Designing Fun: Games Design Lessons for User Experience

by Rachel Glaves

June 17, 2009

When it comes to influencing people’s behavior through engaging experiences, the emerging social impact game community is the foremost in both theory and practice. In order to engage with this community, I attended the Games for Change festival and workshop. It was an event for people who aim to make games that create awareness around an issue - social, political, global, environmental, anything. These were people who know from experience that engaging with a compelling game is a powerful way to change the way a person thinks and acts — the same way engaging with a compelling user experience is a powerful way to affect a person’s behavior.

Game Design Lessons for Compelling Interactions

The difference between designing a game and a game-like interaction is that the interaction should work as a piece of the whole. A game can be a stand-alone experience, but incorporating compelling interactions into a larger website or application is an exercise in balance. Based on my conversations with Game Designers and my experience as an Interaction Designer, these are the three important steps to creating a game-like interaction as part of your design.

1. Decide what piece of your system will work well as a game-like interaction
2. Brainstorm game mechanics
3. Prototype and iterate until it’s fun

Decide What Piece of your Design can be a Game

Many applications that we spend time using have game-like elements. These elements are rarely the main activity in the application, but they’re often the part with which people spend much of their time. Let’s take Facebook as an example. I go to Facebook to stay up-to-date with my friends’ lives and the site makes it easy for me to find the person I want, read their info, and see pictures of them. Where the site becomes compelling and fun is discovering all the activity and side-conversations in my News Feed. There’s an important distinction between my foremost, efficiency-oriented task and what I do after that. These two pieces work best as separate task flows. Efficiency and fun are opposing goals, but they can coexist well in a larger website or application.

Brainstorm Game Mechanics

Game mechanics are the basic design elements of a game. They’re the gears that are assembled together to create the complex working machine that we call a game. Some examples of game mechanics are the ability to navigate through 3D space, the ability to create and manipulate an avatar, or the ability to rotate and place a series of blocks descending from the top of the screen.

The starting place for understanding what makes something fun is your own experience. What games have you played that you love? I don’t know a single game designer who is not also an avid player of games. I also don’t know a single interaction designer who is not also an avid browser of interesting websites or services. Just as Interaction Designers collect interaction patterns (in a literal collection or not), Game Designers collect game mechanics. In both cases we analyze and deconstruct what we find.

An example: a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man”>Pac-Man . The mechanics of this game include navigating 2D space, finite resources to collect, pursuit by enemies, navigation of a maze and items that change the rules of pursuit, with a time limit to their effect. Even a simple arcade game has a useful set of mechanics to reuse for your own designs. The Game Designers I spoke to found game mechanic inspiration in mathematical theory, evolutionary theory, science fiction, soccer strategy and internet memes.

One method that I learned about at the workshop is the Grow-A-Game Cards , developed by Values at Play. The cards come in four categories: Challenges (social issues), Games (examples of games), Values (human rights) and Verbs. While the cards come with a set of instructions and suggested activities, in our workshop we drew one Challenge card and one Game card, then brainstormed game ideas that attempted to bring awareness to the challenge. Our group drew Sustainability and Scrabble. Our brainstorming ranged from the mechanic of limited letters to using the board with its challenges of bonuses and placement. This sort of word mash-up technique is one we use at Adaptive Path to brainstorm design ideas by pairing interaction patterns together.

Building on proven mechanics is one way to design a system which is likely to be fun. Commercial games use this technique all the time - that’s how genres like 2D Side-Scroller or First Person Shooters have evolved. They’re essentially collections of game mechanics and conventions that have proven to be fun for many people.

Prototype and Iterate

There is no formula for designing fun. According to every game designer I talked to, you just have to prototype your game and see how fun it is. The sooner you get to something that works, the sooner you can iterate towards a compelling design. One game developer I interviewed said, “Fun is really hard to design. You make something, then you tweak it until you hit that sweet spot.” Game Designers Eric Zimmerman and Tracy Fullerton say that there is no secret method to game design; you just “iterate, iterate, iterate”.

There are many resources and tips for prototyping (especially with digital tools like Flash), but one method that’s sometimes overlooked is physical prototyping. This includes role-playing with a group of people, setting up a mock game environment and generally playing the game through dialogue and action. One of the most illuminating sessions at the Games for Change festival was an Iron Chef-style competition between three teams of game designers who each were given the task of designing a game from scratch right then and there. Watching the teams work through their ideas was a glimpse into the game design process. Each team brainstormed for a few minutes, then immediately started play-prototyping. Some teams brought audience members up to the stage to role-play, while one team asked the audience to send game directives via email. The effect of iteration was immediately noticeable; a team would try an idea, and it would be boring. Then they would add to or tweak the rules, and it would become a bit more interesting. By the end of the hour, you could see that there were seeds of some interesting game mechanics evolving into something that might actually be fun. To recap the session, Ian Bogost explained that in designing a game for change, the first few iterations help design what’s fun - the compelling part. Then the designer brings it back towards seriousness - the issue or message that needs to be communicated. The iterations swing back and forth until an effective balance is found. The same process is effective in designing a compelling, game-like interaction.

I hope these steps clarify the process of incorporating compelling, motivating and fun interactions within a larger system. There’s a wealth of existing research around designing fun and designing games.

For more thinking around the difference between gameplay and interaction, I suggest reading Jesper Juul and Marleigh Norton’s recent paper, Easy to Use and Incredibly Difficult: On the Mythical Border between Interface and Gameplay”.