When you’re building a game, nothing is more important than putting it in front of an audience. Do it early, do it often, and take it seriously. Playtesters tell you if what you’re doing is working. If you know how to playtest, and if you playtest often enough, you can get metrics on the specific changes as you make them, know what works and what doesn’t, and polish your core gameplay experience until it shines. But playtesting video games doesn’t always go how you want, especially if you don’t know what to look for.

At Thoughtspike, we go into a playtest with top priorities based on what’s new, but when actually watching the play tester, we’re looking for:

• Where do misapprehensions occur and why? These invariably lead to a “less fun” experience.
• Where does the player get stuck? Getting stuck means reaching to internet guides for the answer, which is less fun than triumphing over the puzzle. This is about level and mechanic flow, signaling for play-space paths, and storytelling.
• Where do players get tired of mechanics and need a change of pace?
• When and why do they change up their play style, try new things, experiment?

These simple questions have very complicated answers. To get the most out of the observation of a player interacting with our game, we have to consider every obstacle and decision-making process that we’re watching the player navigate. We’re evaluating all of these things for whether they offer either unhealthy frustration or healthy challenge. One is bad and the other is good. One is a problem that needs to be addressed and the other is the whole point of playing video games.

I’ll go through each of those four bullet points and offer examples from our playtests, illustrating how to watch for them, and how to sort out the signal from the noise.

Frustration VS Challenge

Challenge is a kind of healthy frustration: it’s a resistance to progression that makes the player’s attainments meaningful and interesting. It forces adaptation and experimentation, which leads to new and diverse experiences of play, problem resolution, and eventual triumph. Challenge compels and engages the player, it can be arousing, and it can even be soothing. It’s what games offer that other media doesn’t: why you might play Tetris instead of watching The Lord of the Rings.

Frustration is unhealthy to the game experience. It leads to “table flip” or “rage quit”. Frustration is when the resistance to progression feels unfair, insurmountable, or–most importantly–incomprehensible and arbitrary (if you look back at all those words they’re just different ways of saying ‘unfair’). This can be subjective, but our experience in watching testers has led us to observe that there are very consistent sources of frustration and that these are manageable by design.

Since Challenge and Frustration are both resistance to progression, one might imagine that they are only separated by the question of degree, that a moderated, attenuated experience of frustration could become a healthy challenge. I think this would be a mistake. It is true that a certain level of frustration–in direct proportion to how invested a player is in progressing–isn’t going to end the play session. However, I suspect that if we study frustration carefully then we may define it according to a set of measurable experiences and influences that do not overlap with those that define challenge. It is my suspicion that challenge cannot exist alongside frustration. They are mutually exclusive. I will attempt to demonstrate this in another blog post on another day. If my theory is true, then the distinction between them is not a question of degree: they are separate. Moderated frustration will never become healthy challenge. Instead, the objective of the designer should not be to limit frustration to safe boundaries, but to eliminate it.

Misapprehensions in Video Games

There is no better demonstration of the important difference between frustration and challenge than in the difference between a misapprehension and a mistake. I’m making up my own definitions here to help stake out the distinction between ideas, so stay with me. When I say a misapprehension, I mean when the player comes to an understanding of how the game works that is not correct.

An example of a mistake would be if a player throws a grenade but misjudges the projectile arc so it hits a ceiling beam and bounces back in their face. If they know the rules for grenades, then they’re likely to know what happened and why. Mistakes like this, supported with tight iteration loops so that the cost of the mistake is not unreasonable, can be funny and fun. They are an integral part of the challenge tasks that make gameplay interesting. Getting the arc of a thrown grenade right so it nails your foe is a satisfying challenge.

