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BEN MCMAHAN: Hi, I'm Ben McMahan.
I'm a tech lead on the Google Doodle team.
I have a quick question.
How many of you have ever played a Doodle game?
So quite a few of you.
Well, making a game on the Google homepage
has some interesting unique challenges.
So let's look at the homepage.
First, like every kind of person, from every country,
with every kind of interest and screen configuration
you can think of, goes to the Google homepage.
And second of all, they didn't come to play a game.
They came to do a search, like if my rash is contagious
or something.
[LAUGHTER]
So we're inherently distracting right here,
and so we still have to do right by the user.
So we've learned a lot of lessons.
Like, one obvious one is go straight to your game.
So a couple of years ago, we had this idea, oh, we'll
let them pick a team and have their score go
to some global score count for that team.
But there are two things wrong that we found out.
One is half our users left on this screen,
because they had no idea what they were going to get.
And the other problem--
and we could have known this just looking at YouTube data--
is one of them holds a cat, so we
should have known all of them would
have picked that one anyways.
[LAUGHTER]
So to help us learn all these lessons,
I've come up with a bunch of F-words.
Because people take F-words very seriously.
So the first one is to be friendly.
And by this, I mean non-gamer friendly.
So you've got to keep things simple,
go with paradigms people already know.
It's interesting.
When you make your own game, you end up playing it a lot.
And you get really good at your game,
way more than a user will, being only able to play it
for one day, right?
So you've got to anchor yourself with a lot of play tests
and user studies [? with ?] people
who have never played the game--
and even better, if you can make it a diverse set of people,
outside of your normal demographic comfort zone.
I was lucky last year, I playtested a lot
with my five-year-old.
And I was instantly able to tell exactly how much dexterity you
need to play any of the games.
Next, you have, like, five seconds
tops to do something enjoyable.
It could be just a really cute character,
or the first hill you go over, something amazing happens.
If you think about it, in our context, people
after about five seconds are like, no, wait, wait, wait,
I really do need to do that search.
I'm going to go back and go do that search.
And that's great, but they shouldn't
feel like they wasted their five seconds.
They should have gotten something out of it.
Next, it should be fun to fail.
A lot of games have a challenge.
Otherwise it's not as fun.
But that also means a lot of people
are going to fail when you think about everyone
playing your game.
So just make sure that that's fun.
A lot of times, we just make something funny happen.
Like, for example, in this game, the watermelon
does squish the strawberry.
And on the opposite side, when people are doing well,
you know, go into a frenzy mode.
Reward them.
Make them feel special.
So if they hit something perfectly three times,
just go nuts.
I think NBA Jam did this perfectly with its
you're-on-fire mechanic.
And a quick word on tutorials-- so
we do in-game tutorials because of a previous lesson.
But we also try to do it without text.
And this is a great confirmation that you've made
a simple and friendly game.
Because if a non-gamer can come to your game
and learn how to play it without any text,
you've probably kept it simple and intuitive.
Now, we don't always succeed.
Last year, we had this Halloween game
where you had to draw a symbol over a ghost
to get it to disappear.
And we just couldn't find a way with user studies to do that.
So these are more goals than rules, but still a useful one.
And our final F-word kind of over-arches all the F-words--
is feelings.
And there's this great quote by Maya Angelou.
You know, people will forget what you say.
They'll even forget what you did.
But they'll never forget how you made them feel.
So it's a good idea to just go over
every screen, every choice, every challenge,
and just ask yourself, how am I making
our users feel right now?
And you'll find some low-hanging fruit to improve your game.
So in conclusion, if you want to make
a game that can appeal to, say, like a billion people,
don't forget to encourage your team to use more F-words.
Thank you.
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