Designing Games? Don't Forget Psych 101

Good games need more than great graphics. Sure, you need your math, your video card, and your controller--but a background in psychology and sociology is helpful too.

According to Katherine Isbister, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and director of the Friendly Media project, effective character design needs to take into consideration psychological and socilogical concepts if characters are to make powerful and emotional connections with players. In other words, says Isbister, the key to good character design is leveraging player psychology. Designers who understand what’s memorable, exciting, and useful to a person about real-life social interactions, and can then integrate that knowledge into their designs, can create more realistic characters that players can identify with on an emotional level.

Isbister, who is author of the recently published book Better Game Characters by Design, believes game designers need to to carefully consider and appropriately assign a character’s traits--its voice, face, body, interactions with players and non-characters--to achieve the realistic results. Factors such as gender and culture can influence character perception. (An excerpt of Better Game Characters by Design is available here.)

"With the greater realism and processing power of the next-generation game platforms comes an opportunity for game designers to take characters to the next level in terms of realness," says Isbister. "Accounting for player psychology during the creation process can help designers avoid the potential pitfall of creating eerie characters that look extremely beautiful and life-like, but move and interact like zombies."

Isbister goes on to say that today's interfaces frequently limit our physical movement, emotional expression, and subtleties of social rhythms, forcing us to become more machine-like. She believes that iIf we consider the development of other technologies past and present--musical instruments, sports equipment, furniture--we can see that this is neither an inherent quality of tools nor a necessary sacrifice. Rather it is an inadvertent omission worthy of revisiting and reparing as these technologies move deeper into our everyday lives. With this in mind, the Friendly Media project bases its research and design efforts on the belief that:

• Interfaces should be enjoyable and physically and emotionally engaging--experience is as important as outcome.
• Interfaces should be designed to support and enhance human expressive capabilities.
• The research and design process should be in and of itself engaging, supportive, and humane.

The Friendly Media project currently includes three main initiatives: Research on the social and physical qualities of gaming in the Games Research Lab, Body and Interface explorations, and Embodied Conversational Agents.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:40 AM  Permalink