Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Players of role-playing games are familiar with
experience points
, yet another kind of resource
that doesn't involve much choice. These points are automatically saved for you until you have
a certain amount, and then they're spent to reach a new level, at which point many games give
the player a reward in the form of spendable resources, new verbs, or access to new areas of the
game. Experience points aren't really an expendable currency; they're basically just a marker of
progress toward the next part of the game experience.
Dead End Rewards
Creators of games have invented far more ways to entice players into staying engaged with
a game, from the bells and whistles of exciting audiovisual feedback to piles of spendable
resources—sometimes in such huge amounts that decisions about spending and saving
become meaningless. Many games also try to weave a story into the conversation of playing—
a subject we talk about more in Chapter 7, “Storytelling.” When you're playing a game, your
experience of push and pull, tension and release, has a narrative flow of its own.
Game creators who also want to tell a more authored story often do it in bits and pieces at a
time, with a prewritten dialogue between two characters onscreen, or a cutscene that involves
little to no involvement on your part. These dramatic interludes are often placed between
sections of gameplay so they don't disrupt the flow of actual gameplay. As a result, they often
happen around the same time as other rewards or pauses in the resistance of a game, because
the pleasure involved in watching a story unfold is also a reward. Using story as a reward is a
little troublesome, however. If your story is exciting enough that it feels rewarding just to reach
the next scene, then experiencing that story could become the real motivation to play, at least
for some players. We'll come back to talking about story in the next chapter, but for now it's
good to understand how story rewards, divorced from the system and its shape of resistance,
are like a dead end: they don't feed back into what the player's doing in the same way as giving
the player a new verb does.
Achievements are another kind of dead-end reward, popularized by mass-market online
game networks like Xbox Live and PlayStation Online.
Cheevos
(as Anna and other critics like
to call them) are deliberately outside the real systems of gameplay. Games can record achieve-
ments into an online network's system, but unless a game has its own way of tracking and
using achievements, they never affect anything else in the game. Like story rewards that don't
function as part of gameplay, cheevos sit outside the conversation; they have to be pursued
purely for the sake of reward. Because game creators would have to duplicate the achievement
systems inside their own game to avoid this dead end, it's no wonder that many cheevos seem
to have little to do with what makes a game interesting.
The least interesting kinds of cheevos are either awarded simply for playing the game, often
just duplicating the game's own system of reward and progress, or require the player to do
repetitive actions, like killing large numbers of enemies or amassing lots of resources, in ways
