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Players Making Decisions: Game Design Essentials and the Art of Understanding Your Players

4 min read

Source metadata

  • Type: Textbook
  • Author: Zack Hiwiller
  • Publisher: New Riders (Pearson), 2016
  • Scope: 481 pages, 34 chapters across 8 parts. Broad introductory-to-intermediate textbook on game design, with unusually strong coverage of game theory, behavioural psychology, and quantitative tools (probability, spreadsheets, Monte Carlo simulation).

Key takeaways

  • Hiwiller’s central claim is what he calls the Fundamental Game Design Directive: keep players making interesting decisions. In his view the designer’s main job is to set up the conditions for meaningful decisions, and flow is the psychological state players reach when that is done well.
  • He names five kinds of bad decision: blind, obvious, meaningless, misleading and handcuffing. The positive pattern is a trade-off, or an informed decision with real consequences.
  • Hiwiller borrows Salen and Zimmerman’s anatomy of a choice. Five diagnostic questions (Before, Communication, Action, Consequences, Feedback) give designers a practical way to audit any decision in their game.
  • Randomness is neither good nor bad in itself. Its effect depends on where the game sits on the skill/luck spectrum and on whether players think it is fair, so designers have to plan for it deliberately and not leave it to chance.
  • Game theory gets rigorous treatment. Nash equilibria, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, zero-sum games and dominant strategies are presented as working design tools.
  • Skinner’s reinforcement schedules, operant conditioning and the problem of “extinction” are applied directly to reward design and engagement.
  • Kahneman and Tversky’s work on anchoring, loss aversion, prospect theory and decision heuristics is used to explain how players actually choose.
  • Probability, spreadsheet simulation and Monte Carlo methods are treated as core skills that every game designer needs.

Notable claims

“Randomness for the game designer is like salt for a chef. Sometimes you want to prepare something a bit salty. Sometimes adding salt only hurts the dish.” — Hiwiller, Ch. 11

“The single most useful technique for making a decision interesting, hands down, is introducing a trade-off.” — Hiwiller, Ch. 10

“More agency is not necessarily better. The key is to give the player agency only for decisions he cares about and those that effectively serve the experience that the designers wish to create.” — Hiwiller, Ch. 10

“The variable ratio is what most slot machine designers use. It causes the greatest amount of activity. When the rats do not know when the food pellet is coming, they push the lever furiously.” — Hiwiller, Ch. 23

Hiwiller also reports a finding from Sid Meier’s Civilization. Players with a 3:1 army advantage expected never to lose a battle, yet players at a 1:3 disadvantage expected to win 25% of their battles. Players judge fairness differently depending on which side of the odds they are on.

Relevance

Decision-making is Hiwiller’s central concern, so the book matters most for meaningful-decisions and player-agency. It supplies the decision taxonomy and the anatomy of a choice framework.

It also extends flow with Jenova Chen’s MFA thesis, the Fundamental Game Design Directive and the positions of casual and hardcore players on the challenge/skill axis.

Two topics had no coverage in the wiki before this book: randomness and game theory. Both pages, randomness-in-games and game-theory-fundamentals, were built from it.

Other areas it feeds:

  • reward-systems: Skinner and operant conditioning, the concept of extinction and the behavioural mechanism behind variable ratio schedules
  • cognitive-biases-in-games: new depth on how players really decide, through anchoring, loss aversion and prospect theory
  • playtesting and prototyping: practical paper prototyping techniques, A/B testing and InDesign data merge for making cards
  • game-design-documentation: how to produce a GDD, risk analysis in pitches and presentation design
  • game-balance: marginal decision analysis as a balancing technique

Open questions raised

  • When is opaque DDA preferable to transparent DDA? Hiwiller cites Jenova Chen’s flOw as an explicit DDA implementation. Does making the system visible weaken its effect or strengthen it?
  • Hiwiller covers game theory as if players reason rationally, then spends Ch. 21 taking that assumption apart. What does this mean for designers who use game theory to predict player behaviour?
  • The variable ratio schedule is both the most engaging reinforcement pattern and the most ethically troubling one. Hiwiller acknowledges the tension but does not resolve it. Where is the line?

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