The Social Media Clarity Podcast

Pandemic! UX meets Game Design with Matt Leacock - Episode 15

Bryce Glass returns to the show to join Scott and Randy interviewing Matt Leacock: A mild mannered UX designer by day … but after hours he uses his super-powers to design award-winning boardgames. You may have played one of his most popular games; Pandemic!, Roll Through the Ages, or Forbidden Island…

Matt talks about how he takes the lessons and techniques from each discipline to improve the other.

Transcript

Thomas: Hey, this is Thomas Knoll from Primeloop.com and I listen to the Social Media Clarity podcast.

Matt: When designing Pandemic I barely play-tested the heroic game, that’s the most difficult level on the game. It was really hard. I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to beat it - but I knew the internet could. We put it out there, because I knew players would find a way, and again, you need to trust your players.

Randy: Welcome to the Social Media Clarity podcast, 15 minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media in platform and product design.

Randy: Welcome to the Social Media Clarity podcast. I’m Randy Farmer.

Bryce: I’m Bryce Class.

Scott: I’m Scott Moore.

Matt: I’m Matt Leacock.

Scott: We have some gaming reputation news for you this episode. Microsoft recently announced that they would be notifying Xbox One players if they had been penalized for disruptive or abusive behavior through their reputation system. All Xbox One players have a reputation rating ranging from good, to needs work, to avoid me. Players will get notifications regarding changes to their reputation status and if they slip into the “avoid me” category, may have difficulty finding others to play within the Xbox One’s matchmaking service, or may lose other privileges on the system.

Conversely, Microsoft has hinted that they may reward players who maintain positive social reputations. Recently, game, news, and community site Polygon.com reported that a recent survey to Sony PlayStation 4 owners included questions about a player reputation system. Check the show notes at socialmediaclarity.net for links to articles with more information. As these systems develop, we may take a closer look at how they are performing, and if they are meeting the needs of both company and community.

Randy: Today we’ve got two special guests. Bryce Glass returns to the podcast. You may recall that Bryce was one of our original hosts. Thanks for coming back to visit the old stomping grounds Bryce.

Bryce: Thanks, it’s my pleasure. I’m really glad I could make it back.

Randy: He’s returning to help us interview our special guest today, Matt Leacock. Matt, Bryce, and I worked closely together at Yahoo where Matt was an interactive design architect for Yahoo’s social platforms and products. Now he’s chief designer at Sococo, a company creating technology to run virtual offices where he has all aspects of user experience, including interaction design, visual design, and corporate identity.

He’s also the owner of Locust Games, where he designs and develops board and card games for the international market. You may have heard of some of his award winning games, Pandemic, Roles through the Ages, and Forbidden Island. He recently released Forbidden Desert. Pandemic and Roles of the Ages were named family game of the year in 2009 and 2010 by Games Magazine. Pandemic and Forbidden Island have both defeated the players on Geek and Sundry’s TableTop Webseries.

I’ve been lucky enough to be a play tester for almost all of these awesome games. Congratulations, and we are very excited to have you with us today Matt.

Matt: Yeah, thanks Randy, thanks for having me.

Randy: Matt, could you talk a little bit about what Sococo is and what it does?

Matt: Sococo is a virtual office for you and your team. As companies get larger and more distributed, you end up joining lots of teams where you can’t get everybody in the same room all the time. We’ve created a very easy to use virtual office environment that allows you and your colleagues to get together on a virtual floor plan. You all get together and you can talk with voice, you can chat, you can screen share, you can use video, but more importantly, you can see everyone in your team on this floor plan all in the same room or you can break off into different rooms. It basically uses a visual metaphor to provide a sense of place for a distributed team.

Randy: I’d be interested in your take on how the two disciplines have informed each other, how you’ve grown as a designer and how that’s been able to inform your process when you put together a game, versus your process when you think about product design.

Matt: Sure, yeah, it’s something I mull about quite a bit, because I bounce between the two task daily doing interaction, user experience design by day, and then doing a lot of work game design in the evenings and on the weekends. I think one obvious thing is I’ve taken the toolkit of the user experience design and I’ve applied it directly to board game design.

