“Don’t break RP m8” or “The importance of a consistent and sincere narrative in UX”

Firstly, here is a meme:

The end of 2014 saw a surge in search popularity for this “interactive cutscene” from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014):

Let me wipe the tears from my keyboard first

The player-protagonist attends the funeral of his best friend who sadly lost his life fighting abroad. Thematic, tonal, slow-paced. To advance the cutscene the player-protagonist must stand near the coffin and press the F key on their keyboard.

The game reaches out from behind the emersion and storyline (whether the player is enjoying it or not) to make the player interact with this cutscene.

Pressing ‘F’ on my keyboard is specific and simple, whereas paying respects to my dearly departed friend is in reality so much greater than two words, “pay respects”. It is a much more involved process. The disparity between the two is funny!

Well, not that funny.

Funny enough to make you make a “heh” noise, maybe. The better point to make is elucidated by considering what the real player of this game (the one that bought it on release date or pre-ordered it and is well-versed in other Call of Duty titles) would ask at that moment. Something like:

Wtf? This isn’t the game I bought… is it?

This player’s expectations about this game and this moment were made in consideration of all their previous interactions with the game (and its predecessors in the series). The Call of Duty titles are typified by first-person-shooting in a high-octane, war-esque environment interspersed with cutscenes to better explain a story. Let’s not forget the context of this morose F-pressing: it’s basically betwixt a lot of running and gunning.

It’s not the physical action.

Simply being asked to press ‘F’ to pay respects is not necessarily unusual by nature or even that note-worthy. Have a look at this scene from 2010’s Heavy Rain which calls itself an interactive drama action-adventure game.

Forgiveness is a forgiving thumb

Pressing a button to make a character undergo a change in feelings and attitude towards someone else is just part of the game. But that’s fine: that’s what you signed up for when you decided to play Heavy Rain.

Here’s why it’s a UX thing.

Interacting with a video game is in so many ways like interacting with an app.

In both scenarios you play a game whose rules are fixed: you partake in a mock dialogue with a computer and through those interactions you are told a story.

Examples of such a story include:

I wanted to know more about someone so I found their profile and browsed it.

I wanted coding to be less daunting so I found a great course online that I took.

You get unintentional drama/comedy when

that dialogue becomes a monologue; when the other party stops playing by the rules; when they say something out of character.

This is due to the designers not taking a UX view of their project. Specifically it’s not applying systems thinking or the idea that the details inform the whole as the whole informs the details.

Designers should be particularly aware of these things because the stakes are higher for Apps. More often than not, playing games (being IG) is for fun and using apps (IRL) is for real life; so when design errors like these are made seeing it as comedy falls mostly on the game where as seeing it as drama: mostly on the apps.

Story Time.

During one of my incarnations as a designer for an ‘EdTech’ startup turned scale-up I was asked to design their next product. At its heart it was a tool for taking online courses that were created by employers. The new product is to meet the needs of every possible kind of user that might want to use the app. No exceptions.

This was a particularly difficult product to design: the paying user is not the end user (which creates a diversity of expectations of tone and value); some users need to create content for other users to make their own content; their must be transparency and publicity for some and privacy and simplicity for others. A real head-scratcher.

Every ‘JTBD’ begins with the words “I want to..”. Every user group is named by holistically assessing the push and pull reasons for their use of this product (app). ‘Recruiters’ are those whose primary function is to find talent for their company: they are pushed to use the service by the demands of their job and are pulled to use the service by the offer of making the recruitment process easier.

With so many competing interests and voices their would need to be a great deal of attention paid to the narrative around this product. If I can understand what all of these people want to do in the macro sense I can design what we get them to actually do to achieve that?

I won’t go into the detail of my solution (called ‘bundl’) but it was meant to guide each user through their story.

Inside the app were hundreds of interactions designed to be intuitive and obvious. All of those kinds of interactions are artificial: ‘browse’, ‘discover’, ‘click’, ‘search’. But that’s fine. The game that we’re all playing here is based on an understanding that, with each successful (and bundl would congratulate the user’s success) engagement, the user will be that much closer to achieving their real goal of, say, being recognised by an employer as someone who knows about X. The premiss is set, the rules are clear and easy to follow, and there is the potential for enjoyment and good feels.

As the capabilities of everyday technology in peoples hands starts to compete with those in game consoles, people expect a better narrative and better interactions. I believe that the lessons that can be learned from the video games industry (from game design to a publishers relationship to its fans) are fascinating and super applicable to the world of UX.

So this is my advice:

Know the game your users want to play and play it with them.