لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Meaningful Pleasure
We can identify elements of the play of pleasure through concepts such as repetition and entrainment, short-term and long-term goals, rewards and punishments, and anxiety and boredom. Ultimately, however, a player experiences a more pervasive sense of pleasure and enjoyment; a total feeling of engagement that arises directly from play, the experiential whole that is more than the sum of the parts. Pleasure is emergent. