Understanding Human Beings

Alright, this is the part where the secrets of the universe regarding human beings are revealed. I'm only half joking. Depending on what you've been taught, this might change how you see people, yourself included.

It's necessary because at the end of the day, games are played by humans. To make compelling games for humans, you must understand humans. You're a human, so a game needs to be human-compatible for you to enjoy it, and the same goes for everyone else who plays it.

Nonviolent Communication#

From my experience, Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is the most compact and easiest package for understanding human beings. It's the work of Marshall B. Rosenberg, who put it together while trying to understand why some humans are violent while others are compassionate, and whether it's possible to reach violent people and help them become more compassionate.

It draws on research, writings, studies and findings from many different sources, compiled into a single system that anyone can understand. It offers both a mindset and a toolset: methods to understand, connect and communicate with other humans compassionately, no matter the circumstances. It's really neat.

At its simplest, NVC is a process for turning tension into peaceful outcomes. First, you connect with what's going on in you at this moment. That's called clarity. Then you try to understand what's going on for the other party. That's called empathy. With those two pieces of information, a clear path to concrete, peaceful, win-win solutions becomes easy to see.

Over the years I've come across a lot of different works, advice, guides, videos and books on communication and on understanding people and behavior, but nothing came anywhere close to NVC in terms of how bulletproof and yet how simple it is. As a tool in game design, or frankly in any field of life, work, art, relationships or engineering, I consider it the best resource there is. I can't emphasize this enough.

Fundamental human needs#

At the center of NVC are fundamental human needs, also called universal human needs. Manfred Max-Neef, an economist who worked on how to structure government, infrastructure, services, legislation and resource management for the benefit of all human beings, described them in economics. NVC puts the same idea at its center, and Rosenberg made it simple enough for a layperson to understand and use every day.

Max-Neef's matrix shows the structure well. The left column is the needs themselves. The other columns show what each need looks like as qualities, things, actions and settings: some of the possible ways to meet it, and where.

It isn't exhaustive, but it's a great starting point. Notice that "games" sits right there in the table, as one of the things that meets the need for leisure. Not as a waste of time. As a satisfier of a fundamental human need, next to friendships and shelter.

Not a pyramid#

You may have heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The idea is similar, but this is a different interpretation, and I think a more human and accurate one, because it isn't a hierarchy. Maslow's pyramid assumes you can't fulfill the needs higher up until every need below them is fulfilled. That's false. Each need is separate, and can be met or lost without the needs "above" or "below" it mattering. Forget the pyramid. It's outdated and misleading.

Instead, needs work like independent progress bars. If you've ever played The Sims, the need bars of a sim are fairly close to how real needs work: each one rises and falls on its own, and their combined state is the person's current mood. It's always in flux. No two moments are the same, and a person's state changes every second, minute and hour.

This explains behavior that looks illogical from the pyramid's point of view. A person can have a strong need for meaning and be incredibly thirsty at the same time, and ignore the water to do the thing that gives them meaning. Needs aren't mutually exclusive, and they don't wait in line.

For a game designer this is very practical. The player who sits down to play your game arrives with a whole set of bars, some full and some empty, and your game fills some of them and drains others for as long as they play. A game can fill the bar for challenge beautifully while draining the bar for rest so hard that the player quits, sore and exhausted, and doesn't come back. You have to watch all the bars, not only the one your game is about.

My grouped list of needs#

There are a couple of annoyances with naming needs. First, the English language doesn't have accurate single words for each need, so I find it very helpful to give each need several words:

• Subsistence (food, water, air, warmth, health, rest, sex, exercise, basic survival)
• Safety/Protection/Peace/Order/Harmony/Reliability/Predictability
• Freedom/Power/Participation/Access/Choice (to be capable and have an impact, and to be part of the decisions that affect our life)
• Growth/Learning/Advancement/Creation/Variety/Understanding
• Enjoyment/Leisure/Play/Beauty/Silliness/Movement/Whim/Excitement
• Meaning/Identity/Belonging/Self-worth/Celebration/Mourning/Purpose
• Equality/Respect/Acceptance/Empathy (to be heard, accepted and understood)
• Love/Giving/Receiving/Affection/Care/Socializing/Connection/Touch

This pins down what each need is far better than a single word can.

