Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Greetings Designers,

Frequently, our discussions here focus on the "hard" side of game design. Things like activation methods, dice probabilities, and point cost calculations. Those are all well and good, but they miss some of the key aspects of games; the Emotional Investment.

Players do not play games to determine outcomes. They play games to have an emotional reaction to them. How do you go about designing this emotional investment into your game.

If you have read Ash barker's Last Days rules, in the foreword he lays out some key concepts that he used to create emotional investment for players of the game. It is a good read and I recommend it. Those are not the only ways to do it, and I am looking for your thoughts on how you build the Emotional Investment into your games.

I look forward to a dive into the "softer" side of game design.

Great topic! I agree that while elegance of the rules is the aim of many designers, it's engagement they should all be after (not my words, heard it here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVL4st0blGU )

I will participate when I have more time.

In my experience, it's better to have units slowly degrade over a few turns rather than disappear in one turn - 40k being a prime example of this, when I had a Morkanaught reduced to 6 wounds (from 18) in my own turn after deepstriking, due to excessive overwatch!!! I like the idea of getting just one more go with a unit which is nearly dead. I'm focussing on that as one of the building-blocks of my own wargame.

For board games, there's the emotional investment of direct competition, especially when one player can cause the others demise - look at games like Frustration, where you can be so close to getting your last piece home, then your opponent manages to hop around the board with their last piece and take you out, then you appear behind them and the tense moments continue!

I feel it's a bit more about tense moments than emotional investment - I think of emotional investment as like when I'm playing D&D and my character is getting close to death, that makes me genuinely concerned that the character could die and be gone forever. In a wargame, I'm not emotionally attached to anything except perhaps my newest conversion that I want to see survive longer than half a bloody turn stupid ultrasmurfs with every bloody reroll...
...I'm fine. I'm calm...
For hooking a player into the game, it has to feel close - and not just be close, it has to feel it. There has to be an element of "I don't know what will happen" all the way to the end to give people that "damn, so close, let's play again!" feel.

Maybe that is what people are talking about with discussions of 'balance' in that it can tip either way, and often see-saws back and forth.

I think players become more emotionally invested in warhammer 40,000 when they can identify with their primary characters (like in an RPG). During one of the campaigns I ran I came up with a level progressing system with the help of my players. This leveling progression helped them become invested in their characters and units. Thus, they are more alert and fearful when there's a chance those characters can die.

Additionally I had them write backstories for their main characters which also helped them identify with those characters. Leading to, (obvious by the way one of the players threw a tantrum when his character died), a more emotional investment in the game generally.

I have to say I find the concept of Identifying with a unit or character, alien.

Emotional investment in my opinion is better archived in campaign settings or rule systems were investment buildup is used, both of those are impacting game balance since the game element that gets build up is at least marginally (often more) more powerful than the other elements of their kind.

This always create issues with runaway success, overt dependability on specific game elements, and disregard of other game elements.

I prefer to not design with players emotions in mind they are variable, fluctuating from player to player and often not repeatable even on the same player if some subtle variation on their routine happens.

There are definitely psychological elements that can be exploited to get a more stable reaction from players in game design, gambling in loot boxes is the first that comes to my mind (and a good discussion on the ethics of using such elements in game design), but I am not qualified on these, I need to study more on cases of addiction in gaming for that.

I believe that what creates emotional investment in a game varies and it isn't a single thing. It is different proportions of a few aspects for every player. The aspects I can name are for example:

1. Intellectual challenge (you enjoy doing this "neat move" now and again)
2. Competition (you're bent on defeating your opponents or the game)
3. Narrative (attachment to your character or just a gripping story in general)
4. Personalisation (uniqueness of your experience makes it "yours")
5. Creativity (a sub-aspect of Personalisation?)

but I am sure there can be others!

They may also change with time for the same person as well, just like we may think some of the movies we liked as kids are silly now. For example we reminisce Mordheim games with nostalgia, because we enjoyed the Creative and Narrative aspect then, but the lack of Intellectual Challenge and poor Competition value now result in dissapointment, because we've experienced so many other games that do it better since (sometimes it's better some things stay just a memory )

If you take a look at the first place at BoardGameGeek - Gloomhaven, it ticks a lot of the boxes! There's a personalised narrative, but the game is intellectually satisfying and challenging. It is a hit among both Euro- and Ameri-style loving boardgamers.

Good call out that emotional investment can come in different forms, and only one of them related to "game play" and "tactics". It is best not to over focus on one at the expense of all the others.