As a lifelong nerd in the fields of both user experience design and video games, I was excited to read The Secret Science of Games by John Hopson, a researcher in the games industry who’s helped shape some of the most influential and successful video games of all time, such as World of Warcraft and Halo. It’s a brisk but fascinating look at what goes into the process of ensuring a game is fun. The premise of the book, and user research in general, is simple: watch a user use your product, ask them questions about their experience, and use that data to improve the product.
Interestingly, despite the book being titled The Secret Science of Games, Hopson makes it clear that user research, in and of itself, is not science. Instead, researchers apply scientific processes when interacting with their users, “more like what happens in a therapist’s office than … what happens in a laboratory. The process of therapy uses background knowledge taken from psychological science, but the therapist isn’t experimenting on their patients.” Something as mushy as what makes a game “fun” is hard to scientifically quantify, but we can more easily use scientific principles to try to narrow it down. It’s a subtle but important distinction that’s reiterated throughout the book.
While the first three parts take interesting looks into his process with some real-world examples sprinkled in, the most interesting things in The Secret Science of Games come in part four, “Case Studies,” where Hopson goes into detail about how some of the most influential video games of all time came to be made the way they were.
He isn’t afraid to discuss examples of the process breaking down, either – Hopson kicks things off with the development of Halo 2‘s matchmaking system, a now-commonplace feature that automatically groups players into a randomly chosen sequence of maps to play through together, without the need to create lobbies, find players manually, or curate map selection. This is how nearly all multiplayer games of this type work now, but in the early days of Xbox Live, it was a new concept. The testers interviewed at the time hated it. Hopson goes through the psychology and science of what led early users to such a conclusion, and how it turned out to be so spectacularly wrong.
There are other great examples of user research, including physically sitting down with some of the most toxic players in Overwatch to determine what causes communication breakdown in cooperative online games. These are fascinating looks at the process – when a game is frustrating you, it’s easy to think the developers were lazy, myopic, or just didn’t care, but The Secret Science of Games shows that for many games, every possible detail and outcome has been pored over by some of the smartest minds in the business. But, when it comes to human emotion, scientific data can only take you so far. It’s how that science is applied that separates the good games from the truly great ones.
I recommend The Secret Science of Games to anyone who’s even vaguely interested in video game design or user experience design, and especially to those whose interest falls into the middle of that Venn diagram. It’s concise, easy to understand, and filled with real-world examples that will be fascinating to players of these games.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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