The other annoyance is that while the needs are finite, they're interwoven, and one need can turn out to be an indirect route to another. That makes it tricky to separate and label them. If you compare the matrix above with NVC's own list, or with my list, you'll see that some needs have been lumped together or split apart differently. That's the limit of language, not a disagreement about what humans are. Use whichever list helps you name what you're looking at.

Another angle: Glasser#

Many other theories and frameworks in psychology have come to the same conclusion as NVC. One of them is William Glasser's Choice Theory. I find it a bit too reductive, which makes it easier to misinterpret, but I like how it sums up human needs, and it gives even more clarity to what fundamental human needs are.

In Glasser's view, all behavior is purposeful. Whatever we do is our best attempt at the time, with the knowledge and skills we have then, to meet one or more of our basic needs. Those needs are built into us, and they're the motivation behind everything we do.

Glasser names five: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom and fun. He also links the need for fun directly to learning. Higher animals play, and as they play, they learn important life skills. Humans are no different. Keep that one in mind. It comes back when we talk about making learning compelling in Game or Interactive Tool.

The lists to keep at hand#

NVC has a needs list and a feelings list, both free at the Center for Nonviolent Communication (cnvc.org). Search for "NVC needs inventory" and "NVC feelings inventory". The needs list is more useful for everyday work than Max-Neef's chart, while the chart is better at showing the overall structure of how needs work. Print both lists. You'll use them constantly: on yourself, on your partners and on your players.

Feelings point to needs#

So how do you find out which needs are met or unmet? Through feelings.

Feelings are a natural, automatic function of the human body. They're evoked by fundamental human needs to bring our attention to them. When a need is met, we feel something pleasant: relieved, joyful, calm, excited, grateful. When a need is unmet, we feel something unpleasant: frustrated, bored, anxious, lonely, angry. Feelings are the dashboard. They show what state our needs are in right now.

Please note that there's no such thing as a "negative" feeling in the sense of a bad one. Pleasant and unpleasant feelings serve the same need: they're feedback that helps us enrich life. Anger at an unfair game isn't something to suppress or fix in the player. It's a signal that points exactly at the need the game violated. If you listen to it, it tells you what to change.

For needs inside us, feelings are the feedback. For needs outside us, the needs of other people, we need other feedback: we have to ask, listen and observe. That's why a designer needs both skills, connecting with their own feelings and connecting with other people's.

This is the whole reason the specialist in Three Projects, Two Designers keeps asking "how does it make me feel?". It isn't sentimentality. It's measurement.

NVC for game design, in short#

Here are the parts of NVC and human needs that matter most for game design. Each one is a short statement, with a line on what it means for you as a designer.

All human beings have and share the same needs. Every single one of us.

Your players need the same things you do. That's what makes it possible to design for strangers.

Strategies for meeting needs are often different, but the needs themselves are universal.

Connection is always possible through those universal needs, even between people who seem to want completely different things. Two players arguing about whether a game should be harder want the same need met in different ways.

Needs do not contain specific actions done by specific people. Needs are neutral.

"I need the developer to add a sniper rifle" is not a need. It's a strategy. The need behind it might be power, or variety, or the satisfaction of a skillful shot, and there are many ways to meet it.

There are unlimited ways to meet human needs.

If one design doesn't work, the need is still there and another design can meet it. You're never stuck with one idea.

Everyone's needs can be met without sacrificing anyone or anything. It is possible.

"Compromise" means everyone loses a little. Looking for a strategy that meets everyone's needs is harder at first, and far better. It also means that a design that only works by hurting someone is a design that hasn't been finished yet.

A way to meet a need is a strategy.

Every game, mechanic, feature and menu is a strategy.

Strategies can be dumb, smart, useless or flawed.

