Zooming into the essential experience, I first want to define it. An Essential Experience is an emotion, event or encounter that you consider to be heavily important to how the user experiences the game. Therefore, it’s something you want the player to feel. I’ve identified my essential experiences as excitement and thrill (arousal) and curiosity (to explore).
As I’m making an adventure-action simulator, I need my game’s experience to be packed with memorable events, thrills and high-risk rewards. One example could be a battle with a cat, which would be risky because the cat has the upper hand, but if you win, you’ll get amazing rewards that make the effort worth it.
This is a mood board of the type of reactions that relate to the ideal experience of the player:
Since I’ve identified my focus as excitement and curiosity, I want to break down what makes us as humans feel these emotions in the first place.
Excitement
I looked at an article called The Psychology of Excitement: How to Better Engage Your Audience. This article is good for me to read as it makes understanding player psychology easier. Excitement is mental but also physical. You can experience psychological responses such as: ‘(“butterflies in the stomach”), trembling, weakness, and sweaty palms’, which is the body’s response to a condition. Excitement is a state of arousal, which stimulates emotion and ‘readiness for action’. I would want players to feel ready to act for fight scenes and levels where the humans are actively chasing them.
The article also states two other important things about excitement: 1) That it’s temporary and 2) It makes people more likely to act. These two factors are extremely important to consider if I want to make the experience happen. If excitement is temporary, it will lead to dopamine-seeking behaviour if the game correctly rewards the player with what they expect. For example, if the player defeats a level, they will expect a big reward such as lots of XP or a new area unlocked. If I keep this in mind, the player will want to relive that experience over and continue to play the game.
The article notes 5 factors that harness excitement:
- Strong emotions:
Article: Users respond more to content that affects them emotionally.
My game: When players are shocked or caught off guard, they will keep doing the action. - Progress:
Article: When the user feels that they are progressing, it brings satisfaction.
My game: The 5 set levels give a goal for the player to strive for. - Strong Design Features:
Article: Elements like colour can bring a strong sense of identity and engagement with your product.
My game: The vivid colour palette of the game creates a strong identity that makes players interested. - Price:
Article: Impulse buyers act based on excitement. A good price means players are more likely to share or recommend the product.
My game: The price of the game is reasonable for the content, players may be excited about a new experience and buy it. - Limited products:
Article: Seasonal or limited products can generate excitement due to exclusivity.
My game: Seasonal events that keep on updating with limited edition items will keep players engaged.
I’ve boldened the 2 factors I think are most important for the essential experience of excitement for users.
Curiosity
Curiosity can be fostered in different ways. I looked at an article: The 6 Tools To Make (& Keep) People Curious, which detailed ways to keep people curious about your work. Although there were 6 points, I wanted to limit this to 3.
- Curiosity Is Just Like Hunger
Curiosity is satisfied similarly to hunger. You can see this with our language about curiosity: “Sate” our curiosity, “Hunger” for knowledge. (Squire, O., 2023)
– The article suggests that this could be crucial to our survival. - Withhold Knowledge
– Withholding knowledge prompts the player to discover more about the game: finding easter eggs, secret passages and hidden lore.
– This can help hook people into a story.
– With my game, I could withhold information (e.g. lore) about the characters, and make the players explore to discover it as an incentive. - Disrupt Expectations
– This is all about “making the familiar unfamiliar” (Squire, O., 2023), but not to the point where it makes people shut down
– Example from the article: In a Wild Dining experience Schachtschabel created to redefine dining, they took the familiar location of a train but made it unfamiliar by turning it into a location for a dining experience. They then pushed this even further by putting the dining tables in the toilets.
– This subverts people’s expectations of a familiar location.
– In the game, I could raise expectations for a scary location and make it lighthearted, and vice versa.
Reflections
I’ve now explored my main essential experiences: excitement and curiosity. Excitement facilitates engagement, and curiosity warrants progress. These will be my game’s user experience (UX) focus.
To design these experiences, I have to ask myself the three questions that Worldxo.com leaves me:
- How might you disrupt people’s expectations?
- How might you create a curiosity gap? (The desire to find that one missing piece of context)
- How might you both prevent information overload and also prevent boredom?