Good and Great Possibility Space

Hello, today I want to share my opinion about great possibility space.

First I’d like to explain what I mean when I talk about possibility space.

The possibility space is the amount of choices and the different results of these choices a player can experience when playing your game. These number of different outcomes can be high, which leads to a big possibility space or it can be low, which leads to the opposite.

I like games with a high possibility space. For me, making decisions is the unique attribute that differentiates games from other entertainment media. That's why I think that good games embrace player choices and aspire a big and great possibility space that keeps players engaged for a long time.

Causes that create a great possibility space

Number of choices

You’re may be able to increase the possibility space of your game by increasing the number of choices your players can make. Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Increasing the choices doesn’t have to create a bigger possibility space. The number different outcomes is what defines the possibility space. If nine out of ten decisions always lead to the same outcome your game effectively provides only two decisions and has a much smaller possibility space than you might think. But having choices that lead to different outcomes do indeed increase your games possibility space, which makes this tool a valuable asset.

Dependencies between mechanics

Players can interact with certain game mechanics to influence the game state which may lead to different outcomes. Good mechanics that have a certain depth should be able to influence your system in more than only one meaningful way due to their relationships to other mechanics in your game. This way your player can make decisions that can lead to a wide number of new outcomes due to the complexity of your system. Players can use different mechanics in different ways which lead to even more different outcomes and by this to a much greater possibility space.

In theory this is a very strong tool to increase your games possibility space but some games push this emergence of possibility space a little too far. Often game systems can become so complex that even the designers do not know all the different outcomes can be created with the provided systems. This may lead to an emergence of possibility space that you want to avoid. I try to give an explanation where a mechanic is used in a great way and in a less good way when creating possibility space with an example from a game I really like a lot: Heroes of the Storm.

Most of the time you can see where Blizzard wants to give their players choices that lead to a great possibility space. These choices are very obvious and it’s clear to see where players should make these choices. For example the talent system in Heroes of the Storm that affects the skills and attributes of the heroes. The different combinations in relationship to the different use cases on the different maps, combined with 4 other heroes already lead to an almost immeasurable possibility space. It is easy to grasp and players can think about the different possibilities as soon as they start to play the game.

But there are also mechanics that lead to a not so obvious possibility space but were definitely intended by Blizzard. In Heroes of the Storm heroes can block other heroes movement. The path finding algorithm tries to find a way around the other heroes but it seems that Blizzard tuned this algorithm in a way that makes blocking other heroes possible as they tend to change their direction a lot of times when trying to pass another hero.

I really like this mechanic as it provides gameplay to a mechanic that is easy to grasp and very essential to the game: Moving your hero. On the other side, this mechanic is very natural as you can see this kind of behavior in other games like football and soccer.

But the same mechanic is used by professional teams in a not so obvious way as it also can be used to block your own minions (units controlled by the AI). Most of the time it is useless to do that because minions have a much smaller hitbox than heroes and it is very very hard to block their movement in a meaningful way. Nonetheless in professional games the teams tend to block the first minion wave with all their five heroes so the first combat emerges closer to their defending towers which is an advantage.

This emergence of a strategy may seem to be something good but in my opinion it is not due to three reasons:

1. Both teams will make use of this mechanic and can’t influence the other team while doing the same. This leads to the situation that it doesn’t matter that both teams know about this “strategy” as it’s a dominating strategy that has no counterplay. It doesn’t offer a choice it only offers a dull task.
   
2. The blocking of such a small hitbox feels pretty random. It looks arbitrary how the heroes try to block the minions and how the minions react to the movement of the heroes. That way both teams will achieve almost the same results and if they don't, the outcome seems to be pretty random. The cause and effect between the movement of the heroes and the movement of the minions is too loose to provide valuable feedback to the player.
   
3. Blocking heroes so they have a harder time to escape from or chase other heroes feels natural and has clear parallels to other games (e.g. Football). Blocking your own group of minions so they are slower and arrive later on the battlefield is a much less natural and a very counter intuitive strategy and doesn't serve the fantasy of the game.

