Experience Design — why we cannot stop playing games, how games catch our attention.

Have you ever had the experience playing the games for 24–7 just to know how the plot goes and enjoys the excitement of playing the game?

The reason why games bring us joyfulness is because they touch our heart and strongly evokes our emotions; the joyfulness/pleasure is then pulled out from our memories. A good experience touches our heart, people can’t help but want to try; they cannot say no but get addicted to it, hence trigger the desire to share the sensation with others. The process of undergoing an experience that people “can’t help but having the strong desire doing something „ is the core of experience design.

How wonderful it would be if you could easily touch people’s hearts like playing a game.

Tamaki Shinichiro, former Nintendo Wii project manager, has divided experience design into three categories and analyzed some of Nintendo’s popular games such as Super Mario and Dragon Quest to help readers better understand what experience design really is.

When it comes to Nintendo, many people think of the game Super Mario. This classic game is an intuitive design experience, On the initial screen, we see a flat ground, Mario is standing on the left side of the screen, facing right, the screen looks very simple, may look a little monotonous, but the most important goal is described in the game, what do we need to do to win the game?

Defeat Kuba? Save Princess Brigitte? Get a high score? Neither! In fact, this question seems to be more difficult than we can imagine.

But if you continue observing in the play, you will hear the whisper addressing you the answer, and that is — go right!

The user makes a spontaneous assumption of “should I do this?” Let the user spontaneously make the assumption of “should I do it this way?”, and generate the idea of “let’s try to do it” then take action, finally get the pleasure of “it’s really like this! This is the result of intuitive design, which allows players intuitively understand the experience based on their intuition.

Each intuitive experience contains pleasure, and through the continuous occurrence of the intuitive design, user’s emotion will rise little by little, and at a certain point, the thought of “this game is really interesting” will start to rise. This experience must be simple and straightforward, complicated or difficult questions will just make people give up thinking it in an intuitive, easy way.

Intuitive design formula: Assume → Try → Enjoy

The principle of intuitive design: to make people feel intuitive through easy and simple experience

When the intuitive design appears repeatedly, the player’s emotions is switching between “uneasy → happy”, the players tend to feel tired and bored, this is when the surprise design comes into play.

When our brain keeps receiving the same stimulus over and over again, it will feel tired and the response will become weaker and weaker. If something unexpected happens and break the preconceived notions, making the player’s expectations inaccurate. It will erase the fatigue and boredom and bring a longer experience in the play.

The formula of surprise design: Misunderstanding → Trying → Surprise

The principle of surprise design: to erase fatigue and boredom through unexpected surprises.

Intuitive design allows the user to play the game, interspersed with surprising design to create a long game experience. No matter what might happen to the protagonist in the game, it will not have a substantial impact on the user, so what’s the point of playing the game?

Players explore the game, talk to NPCs, collect pieces of the story to understand the whole game plot, and keep making choices during the journey to create their own story while having the growth through “playing the game”. This is also why at the end of the story, the protagonist and his group will always return to the initial starting place. By returning to the initial place, people can remember themselves before they finished the story, and compare themselves with the one who finished the story, realizing their own growth.

The formula of story design: teasing → growth → will

Story design principle: let players create their own stories through experience

The things that exist in your memory now must be the experiences that have strongly shaken your emotions. The scenes that can be remembered must have a hidden design that touches your heart.

Through countless experience design, the game drives the player’s feelings and gradually connects the emotional pulse of each moment, touching the player’s heart. The most important thing in experience design is to consider about other people’s emotions and create products that people “can’t help but apply“.

I like playing games, I picked up this book due to the author Shinichiro Tamaki, who was in charge of Nintendo’s Wii project. Honestly speaking, I opened it up with the idea that business books might be boring. Nonetheless, to my surprise, the book is really interesting!

The book explains what experience design is by analyzing the games, and takes readers to think about what experience design is and how to use it step by step. At the end of the book, there are tips on how to use experience design in presentations, product design, and communication, which are really useful. Especially the part on surprise design. Through experiential design, the process of “thinking” becomes more interesting.

While reading this book, it recalled my previous experience. I found that I had gained the will and growth through playing games. It seems that playing games is really useful for learning experience design!

In addition, what surprised me most after reading this book is that the book applies the experience design on its layout! I really recommend you reading this book. Who can resist the compelling Experience Design

Book Information
Book Name：Experience Design
Author：Tamaki Shinichiro
Publisher: Crown Culture Corporation
Books.com：https://www.books.com.tw/products/0010882044

Note: The Chinese version of this article was written by Cheryl Fang(Able intern), and interpreted, translated by Ching Hsu.