Wind, Not Sand: Mapping Dynamic Emotion Across a Product Landscape

M A P P I N G
D Y N A M I C
E M O T I O N
A C R O S S A
P R O D U C T
L A N D S C A P E
W I N D , N O T
S A N D
E R I N H O F F M A N , U X W E E K 2 0 1 5

– S O R E N K I E R K E G A A R D , 1 8 4 8
“To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner.
Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from
the learner,
put yourself in his place so that you may understand
what he understands and the way he understands it.”

– S O R E N K I E R K E G A A R D , 1 8 4 8
“To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner.
Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from
the learner,
put yourself in his place so that you may understand
what he understands and the way he understands it.”
“Teaching well is really freaking hard.”
– E R I N H O F F M A N , 2 0 1 5

2%
98%
everyone else game designers
S P E A K E R S AT U X W E E K 2 0 1 5

2%
98%
everyone else game designers
S P E A K E R S AT U X W E E K 2 0 1 5
you
(probably)
me

• things to note:
• most demos
blend
• gamers don’t
on twitter

so my system speaking to your system
is kind of bizarre and incredible
world model
space whales
*
worldmodel
spacewhales
*

G A M E P E O P L E
A N I N T R O D U C T I O N T O

T H I N G S N O R M A L
P E O P L E C A R E
A B O U T
• meaningful work
• vacation
• relationships
• good food
• family
• hobbies

T H I N G S T H AT
G A M E P E O P L E
C A R E A B O U T
• games
(this is bizarre and
distressing)*
* and also may be starting to change

W H E R E G A M E P E O P L E C O M E F R O M

W E ’ R E A L L
O U T S I D E R S
• my parents divorced when
I was 5
• my mixed ethnic
background guaranteed
cultural outsider status
wherever I went
• I was a girl who liked
technology instead of boys
or makeup

B U T G A M E S
U N D E R S T O O D M E
• the game exists for us to play it
• the game is “infinitely patient”
• the game doesn’t care how many
times you try - it wants you to try
again
• the game loves you (even when
you don’t love yourself)

I T ’ S A L L T O
S AY T H AT…
• games are really different
• they represent an outsider
culture
• the mainstream has never
understood us
• the design community has
never understood us  
…and probably never will

A N D W H AT ’ S
P E R T I N E N T H E R E …
• games (historically) were
never about usability
• the culture actually willfully
resists the idea of usability
• usability means
accessibility and
accessibility means
mainstream
• and mainstream is gross

so thank god for social games and UX
because before UX we had System Shock 2, and
someone needed to save us from ourselves

T R I P H A W K I N S
G O T ( M O R E T H A N )
O N E T H I N G R I G H T
• game designers are artists
• and artists are about
provoking emotion
(legends, all)

usually that emotion is pretty simple
(simple emotion sell$)
scary!
omg fast!
BAD.ASS.
epic!

…but sometimes it’s not
the regret of well-intended
complicity in abusive
systems
the existential loneliness of being
human and confronted with the
other in the wake of ancient
hubris-generated apocalypse
(probs the greatest game ever made just fyi)
(e.g., while you weren’t looking, games kinda grew up)

W H AT I S T H E C O R E E M O T I O N I N Y O U R P R O D U C T ?
let us pause

but no matter what, a game must* have one quality:

fun.

fun.
(duh)
(no fun equals no $ equals no more games)

F U N
S O L E T ’ S TA L K A B O U T

A S Y O U M I G H T
I M A G I N E
• game designers spend an
awful lot of time talking about
what “fun” is
• the most widely-accepted
definition comes from a game
designer named Raph Koster
(you might recognize Star
Wars Galaxies, EverQuest II,
Ultima Online - that’s Raph)
• though now he might be
more well known for his book:

– R A P H K O S T E R
“That’s what games are, in the end. Teachers.
Fun is just another word for learning.”
And Raph said…
• this hit the world of game design like a
bomb — it was so obvious and true

world model
space whales
*
worldmodel
spacewhales
*
game design early child psych

But Raph was riffing off the work of a lot of smart people…

Leading to what I call the “depth hierarchy of nerddom” on fun:
Jesse Schell - “fun isn’t important”
Raph Koster - “fun is learning”
James Paul Gee - “fun is the scientific method”
Fred Rogers* - “play is the work of childhood”
Jean Piaget - “play is assimilation without adaptation”
(3 kinds of play: practice, symbolic, rules-based)
Lev Vygotsky - “play is a self-actualizing tool of the mind
that maximizes the zone of proximal development”
(some neuroscientist, maybe Judy Willis**)
** http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/4141/the-neuroscience-joyful-education-judy-willis-md.pdf
image by G. Blackney, middle school earth sciences
* you could maybe stick Csikszentmihalyi*** here but I like Mr. Rogers better because it’s easier to type
*** but for the record I just wanted to prove that I could spell Csikszentmihalyi

T H E R E V O L U T I O N A RY
I D E A B E H I N D
G L A S S L A B WA S
• school is really, really boring.
• maybe video game designers
could make school less boring.
• if kids are less bored, maybe they’ll
learn better.
• and maybe big data could enable
the creation of genuine adaptive,
personalized learning.