I think as a Game Designer you should really know where you want to create the possibility space in your game with the different mechanics that your game provides. Players should be able to guess where they can explore the different strategies and outcomes of your games possibility space without being completely surprised by artificial and absolutely non obvious and counter intuitive usage of mechanics.

Sometimes the reason for emerging strategies is even out of the designers control (e.g. technical).

World of Warcraft has an Arena Mode where players can fight against each other in small teams. A lot of characters need mana to use certain skills. Mana can be regained by drinking but drinking can only be done when players are out of combat, which means that they didn’t participate in any combat action for about 8 seconds. There was a time when players (especially players that played a healing class) were able to abuse the out of combat / drinking mechanic in the arena to regenerate their mana even if they were in combat. The only thing they had to do was to wait until their character was out of combat and then started to  cast their biggest and strongest heal spell of their character with the longest casting time. Channeling the spell didn't count as a combat activity, only as soon as their target which was in combat gained the healing of the spell they were flagged as “in combat”. By spamming the drinking button while casting the spell they were able to drink after they have healed their partner because the server recognized too late that their character participated in a combat activity by a few milliseconds. They started drinking after the spell and as were flagged a short time after they have started to drink which didn’t interrupt the drinking. This behaviour led to combats where people that waited until they were out of combat, used a spell, spammed the drinking button and then started drinking even if they were in combat had an advantage because they could regain mana without renouncing to heal their partner. It was a strong strategy and every top team had to make use of this mechanic to be able to keep up with the other teams.

I hope this article helped you to get a better feeling of possibility space in games and the problems that you may face when designing your game.

The Action in the Loop

Today we’re going to take a look at a specific element of the so called gameplay loop. The gameplay loop contains a goal, an action, and a reward. It describes how the player plays the game in a very superficial and basic way but at the same time it is important to know because every game will feature this loop.

Usually the player has a specific goals that he wants to achieve, he has to perform one or multiple actions and when successfully done he gets a reward for doing so. This makes the gameplay loop look like this:

Some games can be finished after one loop. Rock Paper Scissors can be played with only one loop for example. Usually a game is made of a lot more gameplay loops that have different goals, actions and rewards. It may look like this:

When a player has achieved the final goal of the game it is finished. Some games do not have a final goal so players can play as long as they want to. In this situation the loop just continues until the player quits playing and churns.

In this article I want to take a closer look into the “Action” segment of this loop. I will describe the meaning of the action segment and provide a list of the different kinds of actions that can found in a gameplay loop.

The action segment is the link between the goal of the player and the achieving of this goal with a reward. The action segment can have a challenge but doesn’t have to.  An action can fall into one of seven different sub-segments:

• Out of Context
• Strategic
• Random
• Twitch
• Strategic Twitch
• Social Actions
• Dull

Out of Context Actions

This segment describes actions that are out of your game's context but still can be done by the player. They usually don’t involve a challenge and the results do not feel rewarding most of the time. For example using the options menu to adjust the volume or pressing the start button to start the game. You should try to reduce the amount of actions that fall into this form as much as possible as players usually don’t feel rewarded when successfully completing these actions but feel very frustrated if these actions take too much time in their gaming experience. A good UI should be the solution to successfully manage these actions for your players.

Examples:

• Option Menus
• Dialog Boxes

Strategic Actions

These are the actions where the depth of your game comes into play. Making strategic decisions can be very entertaining for a lot players. Turn based strategy games rely almost entirely on these kind of actions. If you strive for a game that features this kind of actions make sure that your players have to think about what kind of actions they have to perform to achieve a specific goal and receive their rewards. Your game needs to have some dynamics so there are always different things to consider when making a decision. A decision where the answer is obvious and clear is no longer a strategic action but becomes a dull one. Strategic decisions are probably the most powerful actions if you want to keep your players engaged for a long time. Systems that are so complex that the actions in their gameplay loops keep being interesting even after thousands of hours are hard to craft but have the highest potential if you want to keep your players engaged for a long time.

