Will Wright, the designer of The Sims series of games, said that his games often set no specific goals for players. "Instead, we give them a rich environment with goals embedded in it," he said. "I'm interested in rewarding imagination: letting them leverage creativity to build an interesting external artifact of their imagination."
Traditionally, the best way to get a young player to keep playing was simply the score. But this kind of motivation can become stale quickly with more experienced players, said Bob Stevenson, one of the creators of the game Giants, a traditional action shooter that uses unconventional humor as a payoff system. "Scores are the most fundamental motivator," he said. "Our reward system is comedy within the game. It makes you laugh and motivates you to move forward in the narrative."
Neil Young, a game designer and vice president at Electronic Arts, said that payoff systems for today's more complex games also require more patience and foresight. "These days," he said, "we think about ways of primally connecting with the player, rewarding them when they hit key milestones and motivating them with objects of promise that they can't use but move you forward," like a spell or a sword or a clue that works only in later levels of the game.
Perhaps one of the best examples of the complex payoff systems that appeal to adults is that of Grand Theft Auto, which lets players act out the part of a Mafia car thief. Most avid fans say they are drawn to both the multilayered quality of the game's goals and the immersive nature of the world it offers.
"It's the complexity of it -- it's abstract in its goals," said Brooks Wiley, 29, a mortgage broker from San Francisco. "There's always an ultimate goal in mind -- to move your way up the Mafia ladder -- but within that there are so many other things that keep your attention, little side tasks to do."
... and punishments
Game designers also have to defeat their customers in interesting ways. "You need interesting, diverse ways of failure," Wright said. "Gamers have to believe that the next time they won't fail, because they now know about the monster hiding behind the door, or that you need to feed your Sim before it dies. You have this physiological urge to go and finish the problem: Your brain knows what to do now, and it wants to go back."
Despite these insights into maturing gamers, game designers are still scrambling to understand the tricks of the trade. Although video games have quickly evolved into one of the most popular forms of American entertainment, game development theory is still relatively new. There are no game schools that educate game designers in psychology and storytelling in the way that film schools educate budding directors and screenwriters.
Game companies like Electronic Arts and Nintendo are trying to fill this void with their own training programs for game designers. Electronic Arts hired Jenkins to organize a series of roundtables in which academics and game designers brainstormed new ideas in game development. The goal is a more formal understanding of what players respond to. "I can't tell anyone how to make a better game," Jenkins said, "but we can look at games that are good and figure out what they do."
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