No problem!, we thought.
If games are about fun and fun is about learning,
this’ll be easy!
Time to revolutionize education!

so we brought the brand new SimCity
into classrooms…
and the kids said:
so this is pretty fun,
but we’re not learning anything.
(and SimCity historically has been used by
teachers to teach all sorts of things)

This blew open Raph’s theory.
“Fun is learning” wasn’t the conclusive epiphany
we (designers) thought it was — it was just the
beginning.

Over the course of the next two years and three products,
I got to watch tons of breathtakingly talented teachers in
action.
teaches environmental
science and systems
thinking
2013
in collaboration with NASA
and the National Writing
Project, teaches
argumentation
2014
in collaboration with the
teachers of Epic charter
school, teaches proportional
reasoning
2015

when students were really engaged in learning,
there was something going on that wasn’t “fun”.
it was something deeper,
something special.
(real kids playing our real games)

this was an emotion I’d never seen before.
I became obsessed with it.
remember when I said game designers are artists?
and artists are painters of emotion?

E M O T I O N

pop quiz
how many of you know who paul eckman is?

pop quiz
how many of you have seen pixar’s Inside Out?

if you’ve seen Inside Out, you know Eckman
• took photographs of faces around the world
• asked thousands of people from dozens of cultures to identify the emotions
• identified seven (at first six) universal emotions

(the new one)
the one it drives me
nuts that they cut
out!

(the new one)
the one it drives me
nuts that they cut
out!
but where’s ‘fun’?
and where’s ‘learning’?

it seemed to be a little bit of all of them, each in a different order…
sometimes… for 14 year olds… kind of?… definitely…
actually yeah… this one too… getting closer…

it seemed to be a little bit of all of them, each in a different order…
sometimes… for 14 year olds… kind of?… definitely…
actually yeah… this one too… getting closer…
fun/learning wasn’t one emotion, but a process between many.

I called it sophia*:
fun is the cognitive mechanical process
by which we convert fear into happiness
through surprise
* as in “philein sophia” or “philosophy” - the love (philo-) of wisdom (-soph)

M I C R O B E S

how many live in
your body?
let’s talk microbes!
- over 100 trillion microbes
(about 2-6lbs per person)
- microbes outnumber human
cells 10:1
- 1000 species in your gut
- 200 species on the surface of
your eye
- tons still unidentified
- scientists call it “the second
genome”

how many live in
your body?
cells 10:1
your eye
genome”
how you doin'?

your microbiome
= ~100 trillion
microbes
the milky way
= ~100 billion
stars

how many live in
your body?
cells 10:1
your eye
genome”
how you doin’ (now)?

the key is the arc
curiosity
anxiety
threat
stress
failure
tenacity
surprise
mastery
insight

S T O RY T E L L E R S
K N O W T H I S
• without foreshadowing
there is no anticipation
• without anticipation there’s
no tension
• without reversal there’s no
insight
• without insight there’s no
story

(segue)
And this is why it’s so damn annoying that Inside Out
left out Surprise.
when it comes to Eckman universals and both storytelling and product,
Surprise might be the most important emotion there is.

M O D E R N M E T H O D S
O F M E A S U R I N G
E M O T I O N I N C L U D E :
• surveys
• brain fMRIs that detect…
“excitation” (aka
something is happening
and we don’t really know
what)
• hand-encoding videos of
changes in facial expression
• …surveys

emotional research is really this gigantic
unexplored frontier now that we have the capability
to process dynamic data

H O W W O U L D Y O U C R E AT E A N A R C , I N C L U D I N G R E V E R S A L
A N D I N S I G H T, F O R T H E C O R E E M O T I O N I N Y O U R
P R O D U C T ?
let us pause

D Y N A M I C E M O T I O N

A L L E M O T I O N
I S D Y N A M I C
T H E T R U T H I S

W E ’ R E R E A L LY B A D
AT M E A S U R I N G
D Y N A M I C T H I N G S
T H E O T H E R T R U T H I S

so let’s assume emotion is a landscape, not a fixed
point in time; it’s a dynamic system that has things
like hysteresis and momentum
fear surprise
contempt
happiness
anger
disgust
sadness

if we were to design for a specific progression, what
would it look like?
fear surprise
contempt
happiness
anger
disgust
sadness

Y O U B E G I N W I T H
PA I N P O I N T S
• Your starting point is
probably your user’s pain
point.
• Don’t run from the pain
point, and don’t assume
you’ll erase it immediately;
to be fulfilled, it must be
embraced.
• …even amplified.
• In a game, pain is challenge,
and challenge is good.

