RESISTANCE - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 139

fountains of gold coins and exploding sunbursts. It's there as a marker, an acknowledgment that
you've done it. By clearing out the remnants of the past (what you've just accomplished), it also
pulls the player toward the next challenge.
Of course, this isn't the only way to mark the occasion of a player successfully pushing into a
game up to a particular point. It's easy to imagine games that do the opposite. When you finish a
section of the game, a certain set of tasks, or a particularly difficult challenge, you get to keep a
memento of your success, such as a medal or souvenir. It all depends on how you want the con-
versation of your game to mark memories of the past and open the way toward the future, where
the player will explore more of the game's possibilities.
Previous chapters have talked a lot about what happens when the player's introduced to a new
verb and how verbs develop along with a player's understanding of how to use them. Opening
the conversation of a game to include more verbs is an exciting moment, and it's often used
to create a moment of reward. When a player has successfully pushed into a game and accom-
plished something she's been striving for, she's hopefully deepened her understanding of the
game's verbs and system. Introducing a new verb—or a new way to use a verb—can help keep
the experience flowing interestingly. For similar reasons, introducing new objects to use verbs
on is also a common form of reward, whether those objects come in the form of new areas to
explore, new opponents to face, or new obstacles that have to be traversed. Unlocking new
sections of the game may not seem like a reward in the same way that finding a gun that enables
the “shoot” verb is, but both are significant rewards because they let the player push into new
parts of the experience. These rewards connect the player's past accomplishments to what's
coming next.
Resources
A chest full of gold coins is one of the most traditional forms of reward, signifying wealth. In a
game, as in real life, the value of money depends on what you can buy with it. We can think of
currency and other spendable resources as enabling particular kinds of verbs: “spend” and “save.”
Currency is useful for game creators as a flexible kind of reward because it's usually represented
as a number. Players can make choices about how much to exchange, perhaps for a new verb or
access to new objects, or they can hold onto it in anticipation of being able to afford something
else later on. Not all spendable resources look like money, either; skill points are another type of
currency, usually rewarded after the player reaches a certain point in a game.
You can think about any kind of number that the player can spend or save as a currency reward,
the means by which other verbs are enabled. For example, ammunition is an expendable
resource that enables the “shoot” verb in many games. Health is a special kind of expendable
resource that the player tries to avoid losing in challenging situations and which she has to save
enough of to avoid running out. Running empty on health leads to “death,” and although that
means something very different in various games, it often involves starting over, dealing with a
penalty, or experiencing a setback of some kind.