The Critical New Player Experience

The Critical "New Player Experience"

Designers love complexity; nothing gives them more of a sense of satisfaction than watching interlocking game mechanics work together or providing an interface that can do anything and everything, including walking the dog and making coffee. There is also an element of competition among designers to provide more features than the previous guy did, under the assumption that more is better.

What many designers forget to plan for is how long it will take a new player to learn how to operate the necessary features in a game compared to the average new player's patience level. Designers play games for years before they get the financial go-ahead to work on their own game. Then they spend dozens of months building their game. Naturally, they know how everything works (or how everything is supposed to work). By the time they get funding approved for their game, they are strangers to the sense of wonder and frustration that a new player experiences.

Space shuttles are wonderful, but the number of people qualified to pilot them is small. The average middle-school youngster could drive you to a hospital ER these days ”seat, mirror, ignition, gas, brakes (maybe), and you're there. If a new player has to be fairly adept at using most of the capabilities in your everything-under-the-sun feature set to grow a character's stamina, wealth, skills, and so forth fairly quickly in the game world, then the only players your game will retain over time will be from the hard- core segment. Remember: These customers are not buying a car for $15,000 ”they're test-driving a virtual world that costs $25 “$50 to enter and $12.95 a month to rent a life in (and you're giving them the first month's rent as an incentive to stay). You have 30 days, and often less time than that, in which to hook them.

Having nothing but hard-core players can still be a winning formula, assuming that within the next 3 “5 years, nobody develops an interface that walks the dog, makes coffee, kills spiders, and then takes out the garbage. If you could keep 50% of the hard-core gamers playing your PW for a year, someone would probably come along and try to seduce your shuttle pilots with their newer , better feature set and interface. As you will see, what you drive is important (getting there may be fully half of the fun, indeed), but so are where you go, what you do when you get there, and with whom.

Another thing that is often ignored is whether the new player experience is compelling enough and entertaining enough to make the player stick around, or whether it is a frustrating experience that causes him/her to churn ^[6] out and go looking for entertainment elsewhere.

^[6] "Churn" stands for "change- turn ." It is most often used in the industry to describe players who change from customers into non-customers.

The quality of the new player experience is your key retention factor. The player has already decided to try you out; if he/she can't figure out the interface easily, or the environment is so hostile the player can't succeed at something early on, you'll probably lose the player in the first month. Historically, the churn rate of new players from online games, after garnering the hard-core players in the first three months of the game being available, is well over 80%, and in some cases, exceeds 90%. Overall, long- term retention (two months or more) varies, but 40% retention of all those who try the game is pretty standard.

There are a number of reasons for this churn; fixing these reasons during the design phase should be of paramount concern. Following are some of the worst offenses :

• Complexity of the interface ” If the client interface is cumbersome to use, employs non-standard commands or methods for everyday issues, or employs so many buttons and capabilities that even a shuttle pilot would have trouble figuring out how to use it effectively, you can expect only a small, dedicated core of players to bother learning it.

• Complexity of the game mechanics ” Sure, lots of interlocking moving parts are cool and represent a triumph of design; they also tend to limit your subscriber base to those players with the determination and sheer grit to work through them. Experience has shown that this is a limited market. It is fine if your game world is interesting enough that hard-core players spend time on Internet sites sharing special hard-won information, but new players should not need to go to those sites to master the basics quickly.

• A hostile new player environment ” If the new player represents nothing more than a crunchy snack to experienced players, or NPCs, or the environment, you can expect a lot of churn. For example, UO 's environment on launch was completely hostile to new players because player killers (PKs) had free rein. Those who were trying the game tended to get "ganked" by the PKs repeatedly. This is not conducive to creating "fun" in the minds of most players and caused tremendous churn from UO in the early days. It was only when EA reined in the PKs and provided more of a safe haven to allow the new players to get to know the game that subscription growth began to rise again. It is important to provide protection to the new player, to allow him/her to get to know the game and learn how to gain protection.

• An unsatisfying initial experience ” If the new player can't achieve something memorable pretty quickly or be rewarded in some fashion, the game is simple drudgery and unentertaining. Some quick reward, one that preferably teaches something about the game or interface, can provide an accomplishment "hit" and keep the player hooked for more. SSI's old Gold Box series of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) computer games solved this one by starting the level-one characters within a few points of level two and advancing the player within minutes of starting through some simple, easily completed actions.

• A lack of information or training in-game, in context ” Most players never read the game manual; they just jump right in and start playing. If they can't figure out how things work or have easy access to that information in-game, they are soon gone to try the next guy's product. Our history has been that we tend to dump the new players into our complex games without even an interactive tutorial to get them started; we just leave them to sink or swim on their own. The first game to actually provide a tutorial was AC ; players were led through a series of training actions to get to know simple commands such as walking, running, chatting with other players, arming weapons, and so on. Few online games since have followed this example, though one or two have retrofitted tutorials post-launch .

  Additional devices, such as interactive tutorials, tool tips, NPCs standing at new player entry points to provide information, or even human players or gamemasters (GMs) to provide an immediate welcome and offer of help, are not luxuries anymore. Some of the other factors that are listed, such as the complexity of the interface and game mechanics, can be blunted with thoughtful and timely tutorials, training, and assistance to the new player.

Consider every feature you want to design into the game as a potential block to new subscribers, and make sure you build in mechanisms to let the new player learn the basics quickly and easily and survive long enough to start enjoying the game.