Date: 2018/08/25-2018/08/26
Location: Hyatt Regency, Seattle, Washington
PAX Dev is an annual gathering of video and board game developers before PAX Prime (short for Penny Arcade Expo) in Seattle. The two days of panels and talks focus on sharing ideas, business cards, and demo codes with other industry members before the general public invades the convention center. Given that this convention fell around the day that marked my one-year anniversary working as an engineer in video games, I decided to tag along with my coworkers, two of which gave talks during the convention.
The Hyatt Regency is a pretty noticable cylindrical hotel in downtown Seattle. Viewing the tower from the tourist trap monorail makes it seem more impressive than it really is, but the hotel serves as a nice venue for a small convention. After entering the lobby and passing a bar that does look kindly upon board games as long as the beer rent is paid, conference-goers ascend a series of escalators to find the rooms for their panels. PAX Dev is pretty small compared to something like GDC, but I think that's precisely the point. A small mixer and the day break between Dev and Prime give the conference a much more relaxed feeling. I had fun even if I didn't get a ton of engineering talks under my belt. I got to demo the Magic Leap One and give my stupid business cards out.
- How is an engineer supposed to address players?
- What are the best ways to judge player sentiment?
- What is fairness in games?
- What are some good starting points for AR/VR development?
Ben Brode's keynote covered topics relevant to every individual in the room, touching on engineering, management, game design, and art. These next couple of sections can only try to capture the number of great, if sometimes obvious, points that lead to creating a successful and sustainable game.
- Controls are king-- it needs to flow with cognition
- Crispiness-- the synergy of effects, sounds and controls
- Startup time
- VR takes forever to set up so it had better be goodn
- The best mobile games boot up in seconds
- Does a game need the company logo on boot-up?
- Animations should never go slower than the mind works
- Does the game need a story -- example of chess with dumb cutscenes
- Importance of increasing the winrate of new players
- Doesn't have to be lowering the winrate of everyone else (non zero-sum)
- Match people who want to win against people who prioritize other objectives (ie items, skins etc)
- Use hidden bots
- Levelling up often feels like shit
- You are on a treadmill of fighting harder and harder opponents
- Find what to optimize
- Fun?
- Win rate?
- Esports integrity?
- Be a teacher
- Dunning-Kruger Effect - people with less experience assume certain things due to a lack of exposure.
- Keeping sophomore players engaged
- Educate players on the reasons behind decisions
- Allows for discussion and feedback
- Engage directly
- Humanize yourself
- Stem disinformation
- Control project scope
- Make the call to push off features
- Measure everyone's hours to make sure they aren't overworking/creating that culture by example
- Front desk support is brutal
- Take turns watching social
- Learn to balance listening and speaking
- Be positive but understanding
- Assume the best in people
- Find a set of coworkers that can support you
- Physical building security is very important
- Handling toxicity in the community
- You can't please everyone (but you can inform them)
- Start by calling it out
- Utilize heavy moderation
- Step away from severe harassment and escalate
- As an individual
- Minimize online attack surface ie social media presence
- Stay cordial
- Implement an office hours policy
- As an organization
- Implement social media posting policies
- Train frontline staff in de-escalation tactics and mental health
- Deal with all players the same way and set expectations off the bat
- Interact with the community with dev-streams and videos -- humanization
- Jackpot Effect -- randomized rewards cause positive conditioning leading to compulsive behavior as in conditioning drug-detecting dogs
- Dopamine levels are actually highest right before a reward is delivered
- Utilize the type of conditioning to drive the desired engagement with the environment
- Types of conditioning
- Positive Reinforcement
- Rewarding good behavior
- Leads to feelings of trust, confidence, and repeated behavior
- Negative Reinforcement
- Taking away bad things
- Leads to feelings of control and mastery, but can make things boring and restrictive
- Positive Punishment
- Punishment, inflicting pain or adding badness
- Inhibits all behavior
- Leads to feelings of duty
- Increases fear/anxiety/cortisols
- Negative Punishment
- Taking away something good
- The quickest way to frustration
- Breaks trust
- Can be used to frame an enemy
- Can be counteracted by exchanging goods ie a treat given for a toy that is taken away
- It's completely reasonable to track your hours in the office and force yourself to go home
- There can be zero-sum competitive matches
- Rewards, subgoals, objectives that are not exclusive of winning
- Is there a way that the virtual down-marker lines in American Football could be superimposed over a given game in order to help make the game be more clear to new players?
- Engage directly with players, but try not to take anything personally
- Engineer solutions that solve for real player behavior, not the ideal
- Avoid frustration in reward/punishment mechanisms at all costs
- Minimize the time to fun in all possible ways
- Create a Twitter to respond to players
- Graph the retention and churn rate of players by elo
- Use collected historical data from live to test and tune the matchmaker
This was a great panel of creatives and professionals sharing their experiences both positive and not-so-positive experiences with players. Most of the discussion focused on indie games and the experience of steam comments and Twitter messages, but I was able to join the post-panel discussion and dive into the finer points of interacting with the community of a competitive online game.
This talk, given by a canine behavior specialist, applied much of the content of Robert Sapolsky's epic work of popular cognitive science, Behave to game design. The joking overtones of psychological and emotional manipulation aside, the talk imparted some important scientific overviews for those looking to write a compelling and player-friendly narrative.