Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
By opening up or narrowing the space of player choice in your game, you can let your players
affect the shape of resistance. At the narrowest end, players can experiment or choose
when
to
use the verbs you've provided them: Is it the right moment to maneuver left or right in
Super
Hexagon
? Which is the best spot to dig to descend further in
To mb ed
? As you open the shape of
resistance, the choices change:
How much
resistance will there be, and
how soon
will it appear?
Will the player swim toward more challenging depths in
flOw
or spend time riding through
quiet meadows in
Shadow of the Colossus
before the next battle? You may want to open up the
choice of
which
verb the player will use, whether that's represented as a selection of weapons in
a dueling game or deciding whether to grab a Super Shroom to play as big Mario. Finally, if you
pull back your game's shape of resistance to the point where the player's making choices on her
own, you can allow her to decide
which
goals to pursue. You can even ask the player to come up
with her own goals, leading to the big question of
why
she wants to play and
to what end
.
The flow of difficulty and challenge is a kind of resistance that pushes the player to varying
degrees, requiring her to push back into the system of the game, try to overcome obstacles,
and deepen her understanding of the game. A player also pushes into a system and finds resis-
tance when exploring the possibilities of a system, whether it's figuring out what a system can
do or coming up with her own goals and strategies within the structured rules of a system. If
resistance is a way of looking at the push and pull of the ongoing dialogue between player and
game, then we need to find ways to pull players as well as push them, to encourage and lead
them forward.
Because the games we create are having these conversations with players in our absence, we
set up systems to give that signal to players: “Yes! More of that! That's right!” This kind of posi-
tive feedback is often thought of as a reward. The tradition of rewarding players who are “doing
the right thing” goes back a long way through the history of various kinds of games: gambling
for money, accolades and cash prizes for sports tournaments, and so on.
Chances are that when you a play a game, you're not doing it for the practical value of the
rewards you might earn. You're playing the game for its own sake, because hopefully it's enjoy-
able, meaningful, or rewarding. If games ought to be inherently fulfilling in their own right, do
we need rewards? It may make more sense to think of them as feedback in the game's conver-
sation with players. In single-player games, we leave rewards along the way to encourage, to
tell players that they're on the right track. Still, the visual language of rewards often has the
feeling of a payoff, a prize that has some kind of value. At the surface level, you can probably
recall some examples of what these rewards look and sound like: shiny coins, bouncing stars, an
overflowing treasure chest, perhaps accompanied by uplifting, victorious music and large text
that declares, “You Did It!”
Peggle
(2007) has one of the most well-known examples of a game's
contextual elements used to create a rewarding feel. When the player manages to bounce a ball