Examples of games that rely heavily on these kind of actions:

• Chess
• Darkest Dungeon
• Final Fantasy Tactics
• Sid Meier’s Civilization

Random Actions

Random Actions appear if the player has no idea what he has to do to achieve a specific outcome. This often appears when the game offers too much information at the same time and players are so overwhelmed by the information that they can’t use it to make meaningful decisions. If my mom had to play a StarCraft 2 game against a professional player her actions would be probably pretty random. Her mental model of the causes and effects of the game is not evolved enough to make educated decisions in the specific time frame. Random Actions can also appear if the game offers too little information. If I would give you the task to tell me what number I am thinking of right now your answer would be probably pretty random. You should try to avoid these kinds of actions because most of the time the result will not satisfy the player and trying things out without any clou about how the different things could possibly work will probably lead to frustration. To avoid these actions you have to think about what information your players need to make educated decisions.

Twitch Actions

Twitch Actions offer a challenge on a physical layer. Quick Time Events are a good example for these actions as they only present a Twitch gameplay that offers no decisions. Jump’n’Runs rely heavily on these kinds of actions as their levels are often very linear and test the players precision, timing and reaction time. If your game involves this kind of actions make sure that the difficulty matches the players skill. You also need some kind of granularity to provide a broad range of possible outcomes. If you want to give your players the possibility to really show of in these kind of actions, have a score system that is able to show the difference between a bad, a good, a great and an awesome player. Racing games tend to measure the time of the players three to four decimal places because of this. If they would only provide the seconds as a result a lot of players would have the same score. So give your twitch gameplay results almost infinite range if your game relies on it.

Examples of games that rely heavily on these kind of actions:

• CSR Racing
• Mr Jump
• Flappy Bird

Strategic-Twitch Actions

These actions are a combination of both. Micro commands in Warcraft 3 have a strategic layer but also require a high apm to be realised in a proper way. Shooting an enemy that is about to throw a grenade in Uncharted is another example. Players have to gather the information that the game provides and decide whether they should run or try to shoot the enemy that wants to throw the grenade. If they decide to shoot the enemy they also have to hit him, if they don’t the action loses its desired outcome and reward. Raid encounters in World of Warcraft rely heavily on these kinds of actions as players have to make strategic choices on how to defeat the boss and still have to transform their decisions in twitchy gameplay challenges. As soon as the strategy for the boss is well known it gets reduced to a twitch gameplay. If the equipment of the raid becomes better and better raiding can even become a sequence of dull actions. The order is always the same in these actions. First players have to make the strategic decision what kind of action they want to perform and after that have to realise the desired outcome through a challenge that tests their reaction time, precision or other physical properties. Almost every FPS features this kind of action and if it’s done right your game may have a longevity like Counter Strike of League of Legends which are both highly strategical and also reliy heavily on twitch gameplay.

Examples of games that rely heavily on these kind of actions:

• League of Legends
• Street Fighter
• Counter Strike

Social Actions Social Actions are the actions where players engage with each other in some kind of communicative and social engaging way. Sending messages by chat, voice chat or some other kinds of messaging features. Also expressing some kind of emotes with your characters like “/hi” in World of Warcraft falls under this category. The “signal pings” that you can find in MOBAs are another example of social actions. Social actions are all about communication between players. Social actions can be part of the fiction but do not have to. If players give signals to each other in Counter Strike, this is clearly part of the fiction, as  real Anti-Terror units also do communicate in an operation. If a player uses the chat system to talk about the weather these actions clearly fall out of the game's fiction and context. Social actions can be very important in certain kind of games. Most of the time you need some kind of communication system in multiplayer games that feature a strategic layer where players have to communicate to reach a certain goal. But social actions can also be a strong engagement driver if players use them to form and strengthen their bonds between each other. A lot of players that play one specific game for years keep playing because they want to continue performing social actions with their friends that they made in the last years. Because of this a lot of F2P games reward players for engaging with the social systems and other players in the game by giving bonuses and rewards for doing so because they know that thos can be a strong retention driver. If you want to have Social Actions in your game you should try to make the act of communicating as simple as possible so players can concentrate on the exchange between each other. The more important certain Social Actions could be the faster your players should be able to perform them. Not every social action between players is a good one. Keep in mind that you need some kind of solution for players that abuse your communication system to grief other players because a toxic community is something that you definitely want to avoid as it drives a lot of players away from your game.

