Feel-good is pay-off
When you design a game, one of the cornerstones is the idea that games need to give players some kind of pay-off. In an action game, a good idea is to try to find and work with “memorable moments”, events or situations that the player will remember at given points in the game after finished. A good game leaves you with many moments that will stick to your memory and over the years get wrapped in a pink cloud of nostalgia-fluff.
Another way to think about pay-off is as rewards. The player is given rewards for dealing with and solving particularly challenging situations. This might be a boss-fight, a level, a new opponent or whatever. Many games are sprinkled with pickups, boosts and all sorts of nice things that work as rewards and they often work well as pay-off for spending time in a game. Of course, the use of these kinds of devices should be done with great care and thought. Just peppering the player with pickups could be counter effective.
Feel-good in games
But there is a deeper form of pay-off that I believe differentiates the really good game from the average. Here are two examples:
- In the “Ratchet & Clank” series, whenever you smash something bolts fly out of them and you can collect these bolts. When you collect bolts, the game emits a sound that makes you feel good.
- In “Shadow of the Colossus”, just riding Agro, your horse, through the vast landscape feels good.
These are highly subjective reactions to those games, but I know that many agree with me. One of my colleagues, Anders Backman, claimed that any store that played the “collect bolt” sound from “Ratchet & Clank” when you step through the door would increase its sales immediately. It’s a somewhat silly notion, but I kind of believe that he is right.
“Shadow of the Colossus” has been criticised by some for its long transportation sequences, but I do not agree with those people. To me, one of the beauties of the game is that is makes you focus on the horseback-riding and get to know Agro real well. The feel-good of riding is utilized to the max, which I think is a stroke of genius.
There are tons and tons of things that make people feel good about playing and many games hit the spot right on. Whether that happens by design or by luck is somewhat irrelevant to players – they get their games and they like playing them. But if games tend to be successful in this area by luck, chances are that the opportunity to work with those feel-good devices is badly exploited.
Therefore, I think that it is a good idea to, if you haven’t started to do so, look at your favourite games, play them again, analyze them and find those components that triggers you. Chances are that your triggers are similar to many other people’s. And with that little piece of knowledge, you can go back to your team and try to enhance your game, making it pay off even more to those who will eventually play it.