When I started out early on, it’s funny for me to think of a career and game design. I’ve really wanted to do it since I was a kid. I started out at eight, and I was a hack. You flail and you’re not really sure what you’re doing, and you try all sorts of different things. A lot of things don’t work, but as I grew and became more experienced, as a user experience designer, I was able to apply that directly to games design. I’ve got a lot more rigor and methodology around how I approach a design.

I actually write up a creative brief. I really want to understand the audience. I take a lot of the lessons from user experience research and apply them to play testing. It’s really easy for me to think about how I’ve apply just methodology from experience design in to game design.

Bryce: I was really impressed during the development of Pandemic; I remember watching you user testing the documentation, the rules for the game, and I thought oh, what a perfectly fantastic idea.

Matt: One of the most direct things that I think get from game design that I apply back to user experience design and product design it’s just the directness and accessibility of play testing. It’s pretty easy for me to find somebody to sit down and try one of my games out, and it’s really critical as well. I have no illusions that a game will ever work unless it’s tested. It’s like a code; if you’ve written it, it’s guaranteed not to work. You have to test it, right?

The same thing with interaction design, but too many times, we pull some interaction design patterns off the shelf, we plug them in, and we say we’re done. We wash our hands of it. We close the ticket and assume that everything’s going to be great.

I have no such assumptions when it comes to board games design. Because I’m always play testing board games, I get into that rhythm and beat, and I bring a lot of that back into interaction design. It helps me bring that energy back. It helps me remember that, until I’ve got these things put in front of humans it’s not done.

That’s one of the things that I enjoy about game design is just how close you can get to players and how much you have to get inside their heads. It’s a good reminder for product design to keep that in the forefront of my process.

Randy: In 2008 you gave a tech talk at Google entitled, “Cooperation and Engagement; what can board games teach us?” in which you drew some important lessons from design of Pandemic to user interface and interaction design. It’s been six years. Both as a user interface and board game designer, what lessons still ring true from that talk?

Matt: I think all of that stuff is still legitimate, but I’d probably add a bit to it. I think one of the key things in that one was around flow and trying to keep your players in an engaged state between boredom and frustration really, and that seems to be the key thing for me as a game designer; that’s the key problem to solve for me. In to borrow from Jesse Schell, he had a wonderful book on the art of game design. You just play his games as problem solving in a playful mood.

In order to have enjoyable problems, you need to make sure they’re not too frustrating and not too boring. I think those things are directly applicable to product design, especially when you’re talking about new user experience. You need to engage someone, you need to peak their interest, and get them into a channel where they can find the next bit of information. It comes down to really good communication design as well, being able to talk about something generally, and then get a little bit more specific, and down you go.

We used to talk about this as the scent of information; always having the next breadcrumb in front of you that you can follow. That was really key thing when you’re talking about marketing and understanding how a product works and what your next steps are, and how to really engage with the product.

That was one of the lessons. Another one that was really key is - I think I used the word “embodiment”. That can mean a lot of different things but things that come to me right away are really good use of metaphor and finding ways to create component’s controls, to embody what you’re trying to communicate, things that are self-evident that you don’t have to present a wall of text in order to understand how do you either play the game, or how to use the interface.

To use the Sococo example, you’ve got an Avatar and because it’s a representation of a person, you expect you can do certain things with it. You expect that you can drag it around to move it. You expect you should be able to communicate with another person somehow, just by directly manipulating the Avatar object. The similar thing with a game pawn, if you present apon to someone, it begs that it be moved with your hand. Just trying to find the right components that both communicate a story that is easy for people to understand, and communicate their parameters to the system in which either that control or that component operate within.

Another lesson was that of simplification, and trying to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. I told a story in Pandemic how I was on a simplification kick, and I kept removing elements just to see how simple I could make the thing, and reduce it down to its fundamental core, and make it incredibly obvious what to do; super obvious, because there were very few components, right.

I ended up simplifying a deck of cards down to the point where I realize that players were having a lot of problems with it. They were making all sorts of mistakes. They were mapping different actions improperly, and ended up having to add all the complexity back in and introducing as many as 54 new cards in order to overcome that.