Examples of games that rely heavily on these kind of actions:

• Game of War
• World of Warcraft
• Rust

Dull Actions

Dull actions can be found in a lot of gambling games where players don’t have a challenge but need to do actions to receive a reward. For example pressing the button on a slot machine is no challenge at all. Still millions of players are willing to perform this actions a thousand times hoping for their reward. Claiming gifts in a social game is another example of a dull action that involves no challenge but leads to a reward. A lot of MMORPGS especially asian ones are well known to have a lot of grinding in their game play. Grinding is also a good example that falls in this category as it is most of the time a monoton experience that doesn’t contain any challenge. Sometimes actions that were once strategic become dull after the answer is clear to the player. Puzzles usually suffer from this phenomenon as they can be solved only once and after that offer no challenge due to their lack of dynamics.

If your game contains these kinds of actions you should try to make sure that your game keeps being entertaining on another layer. You can add a lot of value to these actions by providing a reward structure with a lot of variation to them. Even dull actions will be performed many times by a lot of players if they can’t be sure about the reward they receive from these actions. This also plays a huge part at mobile games these days as their audience isn’t always looking for a challenge when playing games. The feedback for these kinds of actions should be very juicy and a reward in-itself to higher their value as they lack interesting decisions or skill based challenges.
These kinds of actions can also be part of bigger gameplay loops that have some kind of strategic layer. Think about games that feature some kind of resource management. Maybe harvesting crops is a dull action but harvesting crops to balance a complex resource cycle for the highest and most efficient outcome can be satisfying.

Other genres that feature a lot of dull actions are narrative games like point’n’click and other narrative adventures. These games don’t rely too much on strategic decision but their players like to progress the plot of the game they keep talking to NPC’s, picking up items and walking through cities experience the story of the game even if the necessary actions to drive the plot are neither interesting nor challenging. An interesting story is of course the key to keep the interest of your players in these kinds of games.

Players are also willing to perform dull actions if it serves the purpose of an expression. In Minecraft a lot of players play with the infinite blocks modification and pile thousands of blocks because they want to express their ideas in that environment. The action to pile up cubes offers no fun in itself it is the context of expression that leads to their motivation.

So Dull Actions need a great context that motivates the players to perform them.

Examples of games that rely heavily on these kind of actions:

• Heart of Vegas
• Heavy Rain
• Pirate Kings

I hope that you can make use of this list to take a closer look on the actions in your game. If you’re not happy with the actions in your game you may think about the reasons why the players should be motivated to perform these actions. I hope that this list can help you realise possible flaws in your actions and raise them to a higher level. Good luck with that!

Game Design Debts Part 2

Better sooner than later

In the last part of this little series I discussed the topic of game design debts and provided some examples. If you haven’t read it you better check it out so you have a clear understanding of what I mean when talk I about game design debts. In this article I will present some more examples where you may face possible design debts.

Providing no good tools for your designers

As soon as your game benefits from content you better invest time to provide your designers tools that are good enough to produce that content. The better the tools the better your content will be. Make it as easy as possible for your designers to build levels, scripts, new spells, or whatever kind of content your game will feature. Content design is also some kind of design and I think that every form of design benefits from iteration. When content creation is easy and fast it is much more likely that your content designers will produce better content as they can iterate thorugh the different versions more quickly. Your tools should provide the possibilities to design and prototype something as quick as possible. Tuning your game until you hit the bulls eye of the different attributs ain't easy. If you have long waiting time between the design of your content and playable prototypes, your content and level designers have a lot less tries to produce high quality content. If your team is able to you should keep this in mind and talk to your programmers about this problem from the very beginning so they can plan their tasks and software architecture the way that content creation in your project is as quick and easy as possible so your designers can iterate as effective as possible.

