Bullet Point Learning Design - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 134

is important to know that players want an experience instead of just
experience points. Through juicy interactions, we can make this pos-
sible. Little inputs, huge outputs.
Harsh and Brutal Corrections of Unwanted Behaviors
The flipside of giving players amazing juicy rewards is punishing them
horrendously when they do something wrong. It is fine to punish
players for things they have done incorrectly once they have learned
to play, as I have said repeatedly. You might wonder, throughout this
topic, how games that are hard as nails and force you to die over
and over again can be fun. Well, like Contra that I mentioned earlier,
death doesn't have to be a negative experience so long as something
is learned or gained from it. I would argue that a death that only
brings you back a few minutes is worse in the learning design sense,
as the designers aren't exactly sure when the player is going to die.
In a good design, the only time players die is when they have made
a mistake even though they had everything at their disposal not to.
When this happens, go for it, open the floodgates, and let slip the
most horrific punishments your sadistic mind can cook up. Murder
their sidekick, delete their save file, burn their house down. You get
the idea. So long as your punishments are backed up by learning sup-
port, and players feel like they deserved it, they will try again, littered
though they may be with the ashes of their former home.
Rewards Must Scale in Their Splendor and Awesomeness
Games allow us to scale our rewards up, and up, and up. Everything
we do can get more and more amazing the more times we do it.
Unfortunately, this is not a representation of the real world, but it
has a particular psychological benefit. The effect allows rewards not
to get boring. In a standard behavioral stimulus-response chain, you
would be giving someone a reward, but the reward would eventu-
ally become less and less enticing. In economics, this is called the
effect of diminishing returns. Essentially, I can only bribe you with
chocolates so many times until you want that chocolate less and less.
Eventually, in fact, the chocolate will become a punishment as your