Bullet Point Learning Design - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 137

this? World of Warcraft does this with things like “rested experience.”
They reward the player for coming back to the game. This is exactly
the kind of mechanic that keeps people playing, if World of Warcraft 's
decade-long continuing success is any evidence of that fact. In our
games, we want players to have rewards for signing back in. Give them
items by surprise when they come back to the game just to thank them
for doing it. This relates to our just-in-time conversation from previ-
ous chapters. We have no idea why the player turned the game off per
se, so let's assume it is because the player got bored or frustrated. In
this way, the reward for returning is a just-in-time treatment with the
intention of keeping the player playing the game. You can wrap this in
the game's mechanics. Make it so that the Skull Island explorers keep
looking around the dungeon and give you amazing rewards every time
you play. This system makes the players slowly associate starting the
game with positive experiences. If we can work in mechanics like this,
players are more likely to start our game just for the heck of it. I hope
that this will get them involved in what they are doing, and keep them
interested because our learning design is so amazing—right?
Procedural and Dynamic Rewards and Punishments
Just like our procedural and dynamic difficulty, we can also procedur-
ally and dynamically generate rewards and punishments for players.
This means using procedural algorithms to make new items, or pro-
cedural punishments to dynamically render you dying, kind of like
seeing a flying foot in Team Fortress 2 . You know you shouldn't have
died, and the punishment is clear, but at the same time, you're having
some fun. As I have discussed in other points, there is a diminishing
returns effect that happens when you repeatedly do the same thing
to players, good or bad. In Skull Island , the procedurally generated
dungeon floors can be seen as a kind of procedural reward—getting
to new floors gives you access to dungeons you have probably never
seen before. To this end, you continue to be motivated to get deeper
and deeper in the dungeon, and thus to keep playing. The more you
get used to using behavioral incentives to keep players interested in
your game's objectives, the more you'll get used to using these kinds
of tactics to keep people playing at all.