• Dumb: it fails to meet a need, and makes things worse.
• Smart: it satisfies one or more needs successfully, with no drawbacks.
• Useless: it doesn't meet any needs, but doesn't make things worse either.
• Flawed: it does meet a need, but creates an unmet need somewhere else.

Most bad game design is flawed rather than dumb, which is why it's so hard to spot. A loot box does meet a need for surprise. It also drains the need for fairness, safety and trust, and the player ends up worse off than before. Learn to look for the need a strategy breaks, not only the one it meets.

Anything any human ever does in life is to meet a need. No exceptions. Always.

Including the things players do that you didn't want them to do. Cheating, griefing and quitting are all strategies to meet a need. When Players Misbehave uses this.

Feelings point to met and unmet needs.

They detect what's alive in us at any moment, so they reveal which needs are met or unmet.

Human beings, their behavior and their beliefs are shaped by the environment.

Your game is an environment. Whatever it makes easy, cheap and pleasant, players will do more of. Whatever it makes hard, costly and painful, they'll do less of. This is the most powerful tool you have, and the most dangerous.

Human beings can change, and always have a choice.

Some choices seem vastly better than others, but the choice is always there, no matter the situation. Players are never "just like that". They respond to what's around them.

The root of human thought: 1. What is alive in us? 2. How can we make life more wonderful?

Those two questions are the whole design process in miniature. The first finds the need, the second finds the strategy.

Punishments and rewards are the same thing. They're violence. They never work.

This one gets its own section below, because game design is built on rewards and punishments more than almost any other field.

Retributive justice and the punitive use of force don't work. Restorative justice and the protective use of force do.

Punishing someone to make them suffer for what they did doesn't meet anyone's needs. Stopping harm while it's happening, and then repairing what was broken, does. A ban that exists to make a cheater suffer is punitive. A system that stops cheating from ruining other players' matches is protective.

Human beings only ever say two things: "please" and "thank you".

Every complaint is a "please" in disguise, and every compliment is a "thank you". Angry reviews, rage posts and demands are requests for a need to be met, said in the only way the person knew how at the time. Working with People shows how to translate them.

The purpose of life is to make life more wonderful. In all contexts.

And the purpose of a game is the same, in its own small corner.

This list summarizes NVC for game design specifically, but I highly recommend studying NVC on its own to understand why these things are the way they are. I fear this list alone gives only a partial understanding of what NVC is, how it works and why it works. If you're a game designer, or a human being, NVC is invaluable. Study it.

I learned it through videos and audiobooks. There are also Rosenberg's books, starting with Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, the official Center for Nonviolent Communication, which has a lot of free material, and online communities for NVC. Searching for "Marshall Rosenberg" or "Nonviolent Communication" together with whatever you want to learn will get you started well.

Rewards and punishments are two sides of one coin#

This is probably the most controversial point in the list, especially for game designers, since rewards and punishments are the bread and butter of the industry. Experience points, loot, achievements, unlocks, daily login bonuses, lost progress on death, penalties for quitting. So let me explain it properly instead of just asserting it.

A reward and a punishment are the same tool pointed in two directions. Both say: "Do what I want, and I'll make you feel good. Don't, and I'll make you feel bad." Both are a way of getting someone to do something by attaching a consequence to it that has nothing to do with the thing itself. That's what makes them a use of power over people, and in NVC's broader sense of the word, violence: any use of force to get someone to do something, including guilt, shame, duty and obligation, as well as reward and punishment.

Rosenberg used two questions to show why they never work. If you want someone to change their behavior, ask yourself:

1. What do I want this person to do?
2. What do I want this person's reasons to be for doing it?

With only the first question, rewards and punishments seem to work. The person does the thing. The second question exposes them. Nobody wants a player to explore the world because a checklist pays them to. You want them to explore because exploring is wonderful. Nobody wants a player to stay in a match because leaving costs them rating points. You want them to stay because the match is worth staying for.

