Bullet Point Learning Design - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 133

playing your game, you have to make certain that rewards are ample
and continuous.
Immediate Feedback on All Inputs
It is generally accepted that in order for a behavioral lesson to work,
you need to either reinforce or correct a behavior within about 3 sec-
onds of it happening. That might even be too large a window for
games. I will go ahead and say that for games, anything more than
1 second is too long. I will fall back on the dog training analogy: when
the dog does something good, you pet him, praise him, or give him
a treat immediately. On the other hand, if you don't catch him in the
act of pooping in your bed, there's no point in punishing him. He
has already lost the cognitive trace. This is especially true of games.
Players have to connect something they have done with something
that happened in the game. The best way to make certain this link is
not broken is with temporal proximity, as we discussed in Chapter 3.
In games, this means making sure that victories are rewarded instantly
and shortcomings are punished equally rapidly. After time, this will
cause the player to associate the behavior in-game with the outcome.
For example, if dying causes players to lose their money after being
shown a Game Over screen, they will eventually associate dying with
losing money, and omit the Game Over screen as a cognitive middle-
man. If you just cause them to lose their money immediately the sec-
ond they die, they will make that association much more quickly. In
order to make sure players want to keep playing, rewards and punish-
ments need to be instant, or at least very soon after the behavior.
Massive Explosions of Juiciness
Juiciness is a term that comes up a lot in my teaching. As I have talked
about in a few chapters in this topic, it boils down to small input, big
output. If you can push a button and all kinds of amazing things hap-
pen on the screen, go for it. You will find in life that when you attempt
similar things, like martial arts for example, actually performing
the action in question takes much more effort than just pressing a
button. This is one of the magical things about games. Consistent
with Dewey's talk on experiences that we covered in Chapter 3, it