On the subject of Humane Design: Warframe and False Profit

Over the past 2 weeks, one of the YouTube channels I watch (Extra Credits) have done videos (#1 #2) on the subject of humane design and the subject of natural exits points when discussing games.  I was originally looking to continue my section building in Starbound (which is coming along nicely) but a couple events came up in games recently that got me thinking about this concept from my own personal viewpoint. 

So anyway, what is humane design in video games?  Humane design looks to take into consideration the player as a person and as such treat them in an appropriate manner without the use of tactics that inflate a play session beyond its intended purpose.  Much like ergonomics / anthropometrics building tools and environments for the benefit of the user, games should follow a similar concept where the user isn’t performing tasks that long have lost their appeal.  Methods such as the Skinner box have been an ongoing tool used in games to inflate game length in genres such as MMOs, multiplayer shooters and free to play games with progression, but I feel that this subject takes the concept in a different direction. 

I have play MMOs for the past 10 years or so and during that time I’ve experienced times where I’ve kept playing a game for the sake of an achievement, reputation or similar grind that would not constitute humane design as the ‘exit points’ (a place where we can naturally finish a play session) were few and far between.  I can remember grinding Timbermaw reputation in WoW for a couple weeks exclusively for a single trinket that I used which on reflection I didn’t really get that much use out of due to better gear being on the horizons.  My time to stop playing during these sessions were only stopped by either being too tired and needing sleep or having other commitments like education taking priority.  On the other side thou, there was a time during vanilla WoW where I was heavily into pvp when the rank system was in place.  To stay competitive, this required a similar level of dedication with marginal increases over a 6+month period so my personal goal of ranking up superseded the natural exit point of a battlegrounds map finishing.  This I feel is kind of a grey area that I consider with my playtime even to this day because it requires us to consider many different viewpoints and perspectives into why we play and what we’re looking to get out of it. 

This brings us onto Warframe and its recent event called “Operation False Profit” that tasks the player (known as Tenno) to do a series of raids on portable cash robots (Bursas, a augmented Moa) to achieve points and receive rewards at certain amounts.  As the player achieves a higher mission score, the next Bursa’s become more powerful adding to the difficulty of the event.  This event for me has been a mixture of frustration and consideration as I’ve had to deal with a number of different bugs and not being aware of the mechanics at hand.  Going into the event blind, I wasn’t sure how to spawn the Bursa (of which one of 3 different models can spawn) and when I did get it to spawn it was stuck in a ‘out of range’ mode that didn’t budge whatever I attempted to do.  When I did get it to work, achieving a mission score of 100 out of the required 1500 for the full set of prizes filled me with apathy towards the event as I didn’t want to waste my time over the next 5 days for a little reward akin to my earlier rep farming days in WoW.  However, once I had done some reading into the mechanics, I quickly understood the event and quickly proceeded towards a score of ~850 after an hours gameplay feeling happy with the increased enemy level to the point where I was facing a level 92 Bursa doing laps around a shipping crate to avoid its power attacks. 

The Denial Bursa feels the most challenging with its laser walls, blinds and missile barrages.  Screenshot taken from the Codex 26/4/2015

After finishing this event, I got to thinking about a couple different questions that I would like to answer:

• ·         Did this event present me with natural exit points?  Yes it did because of the scores corresponding to different levels of rewards present a spot to say “I’ve got a score of 1000 now I’ll finish that up later / tomorrow”. 

• ·         Did this event present me with a humane design skill progression?  This sounds a bit odd as I’ve adapted the discussion to fit this question, but a topic that comes up often in games is the subject of difficulty.  Often, games will increase the health, damage, resistances, etc of an enemy to present a difficult challenge but this presents a somewhat simple way of approaching the issue.  To allow the challenge to come in the place of augmented abilities, behaviour patterns or counter plays (something that games like Dota, LoL and Smite do well) gives the user the chance to think more about the decisions they make rather than brute forcing the challenge.  This event did look to start off well with different kinds of Bursa’s but it fell short not adding these concepts into the design. 

• ·         Did this event respect the time investment of the player participating?  This is a subject where we can look at either the journey (playing the event) or the destination (rewards) but for me I’d like to focus on the journey.  This is a difficult thing to discuss because there is a certain achievement to finishing a long event vs. a short one and if one looks to shorten an event it may be seen as a move to ‘cater to casual audiences’ or ‘make it easier’.  I don’t believe that these two things go hand in hand and as such I believe there are ways to condense this event down while keeping a level of challenge similar to this original event.  Here is what I feel would be an alternative means of presenting this event: 

1) give corpus planets (Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto) an associated event mission so that the player feels a natural progression from the planet as well as the event score itself.  By doing this, you could cut the score from ~15 runs to ~ 5 runs.
2) add multiple stages to these missions that look to use the environment alongside the Bursa to increase difficulty beyond enemy level e.g. using line of sight via doors / objects against skills such as the blind attack so that the bursa can’t flee
3) once the player has achieved the final mission on Pluto, present a ‘ongoing’ mission so that players can continue to compete for a high-score

Warframe does remind the player to take breaks.  Screenshot taken and cropped 26/4/2015

Being someone who has been playing games for their entire life, it’s been interesting having this outlook over the past couple days.  I feel it’s something that I’ve always been aware of (the ongoing ‘hours played’ markers on steam and /played in some games are quick to remind me) but never looked to consider my thoughts behind it.  Having someone discuss it makes you think and this event got me thinking where I sit on the discussion.  If you were to take something from this post, I’d say that it’s not the subject of shortening game-time without consequence but more on crafting experiences that feel less about filling in-between the great stuff.  Whatever the case, I feel that there’s going to be some interesting shifts over the next couple years as this becomes a higher priority with a medium that more and more people are taking up as a hobby or passion.