Programming these tools costs time but it will quickly pay off as soon as your content designers can create content independently from programmers in a quick and meaningful way.

Not planning the tutorial

If your game will feature a tutorial you should keep its unique code and special implementation in mind. Tell your programmers as soon as possible what kind of features your tutorial will probably need. I have already faced it two times that the programmers heard too late about the specific requirements from the tutorial and huge workarounds were needed to implement it the way that we wanted it. We could have saved a lot of time if our programmers would have known about these demands for the tutorial from the very beginning and plan the resulting requirements before the most features were already implemented. The requirements were often so unique that our code wasn’t able to provide these features without huge workarounds. If our programmers would have known about these requirements from the very beginning it would have been a lot easier. From now on we will try to talk about the needed features we for the tutorial as soons as we plan our production code. We didn’t have the possibility yet to see if this approach will work but we hope to save a lot of time in the future this way.

Doing playtests too late

Playtests cost time but they will give you valuable information if done right. When you strive for high quality you better start doing playtests soon enough. That means that your have enough time to react to the information that you gain through your playtests. Doing no playtests can cause a loss of so many possibilities. So plan your playtests as soon enough. Try to know what you want to find out and keep your eyes open for surprises. When you do your playtests too late you may miss the chance to react to the rising information which is already bad enough, if you don’t do them at all you will miss a lot more. Playtests don’t need to be as time consuming as you may think. In the very beginning you can do internal playtests with co-workers. These are fast and easy to perform but sooner or later you should invite players that are part of your target group and let them play your game. There are a lot of information about good playtests on the internet. I will link this article that contains a video and hope that you may find it insightful: How to make your game better with playtests the uncharted way

Doing too little research

Research is important. Research is not about stealing ideas from other games it’s about deleting unknowns as soon as possible. When we made our first f2p game we had no idea about f2p. We had no idea what a good f2p title needs to have a chance for success. We just made what we thought would be fun and when we were done we tried to find a good way to sell ingame items to our players. As you can imagine we failed. Do your research in the very beginning. The more you know about the market and  a lot of different games that you could learn from the better. Don’t do mistakes that can be avoided because you think research is a waste of time or you may already know everything. When it’s done right it can save you a lot of time and money. You even raise the chance that your game stands out as you may see possibilities that you may have missed without doing your research. I already wrote about research for game designers so you may take a look at this article: We don’t know what we don’t know: The power of research.

I hope that you enjoyed this article. I don't know if I'll continue this series but I hope that the already mentioned examples are helpful and protect you from some mistakes.

Game Design Debts - Part 1

Better sooner than later

Technical debt is a metaphor that is used to describe the act of choosing a quick and easy solution for a programming task to save time that may (but doesn't have to) cost you much more in the long run. Sometimes this tradeoff can make sense if you don’t have to live too long with your chosen solution but if not, you will have to pay it back including the interests.

I think that in Game Design you have a similar concept where you sometimes have to pay a lot more for the “interests” by making short-term decisions without thinking about the long-run costs. Sometimes it can make sense to go for the short-term solution but often it doesn’t. My examples won't be exhaustive but in the following blog posts I will try to describe different examples that I experienced so it may help you when encountering them.

Not defining clear goals for your design tasks

Sometimes you have to design things without really knowing what they'll be good for. Their purpose is too vague and was never clearly defined. You think about all the cool stuff that you can add without thinking why you should add it. I think that everything you’re designing should have a clear specific purpose that is formulated so you can control your results. Sometimes you just want a specific feature because it fits the fantasy. Then it may be cool to figure things out but sooner or later you should know why you want the different features in your game and what you’re trying to achieve with their design. So ask the following questions:

• Why do I want this feature?
• What do I want to achieve with this feature?
• How can I achieve these things with this feature?

