Making Your Game Smell Like a Bakery Revisited

I have been on a bit of a cognitive science and consumer psychology kick with my reading at the moment in order to get out of the habit of reading nothing but game magazines and nerd fiction.

I chose to get into some light psychology about decision making and such like because psychology is often over looked by designers and many games are released where you can tell absolutely no thought has been given to the player’s psychological experience. Granted, principles of psychology and cognitive science are hard to get into a game as it can often produce intangible results when you are focused on hitting milestones.

I do not profess to be an expert or even well read on this subject but something I read in Martin Lyndstrom’s (the world’s leading brand expert and neural marketing evangelist) book, Buy-ology, relates to an aspect of games that is often the poorest part of the game.

Did you know that the so-called ‘new car smell’ comes from an aerosol? Or that the smell of flame grilled burgers in burger restaurants is pumped in through the ventilation system? Supermarkets have taken to placing bakeries near the front of the store because the smell of freshly baked bread makes people hungry and leads them to make impulse purchases above and beyond what they came in for. Some supermarkets that don’t have a bakery pump the smell of a bakery in through the ventilation.

The point is that companies start engineering your experience to be enjoyable as soon as you enter their building or start using their product. Most videogames present several minutes of frustration before you start enjoying the experience.

Contrary to popular opinion the ambiguous term gameplay starts as soon as you put the disk in the tray, not once the first level has loaded. Think about what developers and publishers make you sit through before the proverbial rubber hits the proverbial road and you are blowing heads off dudes. You will be forced to look at (often unskippable) legal screens, company logos and will often have to endure a loading screen FOR THE FRONT END. Once those precious minutes have been lost you will probably find that the main menu is confusing, hard to navigate and unresponsive or uninspiring.

To tackle the first issue, can we developers just admit that 99% of people don’t care who made the game they are playing? They don’t want to see a logo screen and they don’t care which middleware we used. Maybe it is my anger management issues but I am instantly enraged by seeing logo screens and legal text. My rage subsides a little bit if you are allowed to skip these screens but the damage has been done.

We are wrongly taught about the Seven Sins. There aren’t seven, there are eight. Having a loading screen for a menu is the eighth. Menus are not made better by loading 3D graphics or FMV. A good menu is clean, easy to read and navigate and also loads quickly. The player is not impressed by a feast of moving objects on the screen; they are impressed by a menu that lets them efficiently get into a game.

There is no bakery at the front of most games, just a few minutes of annoyances before we are able to play the game. We need to start giving the player enjoyment as soon as they insert the disk and stop irritating them with nonsense. I understand that people think certain messages have to be shown and that developers want to show off their outsourced logo animation but let’s think about the damage that does to the player experience.

Anyone that has played The Darkness will remember the opening level. Starbreeze wanted the game to load the level and start the game immediately if no save was detected, assuming it was the player’s first time playing the game. This opening level is pretty incredible and this would have made the first play of the game much more enjoyable. The ESRB, however, made the developer display the online warning message first and scotched the idea. Why couldn’t that have been shown when the player goes into multiplayer instead?

Why can’t company logos be shown in a more artistic way as well? A better idea than the logos before the main menu is to have them integrated into the opening sequence. The first person execution level in Call of Duty 4 has scrolling credits and the Activision and Infinity Ward logo could easily have been placed as graffiti on the walls that the player character passes by. Perhaps a character can where it on his t shirt? Perhaps it can be on a flag? Perhaps it can just be shown on screen as a credits roll?

There is also a psychological technique known as priming and this is where before someone experiences something they are primed to feel a certain way by the use of suggestive words or images. I recently went to see Derren Brown who is a master of hypnosis and manipulation. The climax of the show (no spoilers, don’t worry) involves the audience as a whole making a choice. This choice had been primed by suggestive words being used throughout the act without us knowing. The ‘trick’ worked flawlessly and everyone was left in awe at what he had manipulated us into doing.

In games there is no positive priming. Before a user starts the experience they must suffer logo screens and legal text and then a loading screen for what is often an unhelpful menu. Instead of taking steps to prime the player positively we give them a group of annoyances that, whilst in the scheme of things are slight, negatively prime the player before they even get to control their character.

By trying techniques influenced by cognitive science we can prime the player before they start level 1 and we can also create the supermarket bakery effect by rethinking what happens the second after the disk tray closes. We have a short amount of time to grab the player’s attention and must do all we can to fully immerse the player in the experience we have worked so hard to craft.