Modeling player’s time
“Every moment of free time that a player is not playing your game he is going to spend playing someone else’s game”
There are many ways one can think about games. In his popular book on game design “The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses” Jess Schell offers a multitude of lenses through which you can examine your designs. However, when you are designing a mobile game or any game that would run as a service, you are designing for player retention. A very useful way of thinking, when faced with such a task, is to think in terms of time. Essentially what you are doing is structuring the player’s time.
Long-term engagement and player retention are often described as a Player’s Journey, starting from a First Time User Experience (FTUE) and ending with the Elder Game. Ideally, the game that you are designing will keep players transfixed for months or even years. Still, even a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. All that time will be constituted of a myriad of individual play sessions. In this text, I will focus on the anatomy of these atoms of playtime. Understanding their structure can help us design better games.
Play patterns
The designers of console and PC games have it easy. Their players usually plan their own time and set aside hours dedicated to their gaming habits. They know that they are going to play Apex Legend with their buddies that evening and. that they are going to be playing Ghost of Tsushima on the weekend. Of course, they do. Planning a multiplayer session with three other guys requires coordinating everyone’s schedule and they just paid sixty bucks for that new AAA game. Their gaming time is structured around the titles their attention is focused on.
In the world of mobile, players rarely premeditate and plan their playtime. Mobile games are here to fill in the gaps of free time that every one of us will have during a typical day. You are waiting in a queue, you are stuck in traffic, you need a quick coffee break. There are a couple of minutes you want to fill with something more entertaining than staring through the window. You popup your phone and start browsing its home screen looking for a game that would do the job. Any that you already have installed will do, as long as a meaningful gameplay session can be squeezed in this small gap of available time.
These two halves of the gaming world have two radically different play patterns when it comes to time engagement. Typically, PC and console games are enjoyed in one or two play sessions per day. These play sessions will usually last from at least 30 minutes to several hours. Most people can reserve so large blocks of free time only at certain times of the day, usually in the evening or at night. On the other hand, mobile games will be played in several bursts of gameplay, dispersed throughout the day. These sessions can last anywhere from under a minute to up to as much as 15 minutes. Depending on the title, these short sessions can be mixed with longer sessions, again usually in the time of the day when leisure time is more plentiful for most of the people, i.e. in the evening.
During the working hours, your game will need to compete with attention with the player’s actual daily duties and with all sorts of other procrastination-inducing media, such as social networks, Instagrams and Twitters, news portals, etc. In the evening hours, your competition will be console and PC games, movies and TV shows, Netflix and Hulu, etc.
If you are designing a mobile game, your game needs to, like a vine, grow its way into every free nook and cranny of a player’s daily schedule. In order to do so, it needs to offer play sessions of a very flexible length capable of both fitting into narrow gaps of free time during the day, but also engaging enough to fill in the longer time periods!
Returning player experience
In order to be able to construct flexible play sessions, it is good to understand their common structure.
Let’s assume that your player is familiar with your game and that he has been playing it already for some time. In this text, we’ll willfully ignore the problems of FTUE. Let’s also assume that your player is starting a new play session after taking a break. This break can be anything from a couple of minutes to even days or months.
As he has been playing your game previously, your player will have a certain level of familiarity with the game. Obviously, he will also have a reason for returning to your game. This can be entirely by happy accident, or it can be something under your control. Perhaps it was a push notification. Perhaps the phone’s OS notified him about a new update, or he spotted your new icon. Unfortunately, in most cases, you will not be able to know this reason.
No matter what the reason is, it is safe to assume that the player has forgotten what he was doing in his previous play session. At this point, the task for your game is not so much to remind the player about what he was doing last time when he was playing. The first order of business is to help the player to pick out a new goal!
Key idea: Returning player experience is about helping the player to choose a new goal, any goal!
Instead of thinking about what the player was doing previously, think about what you would like him to do now. What is the most important thing that you want to put into his attention? This is a new feature or new content that you just put into the game. It may be a new live vent that you are running. If you do not have anything specific to advertise to your player, then you can direct him simply to the core gameplay or let him choose his own metagame goal.