By answering these questions you can make sure that you do not design features without good purpose. I tend to make a short document where I brief myself about the goals for a specific feature. For further reading check my other blog post about Goals for you Game Design

Going into production without “fun”

To be honest I can’t think about any scenario where this behaviour makes sense so it may be a little off topic but it is so important and I've experienced it myself once and heard about it so often that I have to mention it. Going into full production only because everyone should be working on a project just doesn’t make sense. So many projects start to work with a full team on a game that isn’t fun in its core and finding the fun when already 40 people or more are working on it is really expensive. Finding fun requires iteration and iteration means throwing work away and rebuilding things. And that can be very expensive and really hard to do. It demotivates almost every team member, it costs a lot of money and it is very hard to predict how long you have to iterate until you find the fun in your game. So do your team and yourself a favor and find the fun before going into production. For further reading check the following:

Why Games Fail: Pre-Production

Spore: Pre-Production Through Prototyping

Extra Credits: The Pre-Production Problem

No regular feedback to the developers that are implementing your feature

You may you save time by hoping that the developers will implement your feature as it is communicated in your documentation and if they do you’ll really save some time. But to be honest, chances are high that this won’t be the case. I think that there will never be some kind of documentation that every programmer in the team will read. Or maybe you missed something in your documentation. Or they didn’t understand something the way you meant it. Communicating with the other developers on a regular basis about the features they are implementing may cost time but it will save you a lot in the long run. Just ask them when they are able to show you something. This has nothing to do with controlling their work and you should not communicate it that way. Mistakes happen and it is nothing personal. If they miss something, remind them kindly. If you missed something in your documentation update it and make sure that the developers know about it. Maybe you can see flaws in your design just by taking a look at an early state of your feature or the programmers struggle with the implementation because of a specific requirement and have an idea that has the same result as your desired design and is much easier to implement. There are so many possibilities that you may miss when you don’t communicate with your co-workers that have to implement your designed features. Take your time and and talk to them when you have the chance. Everything will be much smoother and easier. And even if everything is fine and complete you can just praise their work and be happy to see how your design comes to life. Almost everybody likes to hear a compliment and it raises the motivation.

Not thinking about edge cases before implementation

This happens quite often. Your feature is designed, everything is somehow documented and it just needs to be implemented. And then some day a programmer comes to you and asks how something should behave in a certain scenario you didn’t think through. This can happen but it should be avoided as good as possible. Think about all the different possibilities where you may need custom behavior. How does your XP-bar looks like when your player reaches max level? How does your highscore behave when two players have the same score? These things happen often and you should think about a solution before the other developers start to work on the feature. If you missed something and the other developers come up with questions don’t rush and give a quick answer because you want to appear prepared and cover your ass. Tell them that you’re sorry and didn’t think it through. Ask them if they can keep working on the feature and avoid this edge case until you come up with a solution. Just do not rush. Take your time, think everything through, you may talk to your programmers about which technical solution would be the best and after considering all the different aspects you can make your decision. Update the documentation and communicate your solution so the feature can be completed.

These were my first examples where you may face game design debts. I experienced everyone of them in my work and I’m pretty sure that other designers had similar situations. I hope it will help you to not make the same mistakes as I did. The next blog post will featuremore examples that I think are pretty common in game design.

Ownership in Game Design

In the following article we will discuss the topic of ownership. If your game gives your players a lot of ownership it is probable that they will like your game and keep playing a long time. This article will try to explain the concept of ownership and tries to give you an overview of the different kinds of ownership in video games.

When I talk about ownership I don’t mean the legal ownership of a property. It is more a psychological ownership.

“In psychology, ownership is the feeling that something is yours.”

If your game is able to provide that feeling of ownership to your players their engagement will rise and they will be more likely to invest more time, energy and money in your game.

There are 8 different kinds of ownership that can rise in the context of videogames and to be honest I don't think that this list is exhaustive.

• Personal
• Narrative
• Skill
• Strategic
• Virtual
• Visual
• Social
• Investment

As soon as players start to play your game, the 3 following causes of ownership can rise due to the interaction with the game.

