My Life As A Gamer: It's About Shot-Calling

The public (but closed) Alpha test for the next World of Warcraft expansion, Shadowlands, is now live and folks are cutting videos.

Way too early to tell if this is another apology, but that's not the point. This is about Gamer Psychology.

There is a major difference between the audience for media of passive observation and media of active participation. That difference is that the source of satisfaction stems from the interaction between the player and the playspace provided by manipulating the levers of the machine that are game mechanics and gameplay procedures. Each type of game and genre of setting therein has specific expectations put upon it; successful game design fulfills those expectations and failures do not.

The data on what those expectations are is not hard to find anymore. Some types of games (e.g. MMORPGs) are drowning in it while others are harder to acquire, but nonetheless the revealed preference of gamers in every corner of the gaming business is knowable to designers and publishers; that said parties continue to push crap they don't want says a lot more about them than the ill-served gamers.

And yes, as with learning how to write satisfying fiction, this is entirely teachable. You can--and people do--study this stuff and try to tease out useful psychological insights for use in making future games that don't tank in the marketplace. (Why this is something that only the casino crowd seem to bother with is beyond me.) If nothing else, you can just find yourself an old but popular game (e.g. AD&D 1st edition), play it exactly as-written and pay close attention to what the experience of executing procedures and using mechanics actually is and not what you want it to be. Do that with several others of that sort; take notes and think deep on how the game achieves its results when operated as instructed.

Gamers are about the experience of being the guy in that situation calling the shot to get things done. This is universal across all game types, from the Napoleonics big with the Boomers standing around sandtables to the kids throwing around words that get you banned on Twitch playing whatever it is that's in the Fortnite slot this week, with only the sort of shot-calling being done and how being the variables. Stuff like Civilization is shot-calling at a bigger scope and scale but a slower pace of decision than, say, Street Fighter (small scope and scale, fast pace of decision).

The best and enduring examples get that this is about shot-calling. Find that point and build your design around it. Find the games that nail this and publish them.