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Endings are important to the impact a design has on players. So let’s go on a journey together through one of my favorite studies, involving colonoscopies.
Join me, won’t you?
Join me, won’t you?
In the 90’s Don Redelmeier did a study where he asked people to record their discomfort levels on a 1-10 scale at 1 minute intervals during a colonoscopy. He later asked them to rate their total pain for the procedure.
The hypothesis was that the total discomfort would, in essence, track the sum of the all the pain measurements. The “area under the curve”, if you will.
There were two groups. The first was the normal 10 minute procedure, which ended just shortly after the peak pain, around an 8.
For Group 2, the first 10 minutes were the same, but the procedure was extended another 10 minutes as a ‘cooling down’ period, which people rated a 4.
For Group 2, the first 10 minutes were the same, but the procedure was extended another 10 minutes as a ‘cooling down’ period, which people rated a 4.
Here’s a mockup of what the reported discomfort curves look like.
As I mentioned, the thinking was that the people who had the 20 minute procedure would report more total pain than the shorter one. After all, given a choice you’d rather spend half the time being uncomfortable right? The “area under the curve” was a lot smaller for the shorter
But the results showed that people who had the longer procedure reported _less_ total pain, not more.
Further research showed that the best way to estimate the reported discomfort was to average the peak pain with the final pain. So for the shorter procedure the peak and final were about the same. Whereas the lower final pain in the longer procedure brought down the average.
This discrepancy grows over time, by the way. The further away people were from the memory, the more they remembered the ending and not the peak pain in the middle.
There is a difference between "experiencing" and "remembering". And this applies with positive feelings also. If you’re watching a movie, and it has a fantastic sequence in the middle, but a lousy ending, you’re going to be much less happy than with a lousy middle but great end.
Same thing with games. When designing a game, pay attention to how it ends. If you’re final turns are just ‘going through the motions’ or feel like work, people will not like it as much, even if the rest is great.
Applying this idea drove part of the design for Super Skill Pinball. There are two ways to lose the ball – through the center, or through the outlanes. The outlanes give you a bonus that grows as the ball goes on longer, and it can be a lot of points.
This creates excitement towards the end of the ball as the player faces an increasingly consequential game moment as the end gets closer – and the last roll will always be either gaining or missing that final bonus.
In the original design this wasn’t the case. You just got a small bonus for the outlanes, so the time just before losing the ball wasn’t always that exciting. By focusing on that element, the remembered game experience was improved.
I hope this helps you in your designs, or just thinking about how you react to things in general! For more insights like this, please check out GameTek, just published in the US by @Harper360 https://www.amazon.com/GameTek-Geoffrey-Engelstein-ebook/dp/B07G3GX7WG
