Quadro de Design de Jogos: Incentivo de Longo Prazo

Parte 4 de 5 da grande série de artigos “Quadro de Design de Jogos” do The Game Prodigy.

• Parte 1 –  Uma Introdução
• Parte 2 – Mecânica Principal
• Parte 3 – Sistemas de Recompensa e Punição
• Parte 4 – Incentivo de Longo Prazo
• Parte 5 – Layout Estético

The Game Design Canvas: Long Term Incentive

What makes a person want to continue playing a game?  What takes a game from a 30 second experience to a 30 hour experience?

To answer this, we’ll have to start from the beginning: Why did the player begin playing the game in the first place?  Fun and enjoyment are the most obvious answers.  The thrill of the chase, the challenge, the quest!  The opportunity to interact with others, to improve one’s skills, or to go on an adventure.  All of these are examples of Core Experiences, which gets people to start playing a game.  People want to have interesting experiences, and games are one way to fulfill that.

How about once they start playing, what does the player do then?  They got there because they were seeking the Core Experience, and then they begin to enter into the game itself.  They jump, they run, the roll dice, they make moves.  They begin to interact with the game  and perform actions within the game’s construct.  Seeking an Experience, they are beginning with the Base Mechanics.  They are beginning to become coordinated, so to speak, to learn to move and live in the game’s world.

Once they get going with the Base Mechanics, then they begin to learn the broader gameplay.  They learn that they need to look before they jump, that they should treat villagers with respect when discussing delicate matters, and that they need to use the red bullets when fighting the red enemies.  They begin to map out the interconnections between the actions they are making and the results the game is serving them.  They are making their way through the Punishment and Reward Systems, learning what behaviors are encouraged and which ones aren’t.  Building on top of the Base Mechanics, the P&R Systems draw them even deeper into the game and to the Core Experience they were originally seeking.

But then what?

After the player has learned the game, how it works, how it interacts with them, what makes them continue playing?  What could cause a player to perform the same actions, the same strategies, the same rituals, over and over, yet enjoying themselves at every step?

Enter the fourth Game Design Canvas component: The Long Term Incentive.

Striving for a Goal

In well-designed games, the reason that players continue to play is because the player is seeking something.  They are striving after a goal.  The goal doesn’t need to be as explicit as you would think; it doesn’t even need to be very important to the player.  In fact, the player may not even be consciously aware of the goal that is driving them.  But there is a goal, an Incentive, for them to keep going after.

In Super Mario Bros., the player continue playing so that they can reach the next level and the next world.  In classic coin-op games like Pac-Man, the Long Term Incentive is to get the highest goal possible.  In exploratory games like Spore’s space stage or Knytt, the goal is to simply see what’s next, to make known the unknown.  All of these are examples of a component in the design that drives the player onward, long after they’ve learned what they game is and how it works.  A good Long Term Incentive can extend gameplay like no other component.

If there is no Long Term Incentive, then the game is not really a full game.  These types of experiences are more like toys.  The player explores the actions they can do (Base Mechanics), they investigate the relationships between the actions and feedback (P&R Systems), and they enjoy the content (Aesthetic Layout), but then they are…finished.  There is nothing more to learn, nothing more to do.  Everything has already been done.

A Toy Vs. a Game

Let’s walk through an example of this: Suppose you were walking on the street and you came across a small blue ball.  ”Interesting!” you think.  ”I wonder what happens if I push it?”  You touch the blue ball and it magically hops forward.  ”Wow!  That’s interesting.”  You then try touching it rapidly and find that it does not hop as far.  ”It seems like if I want it to keep hopping, I need to time my pushes.”  So you try this a bit more to prove your hypothesis, and it’s proven successful.  You hop the blue ball around a little more, but then you grow bored and, having better things to do, move on to something else.

This is an example of a system with no Long Term Incentive.  But by adding an Incentive, we can build this little blue ball into a game.  Imagine that after you saw the ball, you saw a small blue box on the other side of the street.  ”Hmm, it looks like I’m supposed to put this ball into the box!”  Now you have Incentive.  You hop the ball over to the box and inside.  You have won the game.

Even though this example is a short one, notice what is extending the gameplay of this blue ball.  No new Mechanics were added.  No new Punishments or Rewards were taking place as you hopped the ball across the street.  Instead, you had a goal that was driving your behavior, a goal that led you to complete the puzzle.

Some Common Long Term Incentives

There are vast arrays of Long Term Incentives in games.  Some of the most popular are:

Complete all the levels. This Long Term Incentive was most popular in the early days of computer games, and still appear in many independent and main stream hardcore games today.  The soldier must trudge and shoot his way through the war, or the intrepid monster hunter must save the kingdom, broken into chapters.  The player completes each stage and, by virtue of another stage appearing, continues on and keeps playing.  An older variation of this Incentive is the high score: since they player already has 115,876 points and can earn more by shooting one more Space Invader, they aren’t likely to quit not.

A more advanced method of Complete All The Levels integrates a scoring system into the stages, giving the player a Silver or Gold Metal, or perhaps a C, B, A, or S score.  In this situation, the player will not only complete the level and move on the next, but be compelled to play each level again to get the best score.  This advanced method is very close to our next popular Long Term Incentive…

Collect Everything. Some players are “completionists”, they can’t leave the game alone until every stone has been turned over and every treasure chest opened.  If there is more in the game to collect, more to do, things to complete, then they won’t stop until it’s all done.   Variations on this include completely leveling up your character to the maximum, finding all the special items, or collecting all the achievements.

