Wagner James Au, a 35-year-old journalist from San Francisco, has been playing video games since he was 9, when Space Invaders and Battlezone were about as cutting-edge as games got. These days, though, Au's tastes are more discerning: Instead of playing first-person shooter games, in which winning is only about getting the highest score, he finds himself gravitating toward more complex games like Grand Theft Auto and Planescape: Torment.
"What I get excited about is games that evoke artistic or literary qualities," he said. "Games where you have to put a lot of thought into them -- you get rewarded not just for accomplishing the objectives, but by coming up with your own original way of solving the problems."
In the 1980s, when arcades were the main venue for video game entertainment, successful game design was measured in quarters: Could you convince a young person to keep plugging change into the machine every few minutes, or would he just give up and walk away?
But in 2002, the average game player is 28 years old, and thanks to the advet of online gaming, games that used to last only a few minutes now take 20 or 40 hours to finish -- if a potential end even exists.
As a result, the video game industry's game design strategies are rapidly evolving: What keeps a 13-year-old engaged is often quite different from what an adult might demand. Over the last few years, designers have begun to develop new game theories and more complex strategies of "payoff," the artifice that compels a player to keep playing a game for hours, weeks or days. The game company Electronic Arts has even sought help from academia, putting its designers together with people like Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the hope of understanding the demands of a maturing population of gamers.
"Most arcade games were a short, intense experience, and now we create games that are for the long haul," Jenkins said. "As you move to an experience that you extend for 20 hours, a different set of principles comes into play which have more to do with community-building."
Rewards ...
For arcade games -- much like pinball games before them -- designers knew that good timing was the way to keep young customers playing. "You wanted to have something that the player can feel is successful in the first three minutes of the game, and something suspenseful a few minutes after that," Jenkins said. "Arcade games are five-minute games, and the players have to be in the middle of something when the machine kicks down so that they'll put in another quarter."
This rudimentary formula is still visible in today's dizzying array of console games, computer games and online role-playing games. Within the first few minutes of a game, you will typically achieve a minor "success," whether that means finding a mysterious key or slaying a rat or stealing a car. If you don't, you will probably give up right away.
"You work in cycles of time," said Steve Gray, director of game development at Electronic Arts. "The MTV generation has a three-to-five minute cycle that is important. There's 30 minutes for the TV cycle, and 90 minutes is the film. In games, you don't want three to five minutes to go by without giving them something."
But such a simple formula does not satisfy the more discerning adult gamers who now dominate gaming and who lean toward immersive games. "The more complicated games get, the less compulsive they are," Gray said.
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