This morning I attended a portion of a GDC session entitled: Know Your Players: An in-depth look at player behavior and consumer demographics. Panelists included Jeff Probst of Hidden Path, Jason Scott from Volition, Hans Lee from EmSense, Dallas Snell from NC Soft and Nicole Lazzaro from XEO Design. Each took a turn presenting the methods they use to gauge the amount of fun a player has during a play session. Hans Lee the CTO at EmSense presented a method that sounds like science fiction but it isn't. When designing Gears of War they used a brain wave measurement tool that looks like a headband to measure brain activity. The goal of the measurement is to see where a player's engagement with the game content went up. They record this data side-by-side with a video capture of the player's game. This allows them to zero in on the activities that most stimulated the player. It seemed they also had the capability to gather data related to what kind of emotions the player was experiencing. Extremely cool technology. In a similar vein. Nicole Lazarro President of XEO Design showed some video of a player's face and their game in split screen. The example showed a player having an issue and it was very telling that there was a problem with a part of the game. This is interesting, but far less measurable than the previous method. Too much variety in player personalities and the interpretation of a player's reactions exists to make this anything more than a cute experiment, IMHO. Dallas Snell from NCSoft (Dungeon Runners) focuses on data mining recorded player activities. Dallas focused on hree coremetrics: recency, frequency and duration. Recency is how recently the player played. Frequency is how often they log in, and duration is the length of the play session. This method is clearly most useful in online games where player behavior can be easily observed. They use the data to examine player drop-off rate to determine where they're losing players. An example graph showed players dropping out at a 50% rate by level 5. This helps them figure out where they were dropping out, but the question is: why? Is it a level curve issue, it a problem with the skills, are they rich/poor, are they getting new items, are the quests being completed, are they traveling too much, too little, are they talking to other players, are they grouping, how much time is spent in combat, how many deaths and near death experiences occured? This led to a discussion of the importance of almost losing a particular game encounter. Near death situations are extremely enjoyable and create a 'woo-hoo' reaction from players when they narrowly escape death. Much of the material covered may seem rather obvious, but the impressive part is the amount of thought the designers put into measuring fun. Game design in 2007 is not just guess work; it is science. |