Designing Pings that Inspire Collaboration

The following are some concrete design practices for using pings that can support and inspire collaboration among players.

big idea Pings as Collaborative Tools

Whether coordinating a strategic push or simply expressing encouragement, pings are an essential tool for player collaboration.

Design techniques for collaborative pings

When looking to enhance collaboration among players, ping designs should aim to achieve the following:

Support effective communication

When key information is not transmitted effectively it undermines the play experience and is a drain on teamwork. Ping systems should be thoughtfully constructed to maximize both relevance and situational efficiency.

Related tips:

Utilize a variety of pings for specific actions that reflect key gameplay situations (e.g., enemy spotted, requesting assistance, suggesting objective).
Design for the sender and receiver experience. Model both contexts and examine failure points and the definition of success from both vantages.
Unobtrusively teach ping usage through tutorials and in-game examples. Guide players to utilize context-appropriate pings strategically and help them build good habits.

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Consider the attention hierarchy

There’s a lot going on in most games and we can’t attend to it all. Design for the various demands on player attention by looking for ways to elevate key information or reduce sensory noise.

Related tips:

Consider visual and audio cues that are distinct and easily distinguishable from the game itself.
Help increase precedence by ducking audio or considering when / where pings are delivered.
Design the UI to display critical pings with greater prominence within the game environment.

Highlight successful collaboration

Unanswered pings, whether missed, misunderstood, or ignored, can feel antagonistic or signal incompetence. Ideally, we want designs to reduce the perception of failed communication while amplifying the feeling of successful collaboration.

Related tips:

Encourage acknowledgment of helpful pings. This could be through a quick confirmation, thank-you, or even subtle visual rewards, and make those easy to issue.
If a ping results in an enemy kill or other identifiable success, consider explicitly acknowledging this, such as with a “kill assist.”
Foster a community understanding that supportive pinging benefits the entire team and reflect this through in-game recognition of effective ping use. For example, did a ping result in teammates relocating to a spot together?
Look for small ways to acknowledge collaboration that encourages players to continue those behaviors (without annoying them).

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Mitigate frustration and abuse

Pings are a means of creative expression. Players will naturally explore the limits of those systems, while bad actors may attempt to exploit them. Take steps to preserve the goals of your ping system while mitigating their misuse.

Related tips:

Proactively reduce misuse by ensuring your ping system is valuable and reflects how players play; its successful use should be intrinsically motivating, reducing the invitation to abuse.
Limit ping frequency on an individual basis to prevent misuse and screen clutter. Allow players to customize ping frequency and visibility settings to accommodate different preferences and playstyles. Consider grouping pings or delaying delivery if a player is pinging a lot.
Allow players to temporarily mute other players whose ping behaviors are distracting or unhelpful.
Employ a system that detects patterns of intentional disruption and takes appropriate action, ranging from warnings to escalating consequences.
Provide clear guidelines on the most effective and beneficial ways to use the system, emphasizing etiquette and teamwork.

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Be tested deliberately

Don’t assume that pings will be sufficiently vetted through the course of normal play testing. Ensure you are purposefully testing your system relative to different player needs and experience levels.

Related tips:

Incorporate ping systems early and test them often by playing without any voice comms — this will ensure not only that you fully incorporate and understand their utility but also give you time to refine them.
We naturally gain proficiency as a result of playing our games everyday. This can obscure hard-to-use designs that might discourage players day one. Test onboarding regularly with players new to your game as well as new to the genre.
Test if your pings are accessible to players who may have visual, motor, sensory or other difficulties. This could include additional visual cues, vibrations, or alternate input methods for pings.

Be easy to find

Even in ping-heavy games, it is surprising how often players will ask “How do I ping?” Ensure that players can easily learn how to ping.

Related tips:

Consider a contextual “hint” if a player hovers over an item for any length of time without pinging.
If a player hasn’t played in some time, consider re-activating hints, especially if they are not using pings when appropriate.
Allow players to disable hints, or proactively disable them if you detect a player is already using pings.

Other design ideas

Here are some ping ideas to help you start thinking about how to make your communication systems more intuitive, immersive, and collaborative in order to facilitate a greater sense of rapport:

Juice it up — Make it more fun to agree — if a player pings a location, juice up subsequent pings with audio or video enhancements. Or offer compelling responses, such as high fives, etc.
Reactive environments — Trigger in-world effects that communicate key information, such as birds scattering from a specific area. This can make pings feel less distracting and more immersive.
Diegetic responses — Have the player character respond to in-world events. If birds scatter, include a custom voice line: “Did you see those birds? We should investigate.” Or, if indicating possible treasure, “Come look at this rock, can we move it?”
Amplify alignment in-world — Allow players to actively agree via their own pings and even encourage total agreement via the game world’s response (e.g., rolling in fog to dissuade travel in the opposite direction of what was suggested).
Multi-modal pings — Vibrate the controller at differing degrees of force when available to help indicate importance.
Leverage intensity — Amplify pings according to the severity of the situation so they feel more contextually important. If a player is heavily swarmed, make the ping sound appropriately intense.
AI instruction — Consider leveraging pings in your single player campaigns to direct AI companions. This will help teach and habituate ping usage overall, helping players engage more successfully when playing with others.
Active pings — Consider how enforcing one active ping or ping type might assist gameplay. For example, some games allow players to ping only one objective at a time, but allow for multiple enemies to be pinged at once.