For a long time I wasn't able to remember which game was the last one I was able to finish. And I don't even mean complete a 100% of a game with all missions and achievements, I mean just the main story. Ever wondered why it's difficult to do it these days?
When first thinking about it, my first though was related to time. Lot's of kids were able to complete their games because they just have more time to play. But this alone didn't seem to be the only reason. I have a full time job and yet I can play games... I just don't stick with them for too long. So what is the problem?
The Paradox of Choice
Recently I've watched a video on TED from Barry Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice which I believe can explain this problem. Schwartz explains how to many choices can affect our behavior when choosing anything. So let's go back for when the first games came out: Asteroids, Pong, PacMan.. They were almost the only options we had at that time. You either had to play one of these titles or nothing else... easy to understand why some players could play 99 levels of pacman being all the same.
Later on, when the first gen gaming consoles was hitting thousand of homes we already had many titles to play. But it was easy to identify the best games. Mario, Zelda, Sonic, Street Fighter 2 and some others. When a kid was playing one of these games he knew it was a good choice. Now compare with actual games. There are thousands of games, great productions with thousands of professionals working on them. It's often easy you to catch you playing one game with your mind thinking what are you missing on the last releases. And you go for a little try and it's done you abandon your current game. Part of what give us pleasure is surprises and new things. Almost all games reach a certain point were you already know all game mechanics and that is the point where you start to want another game. But with so many titles been released everyday it will be impossible to play all of them.
The Challenge
I believe game designers biggest challenge is to make this game where the players know that this is the game they want to play and nothing else even just released will bring so many gratification playing. A first step toward this direction is to implement RPG aspects in almost every game. Where the mechanics changes as the player advances in the game. When the firsts non-RPG games started to implement RPG aspects they were huge success, but this is now already expected by players.
That said, at the beginning of this post I said I couldn't recall the last game I finished for a long time. Well the one I recently finished was The Binding of Isaac. Even failing lot's of times, I wanted to keep playing. There are so many upgrades to discover, all of them affecting your gameplay and just this aspect kept me playing for hours.
I hope game designers try to make games where the mechanics keep players wanting to play their games. Well this is a challenge to myself either.
Sign up here with your email
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon