Facts about Players - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 87

successfully—you would only see this data point after a game had
been reset, turned off, or the power had gone out). We can correlate
data very nicely here. If a person dies once or twice and then a load
event is recorded, it is obvious that the player is turning the game off in
frustration after having failed only once or twice. On the other hand,
if a play session including many deaths has a negative correlation with
loads, this would indicate that our player base finds challenge moti-
vating, and that we should go ahead and open the floodgates on the
wholesale murder of our fans. Go for it—rip their heads of.
Correlating data points like this can help us identify the educa-
tional gap between different groups of players. It is very easy to dis-
count data as outlier effects—100 or 200 people among millions stop
playing after a certain event, for example. More likely, this is a factor
of the individual differences in our players. Pre-existing psychological
data, measured in devious ways, can help us achieve this goal. How
do we get this? With clever hooks. Give the player a quest and record
everything he or she does. How does the player solve problems? Does
the player walk up to NPCs and engage them in conversation? That
allows us to profile the player as an extrovert to some degree. On top
of that, we can make meaningful observations about the player by
using the game world. What is the speed at which the player com-
pletes quests? Does the player accept every quest given to him or her?
Why do you think that happens? Is the player driven by conscien-
tiousness, greed, or achievement?
The Big Five Motivational Factors and Games
In a talk at GDC 2012, Jason VanderBerghe drew some correlations
between what are known as the Big Five Motivational Factors and
game development. * I think that is brilliant. I am going to take it a step
further and say that you should be interrogating these motivational fac-
tors as part of the standard interview process by which you recruit your
game testers, along with an MBTI, as well as a full workup on their
prior experiences with games, good or bad. The Big Five Factors are
* VanderBerghe, J. (2012). Applying psychology principles to game design. Game
Developer's Conference 2012.