Games as Engines of Experience
Engines of Experience
Games function as sophisticated engines designed to create meaningful experiences for players. Understanding how this process works is fundamental to effective game design. The journey from mechanical rules to emotional experiences follows a specific chain that every game designer must master.
The core concept: Games don’t directly author experiences like other media. Instead, they create systems that generate experiences through player interaction.
Mechanics
Games are composed of mechanics, which define how the game works. A mechanic is simply a rule about how a game functions and behaves.
Examples of mechanics include: - “The A button makes Mario jump” - “Characters walk at one meter per second” - “Pawns capture diagonally” - “Players alternate taking turns”
In board games, mechanics are documented in the rulebook. In video games, they’re implemented through computer code. Regardless of the medium, mechanics define the game’s fundamental behavior and establish the boundaries of what’s possible within the game world.
Think of mechanics as the DNA of your game - they contain all the instructions for how your game will behave, even in situations you haven’t explicitly considered.
Events
During play, mechanics and players interact to generate events. An event is something that happens during gameplay, emerging from the interaction between the game’s rules and player actions.
Examples of events: - Mario hits a wall and bounces back - The pawn captures the rook - The ball goes in the net, so the other team gets a point
The Difference from Other Media
In nearly every other entertainment medium, events are authored directly. A screenwriter, novelist, or choreographer decides every action, motion, and line of dialogue in their work. Their final product is a long series of predefined events.
Games are fundamentally different. Instead of authoring events directly, game designers create mechanics. Those mechanics then generate events during play, creating unique experiences that can vary each time the game is played.
The Primacy of Emotion
To be meaningful, an event must provoke emotion. The valuable emotions of play can be very subtle - often subtle enough that players don’t consciously detect them. Developing the ability to detect and understand these subtle emotions is a crucial designer skill.
The emotions of play are not limited to “fun.” Games can and should evoke a wide range of emotional responses to create rich, meaningful experiences.
Emotion and Change
To provoke emotion, an event must change some human value. A human value is anything that is important to people that can shift through multiple states. These values can exist in positive, neutral, or negative states.
Examples of human values include: - [life/death] - [victory/defeat] - [friend/stranger/enemy] - [wealth/poverty] - [low status/high status] - [together/alone] - [love/ambivalence/hatred] - [freedom/slavery] - [danger/safety] - [knowledge/ignorance] - [skilled/unskilled] - [healthy/sick] - [follower/leader]
Emotional Relevance
What’s emotionally relevant about an event is not the event itself, but the changes in human values implied by that event. The more important the human value and the more it changes, the greater the emotional response.
Key principles: - Emotions don’t just appear in response to change - they also appear in anticipation of change - A reveal of information is emotionally equivalent to change - The magnitude of emotional response correlates with the importance and degree of change in human values
Emotional Black Box
We can’t directly perceive the logic behind our emotional triggers. This psychological reality has important implications for game design and player experience.
Emotional Misattribution
A classic research study by psychology researcher Arthur Aron in 1973 demonstrated the psychological disconnect between emotions and their perceived causes. In the study, men had no natural ability to track the true cause of their emotions, so they attributed them to the most salient thing in view.
This kind of emotional misattribution happens constantly. We think we feel a certain way for one reason, when the actual reason is completely different.
- Emotional misattribution can be used to manipulate players
- Emotional misattribution makes it difficult to understand how games truly affect us
- As designers, we must be aware of these psychological mechanisms
Basic Emotional Triggers
Emotion Through Learning (Epiphany)
Learning creates powerful emotional responses in players: - The more important a lesson is to a human value, the more we’re driven to learn it - The skills we’re instinctively driven to master are those that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce - The more intricate and non-obvious a lesson is, the greater the pleasure of learning it - The best learning moments happen when we compress a large amount of learning into a short time through insight
Insight
Players feel insight when they receive a new piece of information that causes many old pieces of information to suddenly make sense. This occurs when we get the final piece of a logical puzzle that clicks into place and reveals the shape of the whole.
Other Emotional Triggers
Games can evoke emotions through various mechanisms: - Character arcs - Challenge - Social interaction - Acquisition - Music - Beauty - Environment - Primal threats
Emotional Variation
Any single emotion becomes tiresome if sustained too long. To retain power and freshness, an experience must transform over time.
Pacing
The classic pacing curve follows a specific pattern: 1. Hook - Initial engagement 2. Rising Action - Building tension 3. Build-up - Increasing intensity
4. Climax - Peak emotional moment 5. Denouement - Resolution and closure
Intensity and Valence
In addition to varying intensity through pacing changes, designers can vary the flavor of emotions. Psychologists call this aspect emotional valence.
Examples: - High intensity, different valences: fury, grief, and terror - Low intensity, different valences: satisfaction, relief, and depression
Emotions can be plotted on a graph with valence and intensity as the two axes, allowing designers to map and plan emotional journeys.
Flow
Flow is a psychological concept particularly applicable to game design, originally described by Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.
Flow is defined as “a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to total absorption in an activity.”
Achieving flow states in players is often a key goal in game design, as it represents the ideal balance between challenge and skill that keeps players engaged and immersed.
The Complete Chain
The experience represents the final link in the conceptual chain by which games work:
- Mechanics: Designers create a set of mechanics and wrap them in representative fiction
- Events: During play, those mechanics interact to produce sequences of events
- Emotions: Those events trigger responses in the player’s unconscious mind, provoking emotions
- Experience: Those emotions merge together into an integrated experience that can last minutes, days, or years
Understanding this chain is crucial for game designers. By carefully crafting mechanics, you can influence the entire emotional journey and create the experiences you intend for your players.
Summary
Key takeaways from understanding games as engines of experience:
Games are systems, not stories: Unlike other media that author events directly, games create mechanics that generate events through player interaction.
Emotion drives meaning: Events only become meaningful when they provoke emotional responses by changing human values that matter to players.
We don’t understand our own emotions: Emotional misattribution means players (and designers) often misunderstand what truly causes emotional responses in games.
Variety prevents emotional fatigue: Successful games vary both the intensity and valence of emotions over time, following classic pacing principles.
The design chain matters: Understanding the progression from mechanics → events → emotions → experience allows designers to create more intentional and powerful player experiences.