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Engagement in wonderland: The 4 keys to fun in XR
With XR going mainstream, it’s time to take a few lessons for how flat screen games create engagement and how blockbuster XR experiences already do. The same secret sauce of best-selling games drives the immense valuations of virtual worlds such as Roblox $41.9B , RecRoom $1.2B and VR Chat ($80M raised). More importantly, emotions from interaction make XR fun!
A full exploration of The 4 Keys and human emotional engagement is beyond the scope of a single post. It is a proven system for creating engagement that my company XEODesign uses in our client work. That said, for XR developers and enthusiasts, here is a special quick overview of XR fun’s four directions starting with hacking engagement from the player’s perspective. Enjoy.
Several decades ago, I wanted to know what made games so engaging. Why was it that players by the millions sat for hours eyes glued to a screen doing nothing more than mashing a plastic button. Many do this (and still do) for 40+ hours a week. At the time game developers believed games did not create emotions beyond the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. In player testing games such as Myst, The Sims, and Star Wars I knew it was the opposite. To experience emotions was precisely why gamers played.
To peek inside the minds of players I conceived a study and as far as I know I was the first person to use Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding (FACS) to measure emotional responses to a game. That research became the widely cited 4 Keys to Fun first presented at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2004.
Like points on a compass, people play games for four reasons: novelty, challenge, friendship, and meaning. Fun comes in many flavors with a pantheon of emotions. By understanding the relationship between individual player actions and the emotions each produces game developers (and interaction designers of any stripe) have the same keys to creating emotions through interaction design that a visual artist does with color and an actor does with their voice. Experiences where people can explore all four sets of action <> emotion pairs are deeper and more emotionally engaging.
Since 2004 The 4 Keys has been a valuable ally and compass in my tool belt guiding many of my engagement tech design adventures. Essential…
