Halo 3: The Science of Fun

This story was originally published in Wired last August, but it’s still incredibly relevant to how Human Factors is finding its way everywhere. The author profiles employees at Bungie studios (which produces the wildly popular Halo games for the PC and XBox 360) that explore User Experience. These people examine how players play a game and determine whether their experience is fun or not. How do you define fun?

“Is the game fun?” whispers Pagulayan, a compact Filipino man with a long goatee and architect-chic glasses, as we watch the player in the adjacent room. “Do people enjoy it, do they get a sense of speed and purpose?” To answer these questions, Pagulayan runs a testing lab for Bungie that looks more like a psychological research institute than a game studio. The room we’re monitoring is wired with video cameras that Pagulayan can swivel around to record the player’s expressions or see which buttons they’re pressing on the controller. Every moment of onscreen action is being digitally recorded.Midway through the first level, his test subject stumbles into an area cluttered with boxes, where aliens — chattering little Grunts and howling, towering Brutes — quickly surround her. She’s butchered in about 15 seconds. She keeps plowing back into the same battle but gets killed over and over again.

Continually getting killed in 15 seconds is not fun. “Oh sure,” you may say, “that’s common sense! Obviously that’s not fun!” But how many level designers will realize that? How will they know it takes exactly 15 seconds for the common, inexperienced player? The designer may have considered it especially challenging, not realizing the full implications of putting all those enemies right there.User Experience is more than just applying basic cognitive principles of memory, perception, and decision making to game design. It’s more subjective than that (but that’s not a bad thing!). It’s about bringing in users and videotaping them, asking them questions, and maybe tracking their eyes. It’s like Quality Assurance testing, but instead of looking for software bugs, you’re looking for usability bugs. This is likely easier in linear games like Halo and more challenging in open-ended games like The Sims. But it must be done to ensure that gamers are getting a good experience - essentially, that they are having fun.

Link to the article: http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/ff_halo?currentPage=all (PDF)

Also, my friend and fellow graduate student, Carl Smith, is very much into the User Experience of games. He has a blog that discusses these issues at his blog, aptly named Evaluating Design.