February 3, 2010
Psychology for Game Designers 101 – R…
I’m hoping this series will be one of the more useful and better written parts of this site, but it’s also going to be one of the most complex, so I may come back to these posts later and make alterations.
Introduction to Psychology for Game Designers
Game designers need to know a certain degree of psychology. Mostly, this is topics that seem obvious, such as, repeatedly killing the player with a punishingly hard section is going to cause frustration. However, with some more elaborate techniques the game can be developed into something far more impressive. A large proportion of game design revolves around trying to make the player think certain things and behave certain ways. For example, the game designer needs to show a player instantly if a character is a friend or foe and needs to always ensure the player knows where to go next, even if they havn’t been told. I’m not suggesting game designers spend a year studying psychology, but some learning of basic ideas can he helpful.
This document will be split into multiple sections. Firstly, a simple explaination of reinforcement in games, then a description of the psychology behind reinforcement, a section detailing some examples of reinforcement from popular games, some examples of ways to reinforce training and finally a summary of the article with points to consider.
Reinforcement
Reinforcment is the most simple of psychological concepts the designer must understand. I did construct a simple demo application to show reinforcement in a simple game, but WordPress doesn’t allow Flash embedding so instead we’ll move on.
It is worth mentioning that the true psychological definition of reinforcement is a little different than the pop-culture definition. I’ll be using the pop-culture definition mostly, but in the phychology section, I’ll explain the traditional classification.
Reinforcement is a form of player-training. Through rewarding the player for correct actions and punishing them for incorrect actions, the player eventually learns the correct way to play the game.
Clockwerks Games 