Games and Video Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 25

Novelty
People enjoy novelty: new things to see, to hear, and to do. Early video games were
extremely repetitive and developed an unfortunate reputation for being monoto-
nous. Nowadays, however, video games can offer more variety and content than
any traditional game, no matter how complex. Not only can video games give the
player new worlds to play in, but they can easily change the gameplay as the game
progresses. So, for example, Battlefield 1942 not only lets the player play as a foot
soldier (one of several types, in fact), but also allows him to hop in a tank, an air-
plane, or a ship and play from those perspectives.
Novelty can even be an end in itself. In the WarioWare series from Nintendo, the
player must play dozens of strange microgames, each of which lasts only a few sec-
onds. Their constantly changing goals and graphical styles make WarioWare quite
challenging, if rather disorienting. There aren't many games like this on the market,
however. Novelty alone is not enough to sustain player interest. Most games rely
more on theme-and-variations approaches—introducing a new element and giving
the player the chance to explore it for a while before introducing the next one.
Learning
Learning doesn't mean “edutainment” or educational software here. Learning is an
aspect of playing a game, even just for entertainment, and people enjoy the learn-
ing process. This is the central thesis of Raph Koster's topic, A Theory of Fun for
Game Design (Koster, 2004). Although some of the things Koster says conflict with
ideas in this topic, A Theory of Fun for Game Design is well worth reading. In the
case of conventional games, the players have to learn the rules and then learn how
to optimize their chances of winning. In video games, the players don't have a
guide to the rules, so they have to learn how the game works by playing it. If you're
playing a classic arcade game, over time you learn the movement and attack pat-
terns of your enemies and figure out when they're vulnerable to a counterattack.
Then you come across a new enemy and have to learn a new pattern. So long as a
game keeps offering you new things to learn, it remains enjoyable—assuming it
was enjoyable to begin with! After you have learned everything about a game and
have complete mastery over it, you might start to think that the game is boring.
Koster asserts that this is inevitable, which is why people eventually abandon a
game and pick up a new one. (This is more true of single-player games than it is of
multiplayer games, because in multiplayer games the unpredictability of human
opponents keeps them fresh.)
Learning isn't always easy, and it isn't guaranteed to be fun, as we all remember
from our days in school. People enjoy learning when at least one of two conditions
is met: (1) it takes place in an enjoyable context, and (2) it provides useful mastery.
A game should always provide an enjoyable context for learning; if it doesn't,
there's something wrong with the game. A game should also offer useful mastery;
the things that players learn should help them play the game more successfully. For