How Research on Service Experiences Helped Our Game Design

Craig
Craig
Aug 9, 2017 · 6 min read

The emotional peaks and valleys in ROBOT RISE! were put there on purpose.

Early playtester feedback on a much less mature version of the game.

Note that I’m going to be talking about board and card games specifically in this essay, but it seems to follow that similar conclusions could be made about video games, role-playing games, and maybe even the broad “game” category of sports.

Two playtesters playing ROBOT RISE! and a card is being “raided.”

Significant piles of research have been published on the design of services and service experiences — how customers react and respond to key aspects of a service.

A classic example is a study (I’m blanking on the authors at the moment…apologies) that looked at how airline customers’ in-flight experiences are affected by the timing and sequence of several service elements, such as meals, drink service, and the showing of the in-flight movie (yes, this research was carried out in simpler, gentler times). Even for online services or over long periods, such as weeks or months, the sequence and timing of service-experiential elements truly matter.

I’ve contributed to this literature in the past and I’m always struck by two things: the consistency of its findings and the fact that so few service industries pay much attention to them…but I digress. Two key lessons the research seems to discover evidence for, over and over again, are these:

  1. Concentrate the pain; distribute the pleasure — All the parts of the service experience that customers dislike (e.g., paying, waiting, etc.) should be isolated and bundled together, whereas the pleasurable, gratifying aspects of the service should be sprinkled throughout; and
  2. End on a high note — Make your last interaction with the customer a good one, if not a great one, to let their strongest memory also be the one that will drive them back to your business.

Both of those suggest a clear (and obvious) underlying truism: customers’ emotional states change during a service experience. Sometimes, you’re bored (e.g., when waiting for a table at a restaurant), sometimes you’re anxious (e.g., trying to get the waiter’s attention), and sometimes you’re happy (e.g., when the entrees arrive). It is capitalizing on these changes in emotional state that is essential to making service experience design work. If customers were in the same emotional state the entirety of the service, there would be few, if any, opportunities to generate true delight — the purest form of satisfaction — within them. And because customers’ emotional states change, we should actively try to design services that generate the right kind of emotional states at the right times to maximize customers’ delight.

I propose that the same follows for the games we design.

From here on, I’m going to be using ROBOT RISE!, a game I co-developed with my family, as an example of how we actively made “experience design” decisions regarding the game’s flow and function.

ROBOT RISE! is a card-based game for 2–6 players ages 8 and up. It takes 15–30 minutes to play. The theme is mad scientists building giant robots (and other gadgets) to destroy each others’ secret lairs (it is unapologetically “take that”) in order to be the dominant arch-villain. Fun, eh?

Gameplay is pretty simple. You have a handful of cards. On your turn, you’ll take an action by playing a card (or cards if a giant robot set consisting of a Head, Body, and Legs cards), deal with the effects of that action, and then finish your turn by replenishing your hand.

More playtesters of ROBOT RISE! There’s some definite smack-talk happening.

Most of the time in a game of ROBOT RISE!, players have 4–8 cards in their hands. However, there are times when a player might be down to just 1 or 2 cards. It’s even possible, although rare, to have none at all. In these cases, there may be no option for the player other than drawing one or more additional cards as the entirety of their turn. That can be frustrating…and that’s actually a GREAT thing!

The frustration is temporary. In comparison to a frustrating turn, a turn where you have several attractive options feels especially rewarding. It is the contrast between frustration and joy, and the cycling between those states, that creates the emotional impact of the game’s experience.

If you had the same number or type (if not both) of options each turn, it would quickly become tedious because there would be far less emotional contrast from turn to turn. It is the ebb and flow of this “choice space” that we purposefully designed into ROBOT RISE! that actually helps make it fun and engaging.

Another aspect of experience design that we borrowed from services and put into ROBOT RISE! is the increasing march towards conclusion that heightens emotion over the course of the game. Whereas a great many games start out with the first play greatly resembling the last play, in ROBOT RISE!, turns have increasing emotional magnitude as players lose each successive lair. After you’ve lost two of your secret lairs and are hanging onto your last one, every move that involves you seems crucial. A play that was rather mundane in the first few turns is now an exhilarating nail-biter in the last few turns of the game.

Finally, one aspect of service design that we violate (somewhat) is the “end on a high note” maxim. In ROBOT RISE!, every player except the winner ends the game by losing their last secret lair and exiting the game. This is not going out on a high note. But, it greatly resembles the final experience of many successful restaurants, which is paying…not a particularly pleasurable aspect of the experience. Ultimately, in every game that has winners and losers, there are losers. In “Euro-style” games, losers often don’t know they lost until the very last second when final point tallies are announced. In ROBOT RISE!, someone who goes out 85% of the way through the game can privately deal with that disappointment (if there is any) and then continue to enjoy the remainder of the game as the drama plays out for the remaining players. This — engaging with others’ victories and defeats — should actually enhance the experience more than would losing at the last second when you thought you had a chance at winning.

To sum up, ROBOT RISE! benefits from applying several lessons from the service experience design research I engage in as a business professor. People who play the game tend to have quite a bit of fun and want to play again, even if they lose. So, it seems that this cross-pollination of ideas has helped us produce a game that’s more enjoyable than it otherwise might have been had we not.

If you want to check out the ROBOT RISE! production funding campaign on Kickstarter, just follow this link. Or, go to the game’s current product page on the Happy Harpy Games website.

Craig

Written by

Craig

Business professor, healthcare operations researcher, PhD, tech junkie, game designer, husband, dad of 2. Opinions are mine alone.

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