1. They will take control over specific things in your game.
2. They will gain knowledge, skill and experience in your game which also leads to a sense of ownership.
3. They will start to invest in your game. Playing your game takes time, energy and maybe they even invested money to buy your game or to perform micro transactions.

A sense of ownership leads to the motivation to prosecute effort ,personal sacrifice, a sense of responsibility and stewardship. All these things are extremely valuable when it comes to keeping players engagement up. These things can lead to a positive feedback loop so players will be more willing to interact with your game that will lead to even more ownership and therefor engagement.

It is also important to mention that as soon as your players start gaining one of these specific kinds of ownerships in your game, their desire of gaining more ownership will rise. As soon as your players see no more possibilities in gaining more ownership they will probably lose some interest in your game. If their interest drops below a certain level they will quit your game and look for another game that is able to awake and fulfill their desires.

Personal Ownership

Personal ownership is about the individual passion of your players. Some players love games of a specific genre. Thus they are already engaged in your game if it belongs to one of their favorite genres just due to the fact that it has something to do with their personal passion. This passion is part of the player and he has already invested in similar things to build this passion. This previous investment can be so strong that he is willing to invest in your game, hoping that your game will bring him more of the desired ownership that suits his passion. This is the reason why brands can be such a strong selling driver. If your game features an iconic character like Batman, a lot of players have already invested in Batman because they read the comics, watched the movies or talked with their friends about Batman. They invested time and energy, gained knowledge about the character and because of this have some kind of personal ownership. This can go so far that if games that feature these kinds of characters in a way that is not in line with their pre-knowledge about this character, players can get very angry. They feel betrayed, as if you wanted to give them a new but fake information in order to gratify their desire for more ownership.

Here is a list with examples for personal ownership:

• Difficult games
• Specific genres
• Specific visual looks
• Boss fights
• Certain brands (Harry Potter, Marvel, Poke´mon)
• Humor
• Asian Games
• Indie Games
• Specific themes (Sci Fi, Western, Fantasy)
• Specific designers (“I love Ken Levin games!”)
• Specific companies (“I love From Software games!”)

Narrative Ownership

This kind of ownership can be increased if your players are engaged in the story of your game. They play a part in the story, they form it with their gameplay and their narrative progression in your game. They gain information about the different characters in your game and maybe you even give them the possibility to make decisions that define certain outcomes of the story in your game. All this can lead to the feeling of an ownership, the feeling that it is their story that is being told on screen. Not every player has a desire for this kind of ownership but a good and interesting story that players can participate in can raise the chance that they develop a narrative ownership in your game. But be warned, if the storyline of your game is told and they see no more possibilities of gaining more ownership in this area their interest in your game will drop heavily if that was their main motivation driver in your game. If your players are open and interested in the narrative elements of your game this can be a strong engagement driver.

Skill Ownership

This kind of ownership is all about the skills your player acquires and trains while playing your game. These skills are literally part of the player and something he owns.The more the player can train the skills that are needed to overcome the challenges in your game the more ownership he will develop for your game. Different players like to train different skills. Some players like it to think strategically and prefer to develop skills that have a mental nature while other players enjoy training their aiming skills or reflexes. One of the reasons why Warcraft 3 had been such a success was that this game needed a very wide skillset from the the players. It wasn’t enough to be a good strategist, you also needed a high apm to perform all the needed micro actions to navigate your units in the different battles. I think that Blizzard designed it that way because they wanted to create a very high skill ceiling out of a very limited number of tools, so ambiguous players could keep training their skills and thus raising their skill ownership for a very long time. So start to think about all the skills you players should be able to train in your game and give them the possibilities to express and develop these skills as much as possible. The more skills your players will need the more hardcore this game will probably be. So know your audience and give them the right amount of different skills and granularity in the mechanics that are related to these skills so they can evolve as much ownership as need in this area.

