The newest — yet, the oldest — psychological need in video games, as stated by the PENS model, is relatedness. All three needs (competence, autonomy, and relatedness) arguably had a place in all games, long before we were playing Pac-man or Asteroids.

Multiplayer wasn’t always a top priority in game design. We should thank arcades (which are now a dying tradition) for pioneering the idea of playing a game not by yourself, but with some company.

In a way, it’s strange to think that despite years of arcade get-togethers, multiplayer didn’t truly thrive until it could be done in the convenience of our own homes…alone. We interact together virtually, never knowing the faces of our teammates and opponents.

So, through services like Xbox Live, The Playstation Network, Wii’s online services, and Kaillera, we have the easiest ways to meet and play, and less socialization than when we hovered around the machines at the arcades. Arcade or not, anybody who’s played a game with friends in the same room can attest to one thing: internet multiplayer lacks a little something that no online service will ever be able to simulate.

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First a brief history of the Atari 2600 and early games:

In the late 1970’s, home video game systems were beginning to flood the market, and one company, Atari, capitalized on it by taking games to the next level: removable cartridges. This enabled the buyer to purchase a console and games separately, instead of buying several bulky consoles which often had at the most five or six preloaded games. The old machines, notably Video Pinball and the great, great granddaddy Pong, made way for a sleeker, more compact system, and cartridges which held around three to maybe six or seven kilobytes of information. The resolution improved as well, as the simple squares of the paddles, walls, and balls were replaced by sprites made by multiple pixels, forming space ships, bugs, ghosts, frogs, robots, men, and other types of characters. This incarnation was dubbed the Atari 2600, an innovation when video games were still in their infancy.

Now for the review.

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We, the Players is about learning from the people who do more with games than play them. In our first interview of hopefully many more, we talk with esteemed modder and map-maker WadaHolic about Doom, his history of mods, and his take on console gaming.

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Today’s video games rely so heavily on graphics, sound, and fan-service, that they lose sight of what matters most in gaming: the gameplay. Over twenty years ago, technology was still new, and there was very little space and memory to work with. Thousands of games from that era could all fit on the dinosaur floppy disk, and still have room left over. These constraints meant that one would have to balance graphics, sound, and gameplay with the five to six kilobytes of space they could store on a chip which was protected by a box known as a cartridge. Those cartridges were similar to the jump-drives often used today, and were bulky compared to the six or seven kilobytes they could store. Despite those limitations, many great and addictive games came from that era.

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The second psychological need termed by the PENS model is autonomy. When I first read about this, I thought I knew exactly what it was talking about. Autonomy is described as the quality of the game which controls freedom in choices and influence on forthcoming experiences. However, Immersyve named simulation games, particularly Sim City 4, as “the pinnacle of open-ended gameplay and the degrees of freedom that can maximally satisfy the player’s need for autonomy.” After reading that, I’m thinking maybe we had two different ideas…

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While I was looking around randomly on the internet a website by the name of “Art of Manliness” caught my eye.  Recently they asked a question about whether video games are manly.  Call me crazy, but doesn’t this sound like asking if movies are manly?  Are there not movies that cater to particular types of individuals?  Why, yes there are.  The same (as has been explored in previous posts) is true for games.  Some gamers like a challenge, others want to lose themselves in an adventure.

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According to the PENS model, one of three psychological needs satisfied by games is competence. The desire to feel capable is present in any challenge, so games are probably the purest arena for this need. For many people, a lack of skill is a lack of fun. It’s understandable that if you exert more effort for a game, you expect to see better results.

The most important requirement of the PENS model is that all of this be measurable, predictable. Talking about this stuff in theory may spark ideas, but if it can’t measure completed games or game features, there’s no practical use. So, here’s where it gets interesting…

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About a year ago, I read about a self-described think-tank called Immersyve. This company described a game-assessment model that was meant to help in “predicting outcomes such as enjoyment, sustained play, and value,” called the Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS). Their work is sold to game development companies for building better games and brands. For some reason their website hasn’t been updated since this time last summer.

Immersyve’s research concluded that every game, regardless of platform and genre, contains three inherent psychological needs that contribute to a player’s experience with a game. The needs are coined as competence (mastery and success), autonomy (freedom and ingenuity), and relatedness (social cooperation).

As games become more sophisticated in their abilities, educated players expect newer types of feedback from the experiences. Over the next few posts I’m going to take a closer look at these psychological needs and their presence in games.

While this all leads to a great notion – more understanding = games which are more fun — there’s an obvious flaw (and isn’t there always?). What about manipulation? We’re all guilty of playing games beyond the fresh-new-fun stage: hanging on for the threadbare reward of finally beating a game, for unlocking more achievements or the “100%” mark, for building a better character that had no further use. But what if a game were engineered from the beginning to keep players returning at any cost? This may be more of a moral dilemma, a matter of intentions. 

Would you feel betrayed if you discovered you had spent a ton of your time playing certain features of a game that were only added to put a deeper branding of the game into your awareness and recommendations to friends? And how many games have you played that have already done this?

Links
Immersyve

A few months back, Gamasutra did an interview with Peter Molyneux where he expressed a pretty upset opinion about the whole video game industry:

“Now that’s a huge failure. That’s our failure. For not being really, truly as big as movies. Because we’re not. Because we only sell — what do we sell? Eight million?”

Talk about blunt. But as big as movies?

I do believe that games will eventually be as much a part of daily life as movies, but I don’t think it will happen in the timespan of one generation; I think it will come about only as more, younger kids are raised to play them.

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John Carmack, graphics-programming pioneer and programming lead of id Software, does things with video cards that other people only theorize. He understands the zeitgeist of gaming, and that is a movement toward console games. It’s a little confusing, then, why he would announce a browser-based game for the competitive gaming community, a community that appears to be stuck in its infancy.

Last year, when Carmack announced Quake Zero (later renamed Quake Live) he explained that the choice for a browser-based delivery of the game was natural because competitive players forsake graphical quality in favor of faster input response. The game itself, which will run on a revitalized Quake 3 Arena engine, certainly has no aspirations to be the biggest, the best, or the prettiest anything.

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