And now it's time for your weekly scheduled dose of Game Design talk with McJob. This time, it's based upon a user suggestion.
I guess this is a general kind of problem, but I find it heavily applies to game design a lot of the time, so I wanted to address it in here.
What I find funniest (and possibly slightly ironic) is how deeply embedded the idea of "motivation" is in video games themselves. One of the most critical things that a game developer must provide for their players is a
reason to want to continue playing, yet it's not something we can force upon a player. Some people couldn't give three roosters and a squirt of piss about your 900 page epic fantasy drama novel; they just want to slam a big sword into living things.
In the same way that a good designer must try to create as many possible reasons for a player to
want to play a game as possible (in the hope that the player latches onto at least one of those reasons as motivation), we often have to find creative and clever ways to motivate ourselves. The real secret is that game developer is basically like one big video game, except with less ninjas and awesome explosions.
Now, I want you to hold on to the idea of motivation and reasons; we'll come back to them shortly. In the meantime, take a look at this:
| BOREDOM |------ | <------| ENGAGEMENT |------ | <------| FRUSTRATION |
This is now the table that dictates your entire life. It is the metric scale of fun, and you enlightened forgeters are going to be relying on this for the rest of your lives.
This table represents the span of attention that we give to any experience. While I've placed arrows to show the general flow, in many cases the direction of the arrows may be reversed, or there may not be a linear pattern of behaviour. Still, let me explain exactly what the three parts are:
- Frustration [Failure by Failure]: Frustration is what happens when we find ourselves incapable of understanding or dealing with a problem. Maybe we've decided that it's beyond our scope of knowledge, or maybe we've worked for so long on a project and built up such high expectations of how it should work, when things aren't consistent, we just can't handle it and call it quits.
- Engagement [Success by Averages]: The perfect state is a place where we aren't just cruising through the experience, but that the challenges we encounter feel worthwhile and require a little bit of practised skill and mastery. This is basic Pattern Theory in effect.
- Boredom [Failure by Success]: When things get too easy, we become bored and lose interest. Just like that creepy "friendzoned" dude/girl who always sucks up to you, the experience has become stale as we're not getting anything new out of it to keep our mind involved. Why should our brain waste energy on a timesink that we aren't getting anything out of, when there's plenty of other things that take less energy and produce better results (like sleeping)?
As you experience something for a longer period of time, you become more familiar with it. You learn and understand how it ticks and how to play it to your advantage. Slowly, you go from not understanding anything and being frustrated to becoming bored as you become an expert.
What's critical for keeping yourself motivated is to find ways to keep yourself in that engagement-zone; success by averages. Break your project down into small, manageable challenges. When something becomes too hard, step away from the PC and take a break, before coming back and breaking it down into even smaller challenges. If you're succeeding at something with ridiculous pace, you need to increase the challenges, and possibly (this might sound weird) do
less work in a day.
Ultimately, we want to avoid burn-out or ego-death, and those two can be caused by edging too close to the Frustration-Zone or Boredom-Zone, respectively. If you get it into your head that every single activity/project/game comes down to moment-to-moment challenges, you can start to hopefully micro-manage your attention span a bit better.
Managing challenges is only
one part, though. Challenges are linked to goals, which are things you want to achieve, but are blocked by the challenges. So, what tells us that a goal is worth fighting for? What gives it value?
Reason.
We do things out of a need. Our brain hates to spend energy; it'd love to just conserve it all and not do anything ever. It's necessity that drives progress, and thus what makes us work hardest is when there's a need, not a want. The true skill in making videos is not about making nice looking characters or developing great development tools; it's about understanding the kind of player who will play your game, and what they care about most deeply so you can exploit that (in a good way). Naturally, we
must reflect this back onto ourselves, and figure out what it will take to drive us through the hardest moments.
I tend to find that good motivations are often not self-driven; it's usually best to have other people hold you accountable. Asking your friends to "check in" on your progress (even if they don't understand or give a stuff about your work) is a good way to recreate the kind of studio environment that generally leads to better progress. Furthermore, a simple rewards/punishment system ("I'll eat a biscuit if I can do this work in the next 20 minutes, but if I fail I'll do 20 push-ups") can also go a long way.
Something that drives me a lot is jealously. Looking at other people's public, credited work that comes close to the things I want to do, especially when I feel it's being done
wrong, makes me so loving angry internally, and that drives me harder to push forward on my projects. It probably sounds a bit selfish or rude, but you can't afford to be picky over what motivates you most. Once you figure it out, you have to stick to that.
Moving along; as far as proper "strategies" and "action plans", I can't help but be intentionally vague. The simple fact of the matter is that there's no cure-all. The best I can do is what I've done; provide some knowledge on
how motivation works, and hopefully help you understand
why it often doesn't.
I gave some generally tips above; the one other miscellaneous point I want to make note of is the fact that the brain
loves consistency, and that's why scheduling and timetables work EXTREMELY well for many people, if they're able to maintain them. I recently adopted a new technique involving burn-down charts, time sheets and trello cards, but that method is a bit too professional for general use. I might go into detail in the future. The point is; consider jotting down what time you
expect for something to take, try and put in regular hours, and watch as a project either slips OR excels.