Strategic Ownership

With strategic ownership I don’t mean the strategic skill your player can develop in your game. It’s more the result of the strategic skills of your players. It means the amount of different viable strategies your players can develop in your game. If players learn or develop these strategies, they learned something about the possibilities in your game, an action which is very important to evolve ownership. If they came up with a strategy on their own, the feeling will be even stronger because it was their idea and strategy. Something that relay belongs to them. To create this feeling your game needs to be deep. The deeper your game is the more outcomes are possible and with this more strategies can be developed and owned by your players. So try to make your game deep enough so your players can have a sense ownership to their strategies that they learned or developed by themselfs. Even in more casual games like Hay Day or The Settlers Online players love the feeling of having their own strategies to be as efficient as possible. Like everything else not every player needs the same amount of ownership to be satisfied but the most valuable players that play your game for years will probably have a high interest in having the possibilities to learn or develop strategies.

Virtual Ownership

Virtual Ownership means all the  extrinsic and prestige rewards that players can earn in your game. This can mean anything from Experience Points over Equipment to Currencies or Achievement Badges that players can earn in your game. They invested in these rewards and they own them in this virtual world. Players can feel proud about these rewards. The relationship to the feeling of ownership to these rewards is easy to see, as they literally own them in a virtual way. To make this feeling stronger you have to be able to give your players rewards that have a high value in your game. Rewards of different rareness can help to  promote the value the rewards in your game. There should be a proportionality between the effort and the reward in your game. But you should give a broad range on which level players can earn these rewards. There need to be rewards for the new player and rewards for the experts in your game. As long as there are rewards that they can earn the higher the chances that they keep playing. The feeling of ownership will increase the more rewards your player already earn as long as these rewards have a value to him. Due to this you need a system that gives your rewards the highest amount of value possible.

Visual Ownership

Visual Ownership is often found in RPG’s and more casual time management games. It describes the ownership of a visual creation the player can create with the mechanics in the game. Building a wonderful city or creating a character with a unique look. There are a lot of players who love this kind of expression and keep investing in their appearance. No matter if it is the design of a town, an avatar or something else. A lot of players love expressing themselves. They invest time and energy which causes ownership of this specific field. Mine Craft is one of the most famous examples that gives players the possibility to express themselves in a visual way. Players spend 1000 of hours expressing themselves with wonderful artworks build out of blocks. A lot of players even share these artworks via platforms like youtube, facebook, twitch etc.. This shows the joy they pull out of the visual ownership that the games provides to them.

Social Ownership

Social Ownership is one of the strongest engagement drivers. It is the ownership of the relationship that players have between each other. If you want to make use of this kind of ownership you need to give your players the possibility to communicate with each other. If you provide possibilities that they can help and support each other and achieve things that they wouldn’t be able to do by doing them alone chances are good that they will create bonds that are so strong that they will keep playing just because their friends do it too. Provide platforms like a forum, chat, message system etc. so it is easy for players to interact with each other. The more they do the better. Try to reduce negative communication to a minimum so players do not leave due to harassment by other players. A friendly and helpful community is the best ground to grow strong social bonds that give your players the highest possible amount of social ownership.

Investment Ownership

This is the ownership that will rise when players invest time, money, emotions and energy in your game. In some free to play games, players spend more than 50.000$. Their investment is so high that they will keep playing for a long time no matter what. The more time or money someone invested in your game the higher is his investment ownership. Because of this the successful free to play games have so much content that is able to keep players engaged for years and can cost them thousand of dollars and more. In a lot of box titles that cost 60$ or more players will play at least a few hours even if they do not like the game due to the power of investment because they already spend 60$ to buy the game.

Summary

There are a lot of different kinds of ownership possible in video games. I’m not even sure if my list is exhaustive. It is important to have them in mind when you’re designing your game. Try to know what kind of ownership you want to give your players with your game and strive for the most possible amount. It is also important to say that each ownership that was described could be a whole topic of its own. This list just wants to give an overview of the different kinds of ownership and how to look at each ownership that drives players motivation. Maybe the next time when you play a game on your own you will see how the different ownerships affect your engagement for the game.