Designing with intention

• Experience and motivation
• Practicality: ♥ ♥ • • •
• Theoretical: ♥ ♥ ♥ • •

On January 12th I did a short talk about my United Model of Player Motivation at the Dutch incubation program Dutch Game Garden. After the talk one of the attendees came to me as they experimented and discussed the model afterward saying that there was something not completely right about the motivation of relaxation. The issue was that players could be motivated to play games for their relaxation, but the game experience could be stressful, let’s say a shoot ‘m up like Call of Duty. If you want to take that personal motivation and try to make adjustments to the experience of Call of Duty by looking at the player’s motivation of relaxation, you’ll probably be adjusting it in the wrong way. Call of Duty is designed as a stressful experience, not a relaxing one – even though some people play it to relax.

This got me thinking about what is exactly going on in this example. I think a lot of people play to take their minds off of things, to wind down and relax. But this doesn’t mean the game needs to offer a relaxing experience, it might be a terrifying experience, a stressful experience or an exciting experience that makes players feel wind down. 

There is a difference between design intent and player experience. And although I think we can design games specifically to better cater to player’s motivations to play, there will always be a difference between games providing an experience and players experiencing it. 

If your intent is to use the Unified Model of Player Motivation as a basis for your game’s design or concept – make this clear distinction that you are “intending” to create an experience that facilitates a particular player driver. In case of relaxation, making sure the experience requires low effort, feels transcending and is highly visceral in a non-overwhelming manner would be the way to go. These players seek an experience that provides relaxation and nearing that meditative state. But you cannot prevent certain players from totally stressing out by your experience. Some can’t handle serenity and the mindless interaction might drive them crazy. 

And that’s the key, players are people and they aren’t machines that respond in the way that you designed, they are autonomous and will experience anything in the way that they do. I think the more people experience something as intended and the more people can gauge the intention, the more successful the design is. Even people that relax to Call of Duty know it is not intended as a relaxing experience.