Ghost Elevator
Player mental model
How can the player tell when the game is good or not? There are countless factors that contribute to an answer, but one important piece is how successful a player is in your game. Not if the player is winning, but is the game responding to players actions as the player expects. In other words, how well the player’s mental model fits within your game.
When someone is playing a game, a lot of the game happens inside the player’s head. Their mental model can be shaped by a number of things, including their experience with other games and the real world. It’s the player’s understanding of the world in your game, and their intuitive knowledge of game systems before even testing if that knowledge is correct.
For example, if an enemy shoots a rocket at the player, the player might already expect to die or take some damage, even before that rocket hits him. The game did not explicitly say this would happen, but the scenario already played in the player’s head. Player would take appropriate measures, like hiding behind cover when he sees the rocket, which means it performs actions not according to how the game works, but how it thinks the game works.
In a more real-world example, when you enter the building, there’s a predefined mental model that each person has: building is a collection of rooms, rooms are separated by walls, you can use doors and corridors to move between rooms, etc. When playing a game, our mental model prevents us from aimlessly bumping into walls and testing the system, since we have a predefined understanding of how buildings work.
For a good game design it should conform to the player’s mental model as much as possible. If the player walks through the door and hits an invisible wall, that’s the violation of its mental model, resulting in a bad experience.
Apart from using their mental models, players also do a lot of planning in games. For example, to get the treasure in an adventure game, the player has to gather resources, craft a weapon, go to a cave and slay the monster. This happens all the time, in every game, on some level. If game mechanics do not conform to the player’s plan, again, it results in a violation of their mental model. This is why in games where you can do crafting, it shows “recipes” of what kind of resources the player needs to craft the weapon. This is how the game adjusts the player’s mental model to be closer to actual game mechanics.
Games have an incredibly large arsenal of tools to “nudge” players into specific conditions, where their mental model could become more aligned to how our game mechanics work.
Let’s say we have a closed door. The door is only for decorative purposes, and it cannot be opened. Depending on the player’s mental model, this door will be perceived differently by each player. One group would notice that nothing happens when they try to open the door and correctly assume that it cannot be opened. The other group would get confused, because nothing is happening when they try clicking on it. Their mental model is not aligned with the game, and in their head if the door exists, you should be able to interact with it.
There are many ways to improve this situation. We can give the player explicit feedback when it tries to interact with a door (a lock icon in the UI) or audio cue (a character in the game says “I can’t open this door”). We can also leverage game assets to discourage interaction, like removing door handles or blocking doors with furniture. We can even reconsider having a door at all, and look for other ways to make the room more interesting.
We can use the same ideas to achieve an opposite effect, to invite players to interact with a door. This is where assets, lighting and sound effects are very powerful, sparking the player’s interest to investigate what’s behind the door.
Isn’t this too much of a player’s hand-holding? That’s a fair question. There’s an argument to be made that games are becoming too easy: they remove the fun of exploration and trial-and-error type of situations, which arguably makes the reward more satisfying. I don’t deny these types of games should exist, and they have their own audience.
I think it’s all about managing expectations. If your game from the very beginning doesn’t tell anything about game mechanics, you could set player’s expectations that this game would not make it easy for them, and they’ll have to prepare to experiment a lot to progress. In The Witness for example, the player is just thrown into the world without any explanation, and they have to figure out everything by themselves, including basic game mechanics, rules of the world and every puzzle in the game.
However, if you make a detailed tutorial at the beginning, you’d need to maintain that expectation that the game will be more open about the mechanics of the game. It doesn’t need to be explicit in a way it tells you everything, but using level design and other tools can keep the player’s mental model in check, while still offering enough secrets that can be found by exploration and testing game mechanics.