When I began, I think players had a mix of components, little cubes, and they had actions. They could spend cubes or cards, or just cubes, or just cards, and it was just a confusing mess. I was able to whittle that down so that there was really only one thing that players needed to worry about on their turn and that was how to spend four simple actions. Then, did another exercise and how could I communicate the four available actions as crisply and concisely as possible, and how could I provide a player aid in order to provide iconography and very direct statements, so that people could understand what they could do on their turn very directly.

A key part of design is throwing away everything that’s extraneous or that gets in the way.

Randy: Sometimes simplification adds components.

Matt: Yeah, that’s right, and in that case, it was 54 cards, which is a non-trivial expense. When I did add that that would open up all sorts of other doors for adding to the story, and to add a new clock mechanism, and it just unlocked all sorts of things. Yeah, it was simpler by adding components.

Svott: What lessons can we take from cooperative game design and apply then to social interfaces?

Matt: One thing, when you’re designing a cooperative game, is that you really need to trust your players. I see some people designing games and they put a helpful play tips in the end, where they basically ruin the game and they explain how to win the game. I here this from my daughter; “Don’t tell me how to do it!”, right. She wants to do it for herself. She wants to understand, and I think that’s similar in a cooperative game. You’re presenting a puzzle, and so to present the answer to the puzzle or tips on how to solve it is counterproductive. You need to trust your players that they’re going to figure out how to play it.

Actually, when designing Pandemic, I barely play-tested the heroic game, that’s the most difficult level on the game. It was really hard. I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to beat it but I knew the internet could. We put it out there. I did not test that a whole lot. I play tested the basic and normal levels quite a bit, but not the heroic level, because I knew players would find a way . Again, you need to trust your players.

In designing Sococo, we need to define ways to allow people to work together fluidly, flexibly, and we needed to trust them with degrees of freedom. Our basic user principle is just freedom, a locus of control; basically let the user do what they want to do. Don’t put endless supply of dialog boxes in front of them warning them not to do a certain thing. If they want to erase their hard drive at a certain point, you have to let them erase their hard drive.

In social space, this can be a little scary because you can have these interactions that can be questionable. The thing is you don’t want necessarily control that with software. No amount of software is going to prevent your colleague from being a dick, right? Basically, what we do with a lot of interactions in Sococo is just provide appropriate transparency to ensure that social norms take over, rather than trying to build in all these turn-taking mechanisms and checks and OKs, and this and that.

If you want to tear down what your boss is sharing in a large board meeting, and show pictures of your kids, you can do that, but everybody’s going to see it; everybody’s going to see that you did it, and so people don’t do it. We don’t have passin and control, for example, in Sococo. We trust that people in this controlled environment with people they know are going to behave accordingly because we’re providing the appropriate transparency.

If you want to kick someone out of your meeting when they’re talking, you can do that, but it’s going to tell you, and it’s going to tell everybody else in the meeting that you did it. Again, it comes back to trust. It’s an important lesson, I think, that spans both for game design and experience design.

Randy: Once again, I’d like to thank Matt and Bryce for joining us today.

Scott: Thanks a lot.

Bryce: Thanks a lot Randy; it’s been fun.

Matt: Thanks Randy, it was great to be here.

Scott: Our tip for you is to play Pandemic, to get a feel for the elements of cooperative play, how simple elements can ramp up the difficulty from beginning to challenging play, and introduce new opportunities for play. If you are unable to obtain a copy of Pandemic or get to a local game night where someone can share a copy with you, the next best thing is to at least look at the rules which are available for free on line, and check out both the video introduction to the game and a video of a full game being played through.

Links to Pandemic rules and play videos, as well as Matt’s 2008 Google tech talk are in our show notes, hat tips to publisher Zman games and Spydah666, for the Pandemic rules, and play through videos.

Marc: If you find our podcast valuable, please help others find us by subscribing to us on iTunes or Stitcher, liking us oh Facebook, and sharing podcast links through your own social networks.

Randy: For links, transcripts and more episodes from the socialmediaclarity.net thanks for listening.

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Pandemic! UX meets Game Design with Matt Leacock - Episode 15

Transcript