What I learned about gaming habits from watching my grandad play

I spend a lot of my time thinking about casual games and what makes the people that play them tick. Sometimes when making games for people who don’t call themselves gamers it can feel a bit like fighting an uphill battle. Why would you even concern yourself with a demographic that does not “want” to play, you may think? But what I have found is that most people desire to play, if only the games suited their life more. Mobile games for example reached audiences previously considered irrelevant to the gaming market because they were accessible and could be played when players had time for it. There are different challenges to designing for an audience that does not consider play a priority in their day but rather an activity they do because of other reasons. So what should we aim to do when the simple “I feel like playing a game” is not enough to draw our audience into a game? We aim to form a habit of play.

To understand how to form a habit we must first understand who our players are and what the flow of their lives is. Something I enjoy doing is a bit of exploration of who the player is and how they behave, a bit like building a player backstory. I found that telling stories humanises the player and their plight, especially when it can feel like a struggle to get them to pay attention. Of course we cannot design video games for individuals but we can expand our thinking about who could be a potential player of our game, and how we might help them form these habits in the first place. Allow me then to tell you a story about my grandad and how he engaged with games habitually.

My grandad was the furthest away from what people would call a gamer. When I started my game developer career it was incredibly difficult to describe to him what I did for work. But he was no stranger to games and playing, maybe not in the way we as video game developers would consider, but playing nonetheless. He was an avid chess player and a huge backgammon fan, and he would willingly engage with both of these games frequently, often being the initiating party and instigating others to play with him. But my grandad was also a very busy man; he owned land in the countryside in Romania, he had farm animals, an overflowing vegetable garden, and a giant orchard full of fruit trees to tend to. Playing for him was a ritual he got to engage with at the end of a hard day of manual labour. When he would hire working hands to help him in the yard, the hot afternoons meant, for him, sitting in the shade of the vine pergola and playing. You see, aside from a busy man, my grandad was also a reserved man, and he often used games not only to relax but also to connect with others with whom he might not have had much else to talk about.

I often think about his ritual of playing these games, and what turned this into a habit for him when he’s never shown an interest in other types of games. Was it the fact that he needed a way to unwind and this was an activity he had access to since he was young? Perhaps it was his limited access to games? Or maybe it was a matter of what activities were considered appropriate for someone of his class, age and gender? All of these factors could have played a part in why he started playing these games to begin with. And while that is interesting in its own way I would like to dig more into why he stuck with them over his entire life.

I would propose we take a closer look at his life and his habits of play. In his day full of back breaking work my grandad had a very specific gap in his free time that he could allow for a game-oriented activity. This type of play could not be something else for him because of who he was and how he saw playing as an activity. He often only had rest time during the day, and that time was often spent with other people; in the evening the hard work would often push him to an early night. Even on Sundays when no work was done, my grandparent’s house was always filled with relatives, neighbours and friends.

So what did these games have for him that other games did not? First of all they were familiar, not only to him but to the people he always had around. He could bring up the board and offer a game feeling confident that the person he would ask knew either one or both: chess or backgammon. Secondly, these games were portable and easily accessible to him, the double kit of chess board on one side backgammon on the other was convenient. He could play inside the house at the table over a glass of palinca, or he could play on a blanket in the garden under a tree. He could even take it with him on the many occasions he helped others with their yard work. Thirdly, this was an activity for his brain during the days in which he did not have access to other kinds of mental stimulation. My grandad was an engineer during his time, a clever man but that did not afford him a life without hard labours, such was the way in the time and place he was. While I am sure he would have enjoyed a book to read, or doing a brain teaser in the newspaper, I rarely saw him do things for himself by himself. And this takes me to the final and fourth point I have: chess and backgammon fit this role for him explicitly because they required another player to be played. Guests presented my grandad with the challenge of small talk but they also presented him with the opportunity, and perhaps the excuse, to do something that served no purpose other than enjoyment.

So what is there to take away from this story of my grandad and how he played his games? I’d say that the first lesson is not to be so quick in disregarding someone as a “player” just because they are not a “gamer”. While it is true that he himself never engaged with video-games, a different set of circumstances might have turned him into a devoted player of something like a mobile game for example. A second thing to note here is that for a casual player like him, games could not take priority over his work so they had to instead fit around his life in the gaps already available. One challenge for us as designers is not only to identify what those gaps are for our audience, but also to refrain from overextending beyond the time that players can give. A third interesting thing to note is how the habit of playing was for him always triggered by specific cues in his life. For him this signal was having guests over, but one can form a habit around any one thing that happens on a regular basis, think for example taking the tube home (for our London readers).

Ultimately this is a story about a man who enjoyed playing but would only do so in certain circumstances, but that does not make the endeavour of making a game for people like him a waste of time. In fact there are plenty of under-serviced casual audiences that may be interested in play, if only the game they had access to would be more conscious of their own lives.