Adapting your game's vision to benefit your players
At Devcom's keynote today, Funcom's lead UX designer Anna Brandberg made a case for taking the time to truly understand players.
In a talk entitled 'The Psychology of Play: The Power of Understanding Your Players', Brandberg — who's worked on The Sims, Candy Crush Saga and, most recently, Metal: Hellsinger— encouraged developers to think about the player's journey and emphasised the need for your vision to align with players' vision.
"Often the focus is on ourselves, our own talent and our own achievements and making our own big, special games that are going to change the world," she said. "But in fact, what I'm going to talk about today is the opposite of that. I'm going to tell you [to] stop focusing on yourself entirely. And to start thinking about someone else.
"Some hard to swallow pills: it's not about you. Making successful games often has very little to do about how good you are at your particular craft."
Throughout her keynote, Brandberg detailed why understanding the player is important, because, more often than not, meeting your players' needs means meeting your business' needs.
"What we have to remember is that the people playing our games are people," she continued. "And it's so easy for us to focus on the numbers, how well our games are doing, the ratings, your KPIs, daily revenue, player relation, all of these things.
"But I have a world shattering secret for you: behind each of those numbers is a person. All those numbers that people are so focused on at work, they're people. We as companies need to keep reminding themselves that we should care about people."
She highlighted that "players don't care about [developers'] genius" and that sometimes you need to step back and pivot based on player's
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