Some games are very explicit with the Collect Everything incentive.  Games that are very achievement oriented label each achievement.  RPG’s may have lots of extra side-quests for the player to perform in return for better armor, weapons, etc.  While these items aren’t required for the player to complete the game (Unless you’re doing a parody piece such as Achievement Unlocked), they do greatly extend the time a player is enticed to invest in a game.

Gain Information. Many games dangle new information in front of the player to compel them to continue.  Story is an example of this; even if the levels in a tactics/strategy game grow monotonous, players will continue to learn what happens to Prince Leon, or their other favorite characters.  Information may also be less explicit, such as seeing the end of a cavern or the bottom of an ocean, like in Flow.  And yet as the player in Flow devours different sea creatures and goes deeper into the dark waters, they are compelled to go even further to learn what is down there.

Improve One’s Skill. Games like Street Fighter, Halo, or other action games bring along the Incentive to improve one’s own skill.  This may be to clear incredibly difficult stages (a combination with the first common Long Term Incentive) or to be able to compete against other challengers.  Players engage in the same battles over and over again, on the same stages, with the same weapons and moves, and yet they have a great time.  That’s the Long Term Incentive at work.  Sometimes these come with ranking systems.  Halo, for example, ranks the skill of your performances in matches and then sets you up with other players of similar skill.  This further encourages the player to improve themselves so that they can move up the ladder.

Selecting, Revealing, and Grouping Incentives

Long Term Incentives don’t necessarily have to be hours down the road.  Anything that is driving the player forward in a meaningful way is a Long Term Incentive.  It’s up to the developer to decide what kind of Long Term Incentive they want to put in their game.  Some games seem incomplete because they have no real Long Term Incentive, while others only have a single Long Term Incentive.  Many modern games have several long term incentives packed into the same space.  This is a great way to give a game a professional level of depth.  The game has many things to keep the player going, so that if they become bored with one Incentive, they continue playing because of another.  This way, the developer creates a larger number of fail-safes in their Design Canvas, extra ropes that hold on to the player and keep them from falling away from the game.

In addition to selecting and grouping together Incentives, the developer also has the choice of how explicit to make them.  A game that has very visibly placed Long Term goals, such as listing off achievements after each stage or giving the player a formal score, give a very different feel to games that do not do this.  Games like Spore or Flow have similar goals to other games (complete the level, gain information), however they communicate this much less to the player.  Rather, they let the player find their own goals and have a feeling that their following their own path.  Hiding the Long Term Incentives from the player help the game feel less like a game and more like the Core Experience, but they run the risk of boring players who don’t understand what’s going on, or players who like to have their hand held and guided a little more.

Lengthening Gameplay: More Carrot, or More Stick?

The Long Term Incentive is the easiest way to lengthen gameplay and take a game from several seconds to several hours.  However, developers need to be careful: leaning on the Incentive entirely to provide long term gameplay can be disastrous.  Because of this, developers should be aware of how important the Long Term Incentive will be to the player.

A good analogy is the one of the carrot and the stick.  The horse wants the carrot: the reward, or the Long Term Incentive.  But to get there he needs to travel the length of the stick out in front of him: the task or the Base Mechanic gameplay.  Perform the task, and he receives the reward.  Crafting a good harmony of gameplay is the skill of crafting an effective carrot and stick.

If the Base Mechanics and the Punishment and Reward Systems are the solid focus of the game, then it doesn’t take much to keep the player interested in continuing.  Having a design that forces the player to think, to engage one’s skills, and to execute over the long term is a designer goal worth having.  But it is a challenge to keep this gameplay new and fresh over the long term.  If your game is about flying an airplane, then it is easy to imagine a game where they fly from the U.S. to Canada.  They would enjoy the first experience of learning how to fly, and feel a sense of accomplishment when they completed their Incentive by reaching Canada.

However, this experience isn’t likely to last long.  What if that games needs to be longer, and they need to fly from Canada to China?  They have added more stick to the game, but the stick is the same.  And when you add more stick, you need to either make traversing the stick more fun, or make the carrot more desirable.

For example, the developer could say, “Good job, you’ve flown to Canada.  Now fly to China.  If you get there, you’ll get an entirely new rocket ship that can take you to the moon.”  In this scenario, the player would likely groan, because the challenge set before them is so long and arduous, and is essentially repeating what they have already done.  Some may just quit the game.  But others would see that promise of a new rocket ship and decide to put in the time to earn it.  They want the carrot so much that they will put up with the long stick.  The Long Term Incentive propels them.

Avoiding the Daily Grind

Other games like this, such as many MMORPG’s like World of Warcraft, rely heavily on the Long Term Incentive to drive the player forward.  This often results in what gamers refer to as “grinding”, performing the same boring, brain-dead task over and over again in order to achieve a long term goal.  Fighting the same orc 150 times in order to gain enough gold to buy the silver armor is a great example of a game that is surviving almost entirely on its Long Term Incentive.  If not for that, the player would have quit long ago.

The actions that the player is performing may have been fun at first, but after mastering them, the only thing that keeps the player going is the pursuit of that final goal.  This is a fascinating situation because even though the player is bored out of their mind, they still grind away.  Grinding is a great example of the power of strong Long Term Incentives, albeit used to compensate for weak lower gameplay.

Go for the Long Haul

Photo: Mr Malique

Learning to strike a good balance between the lower level gameplay and the Long Term Incentive is key to having a game that is compelling throughout.  You don’t want your players to quit your game, but you also don’t likely want them to play your game while being bored to tears.  Ideally developers can concoct a Design Canvas that allows for fun as well as long term gameplay, creating an immersive world and Experience where they don’t want to leave.