In this part I look at game mastery.
Mastering a game involves a number of factors:
- Empowerment. "Players must feel they can affect the events and the final outcome of the game" Wise words -- if you're just a passenger then you might just as well be watching a movie. Let the player 'gain' access to items by skill, and make these items critical to later success.
- Timing. Knowing when to do something can be learned from experience. However, this should be appropriate to the existing skill level of the player. This can take the form of dodging moving objects or enemies, or timing a double-jump. This also applies to rhythm-based movement.
- Memory. This is where players benefit from remembering facts about the game or its state. This is readily apparent in many room-by-room adventures, which I personally find incredibly tedious. I suppose the key here is to get the amount of memorising right for the audience: not too much (boring), but not too little (easy). This may be something which is heavily gender-influenced.
- Inductive reasoning. In other words, puzzles. This can also frustrate players in the wrong context.
- Luck. This one surprised me. I usually feel that luck is a bad thing in games, as it takes control away from the player. However, the book suggests that cheating, i.e. "loading the dice", can make the player feel luckier, and lead them to take risks they might not otherwise take. (I explored this in a previous post, looking at how casinos use this to manipulate players.)
- Predictable consequences. You can use experience to judge what actions to take if you have some idea of what should happen next. That's one of the reasons why killing a boss the first time is so hard -- the number of hits required & enemy movement are new to the player.
These points are certainly interesting and worth noting for future reference.