And here's the chain of consequences. When a reward is attached to an activity, the person's reason for doing it moves from the activity to the reward. The activity becomes work, something you do to get paid. Once that happens, the reward has to keep growing to keep the behavior going, and when the reward stops, so does the behavior, often with resentment, because now the activity feels like something they were tricked into. Punishment does the same from the other side: the person stays, but resentfully, and leaves for good the moment staying costs less than leaving. Either way, the thing you actually wanted, the player loving the game, gets further away. This is the effect Alfie Kohn documents at length in Punished by Rewards, which I already brought up in Making Games for the Wrong Reason.

So what do you do instead? You make the thing itself worth doing. You make exploring wonderful. You make the match worth staying for. That's harder than bolting on a reward, and it's the only thing that lasts. Most of Parts III and IV are about how.

Power over people and power with people#

This follows directly from the last section, and the scenarios in Part III lean on it constantly, so it's worth naming now.

Power over people is any attempt to make people do things through force: punishment and reward, guilt, shame, duty, obligation, pressure, threats, manipulation, tricks. It also includes any system that discriminates against people and prevents equal access to resources and to justice. It works in the short term, which is why it's so tempting. In the long term it creates resentment and resistance, and the people under it spend their energy protecting themselves instead of contributing.

Power with people is getting things done together by meeting everyone's needs. It's cooperation instead of a dominant/dominated relationship. Nobody is made to do anything. People do it because it meets their needs too, so they do it willingly, put their whole heart into it, and keep doing it without supervision.

As a game designer you have an enormous amount of power over your players. You decide what's possible in their world, what's easy and what's hard, what's rewarded and what's punished, how long things take and what they cost. You can use that power over them or with them. A game designed with power over players is full of timers, penalties, nagging, artificial scarcity and carrots on sticks. A game designed with power with players gives them what they came for and trusts them to come back because it's worth coming back to.

The same applies to your team, your partners and your customers. Every relationship in game development is a choice between these two kinds of power.

Self-fullness: your needs are a gift#

In Final Result vs Root Cause I kept talking about making life more wonderful for you, and promised to explain why that isn't selfish. Here it is.

There's a common idea that people are either "selfish" or "selfless". Both are false, and both are often used to manipulate people, by fooling them into thinking their needs are bad, sinful or dirty, so that they're easier to take advantage of. "Be selfless" can easily mean "sacrifice yourself so that I don't have to consider you".

Originally both words were attempts to ask other people to be more considerate of each other's wellbeing. But they were easy to abuse and misinterpret, and they turned into tools for guilt.

There's a third, largely unknown concept that describes what's really going on: self-fullness, or self-fulfillment. A human being is fulfilling their needs, usually trying to do it in a way that causes the least harm and the most benefit, in both the short and the long term. That's all anyone is ever doing. Including when they help others: helping others meets our own need to contribute, which is why it feels good. "Selfishness" in the bad sense is just a strategy that meets one person's needs at someone else's expense. And as Rosenberg put it, any strategy that meets your needs at someone else's expense isn't meeting all your needs, because it costs you trust, connection and peace.

So why are your needs a gift? Because needs are universal. When you're inspired to make a game because it meets a need in you, you've found a need that everyone has. Your hunger for that game is a sign that other people are hungry for it too. Making the game for yourself, honestly and completely, is the most reliable way to make it for them. Ignoring your own needs to make a game for some imagined "audience" is the unreliable way, because you can't feel the audience's needs, but you can feel yours.

And your needs are a gift in a second way. When you share what you need, you give other people a chance to contribute to your life, which meets their need to give. That's why the human need to give matters as much as it does, and it's the whole reason a player is happy to pay for a game they love.

I had to cover this, because there's a lot of false information around that makes it hard to see how much simpler human psychology really is.

In short#

Every human being has the same needs. Everything anyone does is an attempt to meet them. Feelings tell you which needs are met and which aren't. Games are one of the strategies humans use to meet their needs, and strategies can be smart, dumb, useless or flawed. That's it. The rest of the book is applying it.

Next, what this means for the word every game designer uses and almost no one can define: fun.