Human Nature in Gaming

If you play games long enough, you’re eventually going to think, “I wonder if I could make a game?” Maybe you get this really cool idea that you’ve never seen done before, or paly a fun game and think, “I could make something like that!” Maybe there’s something about a game that just annoys you and you start thinking about all the ways you could make it better. Whatever the catalyst, now you have all these ideas swirling around in your head, but where do you start?

Hopefully, I can help you with that.

Welcome to my new blog for aspiring game designers! Every week, I am going to talk about some of the fundamentals of board game and card game design. If video games are more your speed, I encourage you to stick around, because a lot of what goes into designing tabletops games is going to apply to any game you make, and that includes video games.

Just a disclaimer, I am not a game design expert by any means, just a hobby game designer who’s happened to read a lot on the topic, and has been designing games for a long time.

This is mostly an introduction for the blog, but I am going to talk about the influence of human nature and game design in this post. My goal is to post once a week, with each post tackling a different aspect of game design.

So, if you get nothing else from this blog, if you never read another post ever again, I want you to take away one thing:

YOU CANNOT FIGHT HUMAN NATURE!

What this means is that as a game designer, you just have to accept the fact that people are prone to do and want certain things, and that is simply never going to change. Design with this concept in mind, and you will have a much easier time developing your game. Design against human nature, and you will be fighting a battle you cannot win.

Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures. If we see something done the exact same way 99 times, we are going to expect that 100^th time to turn out just the same. This is as true in life as is it is in games. If you design a game where at the beginning of each player’s turn, they draw a card, but on the fifth turn, they don’t draw a card, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that everyone is still going to try to draw a card on turn five. Every time you play this game, you are going to have to remind people that they are not supposed to draw a card on their fifth turn, and players will start having to repeat to themselves every time they play this game, “Don’t draw a card on turn five. Don’t draw a card on turn five. Don’t draw a card on turn five.”

And then, they’ll forget what turn they’re on.

Just don’t do it. Create the pattern; stick to the pattern. Your play testers will thank you for it.

If you must deviate from the standard rules of your game, make sure you are doing it for the right reasons. Rules that make sense are infinitely easier to remember and understand than rules that are arbitrary. People want things to make sense. We want cause and effect, we want an ordered world.

Here’s an example of how I had to deal with the issue of human nature in one of my games, Rabbit Ranch.

 

Some of the cards in Rabbit Ranch have purple stars on them, and some have yellow stars. The original concept was that some bunnies were male and some were female. When you played a female bunny next to a male bunny, or vice versa, you were allowed to immediately play another bunny. The idea, of course, was that the bunnies had a baby. I quickly became uncomfortable with this concept because I imagined parents across the country being forced into conversations with their children about how babies were made before they were ready to have those conversations, and it would be my fault because of this bunny game! So, I changed it from male bunnies and female bunnies to bunnies with purple and yellow stars.

The problem was, and this was a problem even before when we were still dealing with male and female bunnies, was that I had to constantly remind players that when you played a yellow star bunny next to a purple star bunny, the only bonus you got was the ability to play another bunny. You couldn’t play anything else. Now, this actually made sense when we were talking about male and female bunnies, but it made less sense when we were talking about purple and yellow stars. Also, the limitation wasn’t adding anything to the game, so I changed it. Now, when you played a purple star next to a yellow star, you could play anything you want.

But, that created a whole new problem. See, Rabbit Ranch is a pretty simple game. During your turn, you only have two options: you can draw a card, or play a card. That’s it. So now, whenever someone played a purple star next to a yellow star, I was constantly having to remind them that they were not allowed to draw a card, they could only play a card. It was human nature coming into the equation again. The ability to play another card felt so much like getting another turn, that in players’ minds, they did have another turn, and one of your options on your turn is to draw a card! Again, this limitation was not adding anything to the game, so again, I changed it.

In the current version of the game, when you play a purple star next to a yellow star you simply get another turn, and that is how the game stands today. The game is clean, and no one has be reminded of how anything works because I stopped fighting against the players’ natural inclination to do things in a certain way. Human nature is a beast, but if you can work with it, you will end up with a much better game.

So, that’s it for this week! I hope you all learned something that will help in your quest to making a game of your own!

Join me next time where we'll discuss the first steps in game design.