Solid new game designers typically have the game research side of things covered, but it’s common for them to miss out on other disciplines. While game design is relatively new, design itself is not. There’s a plethora of subjects that impart useful game design lessons, ranging from psychology and architecture to traffic. Today I’m going to talk a little about traffic.
Freeway design is a science, right down to proper sign placement and how frequently and early the driver should be notified about exits. The purpose of a road is to get the users from point A to point B. A well designed road system does that as quickly, efficiently and hassle-free as possible. These goals are often mirrored in our game designs. Often, we want to funnel players to specific experiences in the game without giving them the feeling that they’re being led by the nose. We want intuitive paths. We don’t want players to get lost, yet they need to be able to explore and find their bearings. I’m sure you’ve all experienced poorly designed roads that led you astray or caused huge traffic jams. Those are the problems we want to eliminate in our games.
I’m going to use an example from a local road to demonstrate how simple flaws can compromise the integrity of the entire design. Note: the lessons used to solve this problem come from psychology.
First, let’s take a look at the road layout. Cars are trying to reach the freeway (X) and they come from points A and B.
During normal work hours, there was usually a two-cycle delay for each car to get through a street light. The morning and evening commutes backed up across this entire stretch of road, leaving cars trapped for up to 30 minutes on this ~1 mile stretch (depending on the point of origin).
On the way to the destination, there’s a longer side path. This side path simply requires paralleling the traffic jam on a minor street and then merging before the freeway entrance. It’s an appealing option to drivers who are stuck in traffic. They bypass the logjam and only have to deal with a small amount of traffic before entering the freeway. Now, with that in mind: where does the traffic originate?
The bulk of the traffic comes from the cars on the side path merging with the main road.
The commuters who used the side path were taking a common self-serving approach to the problem. They knew they could bypass most of the traffic for themselves, but they did not evaluate the problem from a wider perspective to realize that they were responsible for the problem they’re trying to avoid. This is expected behavior. Of course, you may be thinking this is a chicken-egg scenario, because the traffic had to exist for drivers to attempt to bypass it to create traffic. On this point, we can reasonably assume an origin C coming from the north, resulting in the merges before the freeway entrance.
The city/county/whoever eventually solved this problem by removing the option to merge onto the main road via the side path. Traffic immediately plummeted, as it is all about flow. Each time cars cross they create a small delay. Multiply that delay and you get traffic jams. In order to deal with traffic jams, we need to guide people down the paths with as few collisions as possible.
I simplified the problem a bit in an attempt to avoid cluttering my point… and because it was a lot easier to draw! All design is interconnected, just like roads. We can learn lessons from studying traffic patterns, just as this traffic problem found its answer in psychology. This problem also demonstrates how critical it is to spend time gathering data and analyzing the problem to find the right solution. The kneejerk response is to add another lane to reduce the traffic, but that would have ignored the cause of the traffic. Design cannot administer random solutions any more than doctors can prescribe random medications.