Meaningful goals
Everyone wants to write their own success narrative. Each gameplay session needs to feel meaningful. In order to do so, the player needs to have one meaningful goal for each play session. To be meaningful, a goal needs to be:
- Attainable during the play session.
- Feel consequential in the larger context of the game.
Establishing a context for each goal is what metagame design is all about. It is a story bigger than the scope of this text. In order to be attainable, it means that the player needs to be able to reach the goal with the skills he has within the time at his disposal. Unfortunately, you probably know neither the player’s precise skill level nor the time he can devote to your game. What helps, in this case, is the density of goals.
You can leave the figuring of the player’s abilities and schedule, to the person who knows the most about these things, to the player himself. Your game should provide the player with as many goals as possible. These goals should vary in difficulty and time requirements. The player will be able to choose at least one of them to chase during his play session. Ideally, he will be able to pick out as many as possible he could fit into the time that he has at his disposal.
These goals could be anything, from trivial, such as collecting resources in a crafting game to winning a race, beating a level, or unlocking a new reward tier in the season pass.
Structuring the game in this manner allows for flexible session length that can accommodate different play patterns and daily schedules. It also implies that your game needs to have a rich enough metagame that can support the required density of goals.
Cliffhangers
Eventually, the player would need to end the session. Perhaps his moment of free time will run out, or you as a game designer have a legitimate reason to make him leave. In any case, what the player needs is a safe moment to end the session. A moment when he feels that he has accomplished enough to be satisfied with the way he has spent his time. He also needs to feel like there are no other things in the game that need his attention. No one wants to leave a virtual city in danger of burning down while the mayor is away! In many cases, this means that there are no further actions available to the player.
This can be achieved with a variety of methods:
- Explicit — such as energy mechanic, where UI indicates that player has no more energy/fuel/action points left.
- Implicit — where the metagame is a structure in such a way that there are no tasks left for the player to do.
If these conditions are met, the player will feel free to leave the game with peace in mind. However, as a game designer, you obviously want your player to eventually return! Your game will still need to provide some sort of a cliffhanger, some sort of return trigger, a bit of unfinished business that will lure the player back in.
When designing return triggers, you are actually modeling player’s time away from your game.
Key idea: You are modeling players time both with the game or away from the game!
Here again, we encounter two general approaches. Some of the games rely on appointment mechanics that create return triggers for the player. Usual energy mechanics, found in many casual games, is a typical example. The player runs out of hearts or energy units and he is prevented from playing for a certain amount of time until energy is regenerated by the system.
The main advantage of these systems is their relative simplicity. On the other hand, these systems remove the sense of agency from the players, which is their main disadvantage. Such systems are generally perceived as restrictive and are not appreciated by the players.
The other approach is to allow the player to set his own return triggers. Typical examples of this are production loops in crafting games such as Hay Day or chest opening mechanics employed in Clash Royale. The key advantage of these systems is that they put control over the time in the player’s hands. In a typical farming game time management is an essential core gameplay puzzle. The player tries to optimize the usage of his time both during the play sessions and away from the game.
Key takeaways
- Designing a game is about modeling players’ time, both with the game and away from the game.
- Games on consoles, PCs, and mobile devices have radically different gameplay patterns in terms of time.
- Mobile games are played to fill in the gaps of free time of various lengths, dispersed throughout the day.
- Mobile games need to be able to offer meaningful gameplay sessions that fit in different time intervals.
- The first task of the game, at the start of each new session, is to help the returning player select a meaningful goal.
- The player should feel a sense of accomplishment in every gameplay session.
- This can be achieved by providing a density of goals and letting the player choose his own goal for each individual session.
- The player needs a safe moment at which he can feel free to end the session.
- At the end of the session, the player should have a return trigger that would motivate him to get back into the game.
Links
- The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses
- Mobile game session benchmarks by Udonis
- Deconstruction of Clash Royale
- The density of Goals — my previous text
- Returning player experience in Heartstone