PA I N I N
A R G U M E N TAT I O N
• When we began Mars
Generation One: Argubot
Academy, we set out to
identify pain in argumentation.
• When you’re bad at arguing,
you feel:
• confused
• powerless
• unpopular
• stupid

• confused
• powerless
• unpopular
• stupid
• clear
• powerful
• charismatic
• genius
so we knew we needed to bring about this emotional transition:
our message was: learn to argue well, using evidence, and you’ll become
convincing, popular, admired, and powerful

E M O T I O N A L
C L U S T E R I N G
• We began by digging
deeper into the pain point
analysis.
• After many interviews with
teachers, the same problems
emerged between
instructors and students.
• These qualities created the
dominant emotional reaction
of confusion.
VA G U E
aspects of argumentation
S U B J E C T I V E
A B S T R A C T
H A R D T O
R E M E M B E R
C O M P L E X

VA G U E
S U B J E C T I V E
A B S T R A C T
H A R D T O
R E M E M B E R
C O M P L E X
so we took these qualities and searched for game
experiences that were the opposite
P R E C I S E
O B J E C T I V E
C O N C R E T E
M A S T E R A B L E
S I M P L E

P R E C I S E O B J E C T I V E C O N C R E T EM E M O R A B L E S I M P L E
it turns out that these are feelings that games innately convey
particularly well

So we applied a concrete system that scaffolded into great complexity
(otherwise it wouldn’t ever really feel like argumentation) but was
masterable and simple. Aka…

G O T TA C AT C H
‘ E M A L L
• Pokemon is an incredibly
complex game involving
constant computation,
comparison, and
memorization.
• Kids love it anyway because it’s
so concrete and memorable.
• So the important thing to
remove from argumentation
wasn’t the complexity, but the
abstractness and subjectivity.

Our “argubots” paralleled forms of argument, but made them
visually memorable, masterable, and full of personality.

T H E R E S U LT S
• Well, ask the kids:
• “BOOM!”
• “wait wait wait we want to hear this!”
• “that’s TOTALLY not related!”
• “that [argument] wasn’t even, like, legit!”
• “omg, K-O!”
• “data was inconsistent, it wasn’t supporting”
• “fiiiiiiight!”
• “let’s go CQ!*”
This approach to argumentation was:
• concrete
• exciting
• masterable
• relatable
* a 6th grader referencing philosopher Stephen Toulmin

by taking them from one painful side of the
emotional map to the other, we changed the way
they thought about argumentation and reason
curiosity
anxiety
threat
stress
failure
tenacity
surprise mastery
insight
abstract
confused
afraid
can’t
remember getting it
got it
winning

contrast this with the emotionally flat way
argumentation is traditionally taught
it’s not memorable because there’s no surprise, no
discovery, no choice, no tension, no reversal

when you’re designing, consider the user’s
emotional journey — where are you taking them?
where do they begin? where do they end?
fear surprise
contempt
happiness
anger
disgust
sadness

F I N A L
Q U E S T I O N S
• Where are your moments of surprise?
• Where are you showing your user
that you really understand their pain?
• Where are your transition points
between pain and ecstasy?
• Where are your users discovering
insights for themselves?
• What is your unique core emotion
and how are you centering your
design decisions on it?
• What is the emotional path for each
of your user archetypes?

T H A N K S F O R
P L AY I N G
T H A T ’ S I T
erin@makingwonder.com
@gryphoness

lately, this has become the context for some genuinely awful behavior

it’s baffling for those of us who came from this culture
1 9 9 8 2 0 0 3 2 0 0 5 2 0 0 6 2 0 0 8 2 0 1 0 2 0 1 2 2 0 1 3 2 0 1 4
…but we don’t know anything else
(I was 17) (you do the
math)

I N 2 0 1 3 , A F U N N Y
T H I N G H A P P E N E D
T O M E
• I was taken in by scientists.
• 24 scientists, to be exact,
from the likes of the
Stanford Research
Institute, NASA, and
Educational Testing
Service (the folk who make
the SAT).
• these are nerds among
nerds.

and remember that emotions hybridize

Wind, Not Sand: Mapping Dynamic Emotion Across a Product Landscape

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