By contrast, a misapprehension would be if they threw a grenade at an enemy but the grenade landed behind a small object that blocked the explosion damage from affecting their foe. It explodes and looks like it should have destroyed the foe, but it didn’t. The player decides that grenades don’t do much damage, and then makes the choice to ignore grenades for the rest of their play experience, thus locking themselves out of a fun and useful tool. Worse, as the misapprehension persists, they start to feel like the game doesn’t make sense. The gap between their belief (grenades are puny) and the reality (grenades are lethal) will make it feel unfair, random, and arbitrary every time they get killed by one. This unfairness will be frustrating.

Misapprehensions can be caustic to the experience of fun, and can go on for a very long time. In one game we made we have glowing green crystals that you can absorb to increase the size of your mana pool. A playtester attempted to absorb a crystal and the absorb spell missed the crystal, hit the edge of the chest holding the crystal, and then bounced back empty handed. The playtester assumed that the absorb spell couldn’t work on crystals, and then, not knowing what else to try, ignored them from then on. Since absorbing crystals is a core level-up mechanic, the longer they went on under this misapprehension, the more underpowered they were in each new area, and eventually the game became unplayable.

Again, a misapprehension is not a simple strategic or tactical error, a slip of the finger, or a missed shot. A misapprehension is a mistaken belief about how the game works that leads to the player having less fun. Mistakes are fine, and even funny or fun. Misapprehensions are bad: The player can tell something is wrong and they feel like the butt of a joke nobody is explaining.

Avoiding Misapprehension

You are always teaching your players how to play the game. This starts with the advertising, which informs the player what kind of game it is and lets them start forming assumptions about its mechanics. It continues when they open the game for the first time and it doesn’t stop until the last game strategy listicle disappears from their social media. If your game is a success, that means never.

In a very real sense, a game is just a confined space for learning arbitrary skills.

If you want to avoid misapprehension, you need to teach at every step of gameplay. Every new mechanic, every new tool, every new direction of exploration has to be taught. Ideally this instruction is managed in a way where the player never notices it’s happening: they just feel increasingly badass for what they’re able to do “all on their own.”

The following list is a work in progress, but represents the principles we’ve learned to follow to try to avoid misapprehension.

1. Problem Before Solution. Or, don’t give them the solution to a problem they don’t have yet, unless the solution’s usefulness is obvious and memorable, e.g. a bomb. Only give them a new hammer once they are in front of a nail.
2. See Before Do. Let them see it done before they do it. Enemies using powers is a good combo of this and Problem Before Solution.
   • Do not show what can’t be done.
3. Mechanical Immediacy. Introduce a new tool or mechanic only through immediate play. That is, in a place and at a time when the new mechanic must be actively engaged with in interesting and satisfying ways that solve problems or provide rewards—with low or no cost of failure! Do not expect players to later pause to try to figure out the new thing. Let them play with it right away.
4. Guided Progression. Introduce new ideas one at a time, in a logical sequence.
5. Vary the Load on your player’s brain. Exploration, experimentation/planning, and rapid skill tests (eg Combat, Tetris) are all distinct modes of mental operation that tax the mind differently. Switch back and forth between different modes to allow the player’s brain to rest. Avoid asking for two at once.
6. Signal Persistence. It’s often said that if you want your audience to notice something, leave three clues: they will ignore one, miss one, and start to wonder about the third. This is an example of the principle of signal persistence, which states that a signal cannot be interpreted unless it lasts long enough to be noticed, studied, and then decoded. Non-Diegetic signaling must be unmistakable, persistent, and use the conventions of the genre. Diegetic signaling is preferable wherever possible but again must be unmistakable, persistent, and consistent with the reality presented. Never assume that a player knows something just because they’ve been told.

What I think is neat about these principles, is they apply to other educational contexts equally. These same rules apply whether I’m making a game that has to teach you how to play or I’m trying to teach you how to find a source so you can fact check the news.

Frustration is anathema to students in the classroom too, and challenge is just as empowering there.

So when we’re running playtests, we view the players as we would students. We let them play, and wait for them to ask questions. We look for ways to scaffold their experience so they can discover and master the principles at work for themselves.