RESISTANCE - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 141

that they wouldn't be likely to pursue without the achievement. It's possible to create interest-
ing achievements that can feel genuinely rewarding but, like story, this tends to work best if a
game's creators have figured out how to integrate achievements into their own systems. That
ends up making the online networks' achievement system a little redundant for most players
who don't care about racking up Xbox Gamerscore points that simply show how much time
someone's put into playing Xbox games.
Time and Punishment
Rewards involve a shaping of resistance that pulls the player forward instead of pushing her
back. Moments of reward encourage the player to push deeper into the game. Difficult chal-
lenges, as well as the very rules of the game, are the structures of resistance that the player
pushes against. Of course, we can't just talk about rewards and difficulty without discussing
another way that games push the player: punishment . Moments of punishment happen when
the player makes a mistake or fails at the game, whether by being crushed by a spiked ceiling
(as in To mb ed ) or losing all health points while fighting an enemy (a system found in countless
games). If rewards are the “carrots” that encourage the player to move forward, punishments
are the “sticks” that signal when the player does something, or ends up in a situation, that the
system doesn't encourage.
Punishments don't just block the player from doing something, as when a player encounters
a rule like she can't dig into a metal floor. Instead, they often send the player flying backward
through the experience. When the spiked ceiling of To mb ed reaches the top of Danger Jane's
helmet, Jane goes flying off the screen, disrupting the scene. The game then resets itself to an
earlier moment, the last time that the game invisibly recorded that Jane had passed a certain
depth in her descent. This moment is a checkpoint , sometimes marked by a little flag or other
landmark, like the small white pillars that the player frequently passes while exploring the Mar-
tian landscape of REDDER (see Figure 6.11). Returning the player to a checkpoint is like repeating
part of a conversation—perhaps to go over something a second or third time that one of the
participants didn't understand or that they need to revisit to respond differently.
In many games, players can create their own checkpoints as well, by saving the game. If they
encounter a punishment, perhaps one that terminates the experience like “dying” in a game
usually does, they can return to one of the moments where they saved. Regardless of whether
the system provides a way for players to manage their own checkpoints or includes check-
points at predetermined points in the experience, the player is sent backward to repeat what
she's done. This form of punishment also exists in games that simply punish the player with a
“GAME OVER” message, like Three Body Problem and Super Hexagon do—except in those cases,
as with many classic arcade games, the player is returned to the beginning of the experience to
start again. The entire system is reset.