Reflection Wk 6: Player-centred design

In teaching you the importance of prototyping and playtesting, I have been introducing you to what is widely known as “player-centred design”. This is, however, a multi-faceted term and different designers have different takes on what it involves.

Some authors take this idea to an extreme. For instance, Ernest and Adams write in their book “Fundamentals of Game Design”:

Player-centric design is a philosophy of design in which the designer envisions a representative player of a game the designer wants to create, then accepts two key obligations to that player:

• The duty to entertain: A game’s primary function is to entertain the player, and it is the designer’s obligation to create a game that does so. Other motivations are secondary.
• The duty to empathize: To design a game that entertains the player, the designer must imagine that he is the player and must build the game to meet the player’s desires and preferences for entertainment.

The first obligation, the duty to entertain, can be adapted somewhat if the game is intended for education, research, advertising, political or other purposes, but for recreational video games it is imperative. If a player is going to spend time and money on your game, your first concern must be to see that he enjoys himself. This means that entertaining the player takes priority over your own desire to express yourself creatively. You must have a creative vision for your game, but if some aspect of your vision is incompatible with entertaining the player, you should modify or eliminate it.

Others, such as Raph Koster see player-centred design a bit differently:

I’ll tell you that to me, player-centered design means not only sanding the rough edges off of your interaction with the game, and not only seeing the game from the perspective of the player, but also always thinking about what the ultimate experience of the player will be, when the interaction is completed. And sometimes, the ultimate experience might mean that there’s rough edges left in on purpose. It might mean breaking the player out from seeing things only from the player’s point of view.

In recent times there has been a reaction against this kind of thinking and a rise of “auteur-driven” games such as Passage and Braid, which focus on making an artistic statment rather than pure entertainment. There is mixed opinion in the community as to whether this is a good thing.

What are your thoughts on this? Is the player always right?