Emotion Study #1: Trust

Why trust for my first study? The simple answer is that I've had the chance to think a lot about how trust can be explored in games because it is a central part of the play of Aegis Wing, my first title released on Xbox LIVE Arcade.

Definition
Trust: a. the trait of believing in the honesty and reliability of others; "the experience destroyed his trust and personal dignity" b. reliance: certainty based on past experience; "he wrote the paper with considerable reliance on the work of other scientists"; "he put more trust in his own two legs than in the gun"

What is it?
I would describe trust as a feeling of confidence or certainty attributed to something else. It is most often expressed most intensely in multiplayer games, where some aspect of the game requires teamwork or reliance on another agent.

How is it generated?
Trust & mistrust are obviously linked, and most trust mechanics ask a player to interpret to what degree they have confidence in something else, and why that is.

Trust Mechanics

Mechanic #1: Separate management and usage of a resource - In Aegis Wing players were forced to give up the management of their ship movement in order to gain added attack power by choosing to attach to another player's ship. The decision to attach asks the player to make a vote of confidence in the other player's ability to manage their ship movement. The mechanic does not need to involve multiple players, however the meaning generated from something like this will resonate more when a human relationship is layered on top of it.

Mechanic #2: Hide or partially expose game information - Many mechanics that have hidden information ask players to make a vote of confidence in their own understanding of the current game state. The classic game of memory is a simple example, where the player makes a decision based upon confidence in their own memory to find a matching card. A more resonant example is Poker, where players must decide how much they trust the other player's betting patterns and tells.

Resonance Knobs
Here are some useful ways these types of mechanics can be adjusted to resonate more with the average player.

• Make both the manager and user of the resource players. Human relationship decisions almost always resonate more. (my guess is this is a knob that will persist across most emotions)
• Repeat the choice cycle often so that the player has a long history to evaluate when making a vote of confidence.
• Offer players the ability to shake other's confidence in them by offering incentives to them to betray. By offering this option, when players do not take advantage of it, it can build a stronger trust bond.

What other mechanics can generate trust? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Emotion Study Series: Introduction

At nearly every game conference I've attended, there is some speaker who invariably makes a plea to designers to focus on evoking new emotions in their games. Whether as a response to the lack of meaning in the speaker's recent gameplay experiences, or in an effort to justify that game design is an artform, emotion is held up as the holy grail that will lift us out of our nerd shackles and bring us to the game design promised land. I think they are on to something, however I find that I never walk away from these conferences with a concrete set of tools that will help me execute on creating emotional experiences in my own games. I've done a lot of thinking on the subject recently, and I'd like to change that.

In this and subsequent articles I will attempt to outline specific ways unique emotions can be evoked through studies of individual emotions and the mechanics that evoke them. My hope is that each article will provide some concrete mechanics that can be used as tools to help designers craft player experiences more intentionally. My first article on Trust can be found below. But first I'd like to take a brief detour to explain conceptually how I believe game mechanics lead to emotional responses in players.

Emotion through Meaning

As described in Rules of Play by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen, through play, meaning can be evoked when a player interprets the feedback (stimulus) they receive as the result of a game action.

That meaning manifests in the player as a feeling we typically refer to as an emotion. For our purposes, it's helpful to think of emotion as the shade and intensity to which the meaning created through play resonates with the player. Shade implies what a player is feeling, and the intensity defines the degree to which that emotion is felt. Emotional resonance is a topic for a post of its own, but there are a variety of factors which affect how much an emotion resonates (context, awareness, etc.). The definition isn't perfect (and is a little too clinical for my taste), but it helps frame some of the general variables we can use when designing mechanics to generate specific meaning.

We can see then that the Game Designer has a wedge to deliver emotional responses by generating meaning through designed mechanics (action/response sets). If the Game Designer can understand how the play the player experiences will be interpreted, then it is possible to understand what type of emotions will be evoked. In practice most meaningful play has a range of interpretations, which as a designer is a desirable outcome, as each emotional experience will belong uniquely to the player.

I hope that through studying mechanics and their interpretations, we can develop a set of concrete tools that can be repurposed to craft unique experiences for players. My first attempt linked below tackles some mechanics that can explore the trust emotion.

• Emotion Study #1: Trust

Ogre Battle on Virtual Console

I wouldn't normally point you away from Xbox LIVE Arcade, but I found a good reason to turn on your Wii again: Ogre Battle on Virtual Console. As the article points out it's pretty cheap too, given how hard it is to find a real copy.