Gamer Instinct

            Gamer instinct is a term used to describe what the player feels is natural to do in any situation, similar to real world instinct. Stomach growling? You look for something to eat. Drowsy state and yawning a lot? You think about going to sleep. The same things apply in virtually every game out there. The player uses instinct to avoid getting hit by projectiles, leaping over obstacles, and getting food when their health starts to run low. Some games defy gamer instinct, although for good reason. But before I get into that, let me just provide some more specific examples of how developers design a game to appeal to the instinct in all of us.

            Alright, so you have a plane game before you. The rules are simple: shoot stuff and don’t get hit. Getting hit means death. Naturally, you learn to avoid everything the enemy throws at you. Rules vary game by game, but this one instinct carries over. It is just a common rule to not get hit by your opponent because taking damage brings you closer to failure. Some games are lenient on this and let you make many mistakes, but that instinct will always tell you to dodge everything bad. This is especially true if the game’s sprites read well as a hostile threat. Take a glowing red ball of fire. Obviously that would kill you outright, so you steer clear. But what about this sparkling blue gem? How do you know THAT won’t kill you, too? Designing your sprites to read well to the player makes their instincts kick in so they don’t have to consciously think about what they are doing. They just will their actions and they happen. By the way, that gem is useful. Might as well pick it up.

            Knowing gamer instinct is invaluable when making an exploration game. The player will see a wide open sandbox to play in, but they need some kind of guidance as to where to go first. If the world looks quite literally like an empty sandbox, they could go just anywhere. But if you were to, say, make an arch of trees that lead to a big prairie, just about every player will head that direction and ignore everything else. It takes a conscious effort to look away from the trees and at the expanse of nothingness. Knowing how to draw the eye of your player is also helpful for teaching mechanics without a convoluted tutorial. This technique is known as conveyance. I might just go over this in more detail in another article, but point is conveyance is a way to teach the player about the world without implicitly telling them. 

Now that the player has been draw to the prairie, we put up two portals that lead to different areas. One of the portals is brightly colored and looks positively inviting. The other is crooked, misshapen, and emanates a bad vibe. Chances are, the player will go through the bright portal as it looks safer. But what if the portal is on the right side of the player’s view? What if the dark portal is on the left? Naturally, players may still opt for the bright portal, but more often than not players will take the left option over the right option. I’m not sure why this is, but it also applies to gamer instinct. We just like picking left first. As for those portals, what is actually in them? A developer can make those portals do anything! The bright one could lead to a fun filled paradise, or it could just outright kill the player. The second option goes against gamer instinct and in some cases can make a game more interesting to play.

Going against gamer instinct is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it’s rewarded such as following a guide arrow to a destination, but taking the other path to find a secret. This is a common trope in games that encourages exploration, although it’s a little pointless in linear experiences. Leading a player through a hallway with a few closets here and there does not make for a good exploration game. As for those portals mentioned earlier, what if the developer wanted to challenge the player’s will? That spooky portal might actually hide some brilliant gold or a wondrous location. One would expect it to lead to a creepy forest or a dark room with little illumination, but it could literally be anything. There are some examples of bad attempts of going against gamer instinct.

There is only one part of Cave Story I dislike. You just beat a boss monster and you enter the next room. At the start, a brief cutscene shows a friendly NPC from earlier falling from the top of the room to the bottom. Naturally, due to gamer instinct, you go down and talk to this person. Doing so rewards the player with an item that lets you boost yourself a little, almost like flying. Except that is the wrong choice! You can get a much better item if you IGNORE THE NPC! You have to deliberately march on ahead knowing full well that a man could be down there injured and you are the only living thing that could conceivably save him or at least listen to his last words. Later the same guy shows up again all fine and dandy. He gives you a stronger version of the booster which lets you direct exactly where you fly. I never figured this out on a natural playthrough with no walkthroughs or guides. I had to see a video online to figure this out. It was maddening to me.

            That’s all I have on gamer instinct. Hopefully you as a reader have gained some knowledge on how players think, how they read visuals, and how it can be fun to trick them into following their instincts and make them defy conventions in order to progress through the game.