I woke up in the middle of the night on my holiday trip to Thailand after I had a vivid dream about the essence of Art. That made me think about the pleasure of making art, which led my thoughts to the pleasure of playing games.
What brings pleasure to the player of a game?
Achievements. Why do I grind the same race in Need for Speed: Most Wanted on my iPhone, race after race? To get better times, to unlock new cars and to get in-game money to buy them. It brings me pleasure to achieve those things.
A short and very crude timeline of pleasure in games
- Pong - winning your physical opponent
- Super Mario Bros. - finishing a level, finishing the game, finishing a hard level faster than before
- WoW - leveling your character/alter ego and comparing that level to characters of other players, showing off your level with equipment (PvE), playing skills (PvP), titles, rankings
What kind of pleasure could our game offer to our players? How is skillful playing and using your time to play our game rewarded?
Grinding should lead to something - preferably tangible - you can show off for you efforts. But what is tangible in the digital world of a game? Everything you achieve in a game is usually confined in that small world, quite possibly viewable by other players also playing that game, and in some cases something can be viewed in larger digital environments like internet, PSN or XBox LIVE.
Could some of our rewards directly target those large digital environments? For example: graphical rewards for Facebook, story/lore/text rewards for Twitter, musical/sound/video rewards for YouTube. And the player should be able to show them off easily, without needing PhD on Internets.
After these thoughts I went back to sleep.
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