The Freedom Fallacy: Understanding Player Autonomy in Game Design
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- čas přidán 25. 03. 2019
- In this 2017 GDC session, Immersyve's Scott Rigby explains why it is extremely valuable for developers to have a nuanced understanding of player autonomy, enabling them to satisfy players while avoiding common traps that lead down bad design roads.
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this talk is EXACTLY what I was looking for, explanation of why and how to approach the problem, many thanks, this was truly helpful
Reminds me of when I first saw the preview for No Man's Sky and I was like "Where is the game in this? There is nothing to do. This looks really dumb." Seemed obvious to me it was totally missing the point of using procedural generation to create a big world, because it didn't use it for anything and was just a pointless cheap gallery.
Edit: I said that well before I got to the part where he actually brings up procedural generation and No Man's Sky.
This is the best GDC talk. Thank you
Great talk. Just great!
Fundamentally in Wild Hunt, players are roll playing as a Witcher. The fact that they are Geralt only narrows your range of agency they have to shape the game world. Assuming they are invested in their play through y. Contrarily in Skyrim, players can be one of many races and class. Immersion in the narrative here is different depending on the character selection. If in fact these two games provide identical age risk ability, then is the player’s autonomy more freedom to explore the world rather than volition to engage in the narrative/world?
This is largely why 4X games suck players in for so long.
Wasn't that already up on the channel?
there was a talk with a really similar title, but this is all new as far as I can tell
I have the same impression. Might just be same speaker or similar topic.
They delete and re-upload old content in order to drive views.
Not a gamedev, but this talk was EXTREMELY USEFUL and very-very interesting especially in "the challenge" perspective. I hope some gamedevs would take those lessons to heart and use them responsibly (I'm looking at you, EA).
Can help you realize what you actually value as a player.
It is basically about yet another own interpretation of Self-Determination Theory (Autonomy, Relatedness, Competence)
Chris Roberts is shooting for just this. I hope we get it.
Good luck mate. Wasn't SQ42 supposed to come out two years ago from the initial announce trailer?
@@koalabrownie It's on track for an actual release for 2020. They ended up scrapping everything they did and rebuilt the game over again. I'm content to wait it out right now with how the AAA market is content to keep shoveling out garbage.
@@georgehall7749 Wouldn't say AAA is shoveling out garbage. Games are slim pickings this generation I feel. Seemed that console games in particular were much more prolific last gen.
As for SC, I'll believe it when I see it. From what I've seen, it honestly just seems like a free to play arena game like MechWarrior Online. That SQ42 gameplay hour that came out a few months ago had very little gameplay in it at all, with like 5 minutes of combat total and the rest was talking or flying.
Y'all came here gotta play Wildermyth with a group of friends.
For the most part I like this talk and think it's valuable, except near the end when he goes full hog behaviorist. Especially at the end when he dreams of games that adjust to your psychological profile it becomes really scary. The problem is that companies will not use this to make better games but they will and probably do already to a degree use these methods to keep players engaged, hooked, addicted and exploit them.
They already do. Look at every popular competitive multiplayer game. Every single one of them has a progression system. Simply because lackluster gameplay would not hold millions of players attention for that long.
@@Nors2Ka Sure, the question is whether they use personalized psychological profiles to keep people hooked.
They absolutely do this in the commercially-successful free-to-play mobile space. Something like 90% of revenue comes from 10% of users (or fewer), and they use incredibly detailed analytics & psychometrics to identify the players most susceptible to tactics of sunk-cost, false encouragement, etc.
E.g. if you're age 20+, play a lot during the local "work/school day" hours and early AM, then you get flagged as maybe being unemployed/disabled/stuck at home, someone with lots of time to fill, maybe socially lonely/isolated. They throw up a couple of "test prompts" to get you to buy something small, and if you take the bait, then ah-ha, they know you have money to spend.
seems like a huge issue for a lot of games these days.
Calling the RPG systems of Skyrim dense and rich (!) seems a bit silly to me. Otherwise good talk.
It is dense and rich... it may not be that meaningful though... I think that's the difference...
@@ZoidbergForPresident I totally totally agree with you.
As compared to what?
Rich is a bit much, but dense is absolutely true. It takes hundreds of hours before you can claim you've experienced all of the content.
@@ZoidbergForPresident That seemed to be his entire point. It's deeper than something like GTA, but in reality since it's giving you so many options it can't be incredibly deep. You simply can't get both depth and width on these systems in a realistic time frame if you're crafting the game by hand. It's why towards the end he is saying the only way to truly reach a games full potential is not simply procedural generation but procedural volition. You need your systems to warp themselves around the players game instead of being static. While this isn't something easy to tackle, and simply might not be possible for some systems it's an interesting hypothetical.
I don't understand how anyone can talk about player agency without talking about Mount and Blade.
It's a great one but I think most strategy and sim games are on par with it in that context. It's also unfortunately not the most widely known game.
He goes into that at the end when someone brings up the good point of how grand strategy games like Stellaris/Civilization fall into this. His point is basically that these games have high player volition for around 20-30 hours before you beat the game, and upon a second playthrough realize that it is roughly going to play out the same way. You essentially are chasing after the same thing, total domination, in every single playthrough you run. I definitely think something like Mount and Blade has a lot of potential to fit into what he envisions as the 'perfect game' for player volition. It's just a genre that really doesn't have that much involvement from large AAA companies that can dump the money into it that would be needed to make true progress in the genre.
@@FarCraftMania Doesn't Mount&Blade falls into a sandpit trap? It has incredible mechanics for battle (even today), very primitive world economy and procedurally generated quests, but basically there was nothing to do that made meaningful impact. I don't remember what patch I played last, but I remember that the only way to force the world to react to my agency in any meaningful way was to strike out on my own and try to create my own kingdom. And even that mechanic wasn't really realised fully. Mount&Blade was in fact very similar to Sid Meyer's Pirates! - you could have a lot of fun robbing caravans or sacking cities, but that's basically all. Once you reached a peak in your ship/band efficacy and upgraded your character to the max, you had nothing to do besides a basic pool of procedural fetch-quests.
@@ElectroVenik90 If you're not trying to conquer the whole map, you're playing M&B wrong :p
With that said, I agree that after playing for awhile, it definitely feels like what you're doing doesn't really feel that "meaningful" and ends up even rather boring
i dislike last of us and very scripted games like that, so this means i don't have "Volition" for this?
I really feel if you try to put too much psychoanalysis behind a game though you really lose the soul and it ends up being terrible.
18:00 this just seems like common sense you shouldn't need research to understand. basic design 101
4:50 lol, he's wrong. an open world game analysis that's lacking "curiosity" as basic motivation is *way* off. Should be entertaining to finish watching though.
12:26 oops now he's comparing open world and linear story based games on how similar they are. :/ I'm done.
Yep, you suck at science if you can't operate with basic models which are used to analise aggregated data and draw conclusions. Curiosity isn't an impactful enough parameter to be defined. Browsing through Google Maps - that's curiosity. It's just a small part of authonomy and player agency. As for comparing open world and linear stories, I can compare take-out with 12-course chief meal based on their nutritional value. Same with comparing open-world and linear-story. Dumbing down complex things into simple maths is one of the core principles of science.
I feel like you chose a good username.