Bacheng Li

The Issue

Gaming experience, especially team-based competitive gaming experience, is a very complex human problem, because it is affected by the gamers' personality, interpersonal communication, emotion management as well as the game's mechanism. As both a gamer and designer myself, I understand how furious people can get when they lose reason in competitive games. For the sake of the gamers' mental well-being, it is very interesting and also significant to find a solution that solve this problem without talking them out of gaming. What if I can interfere with their gaming experience? Meticulous user research was carried out to go deep into the gamers' gamming experience in order to find out the fundamental reason that causes their emotions to change.

Socializing

According to the research, gamers are less likely to suffer from negative emotions or problematic behaviors when playing with people they know. Hence, after giving GG the access to your gaming data and completing a Belbin Test, GG knows what kind of gamer you are and what kind of team you can fit into. Then AI is able to match you with other several gamers that form a "Squad". In this squad, you can say hello to your teammates and pick a strategy from "Strategy Pool" and talk to them about what tactics your team can carry out on the battlefield.

Gaming Balance

"The fundamental reason for my bad gaming experience is gaming balance." Imbalanced game, where the gamer is matched into a game with one team being too strong for the other to compete against, or the gamer keeps losing, prominently destroys the gamer's self-esteem and mental well-being. GG solves this problem by constantly monitoring real-time battlefield data including damage, healing and eliminations. When a gaming balance issue is detected, it automatically pops out to inform the gamer. Knowing it's the game's fault that he's losing, he is less likely too be frustrated by the game.

Behavior Change

Feeling tired of toxic gamers (bad-attitude gamers who blame, insult or verbally abuse teammates or opponents)? GG is powered by the most cutting-edge AI voice recognition engine, which is able to read, hear and understand what the gamers say in the middle of gaming. If any teammate in your squad tries to say anything adverse to you, the conversation will be instantly snapped. By filtering toxic communication for you, GG protects your psychology and helps you keep a good mood from the start to the end.

Emotional Support

Even if you inevitably get into a bad mood, GG can still help you. With AI constantly monitoring battlefield data, it can easily tell when you are about to get upset. Then a comforting message will pop up to give you emotional support. The most touching part of this feature is that the comforting message is from a real player. At the end of the game, the gamer is encouraged to leave a comforting message that will pop up when some other stranger feels bad in gaming. By building a behavioral loop, designer wants to create a reciprocal community culture for gamers to support each other, which is very helpful for the gamers' social well-being.