is appropriate visual design. On this metric, Angry Birds again has just the right set of attributes. The concept of appropriate visual design is in itself complex as designers generally apply too much rendering and engineers apply none, which often leaves the actual user staring at the equivalent of an engineering prototype (Google) or alternatively, World of Warcraft. After decades of experience in user interface design, I can predict fairly accurately the corporate software development bias of clients by simply examining the user interfaces of their products. I cannot imagine Google as anything but engineering-driven, despite the apparently large number of UX designers hired in recent years.

Measuring that which some say cannot be measured: How does one measure visual design in this context? There are several well-understood methodologies for assessing the appropriateness of visual design that we employ in development projects. These research methods make objective that which is thought to be only subjective. Visual design can be measured, rated, and scaled to the benefit of users and those who develop such interfaces. The actual dimensions of appropriate and winning visual design vary widely, depending on the application but in game design two factors reign supreme. First, the visual design must be memorable and second, it must convey the desired attributes of the game play model.

So memorable is Angry Birds that the developers have deals for real world "brand extensions", including Angry Birds stuffed toys, t-shirts, and all matter of off-the-wall consumer goods that make BIG profits. The simple visual design of those tiny cartoon-ish birds is so compelling and simple, it brings an additional level of continuous interest to the game play experience. Of note too is the world the birds and pigs inhabit which changes in strange and subtle ways with every level. Visual design is another critical dimension of the success of Angry Birds, which leads to the ultimate question: Is Angry Birds the best it can be? Not by a long shot!

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MauroNewMedia has been helping major corporations and leading startups design highly usable and engaging products and software for more than 35 years. Visit our website for more information or hear a in-depth interview with Charles Mauro for more interesting insights.

We are left with the notion that a cognitive teardown of a truly compelling user experience is vastly more interesting and insightful than simply answering the opposite question: why is a given user interface dysfunctional? To summarize, in the context of Angry Birds, success is bound up in slowing down that which could be fast, erasing that which is easily renewable, and making visual that which is mysterious and memorable. Over the past 10 years, our firm has conducted user engagement studies on hundreds of user interfaces. The vast number did not get one principle right, much less six. You go Birds! Your success certainly makes others Angry and envious.

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Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience - MauroNewMedia

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The usual question: Over the past 40+ years as a consultant in the field generally known as human factors engineering (aka usability engineering), I have been asked by hundreds of clients why users don't find their company's software engaging. The answer to this persistent question is complex but never truly elusive.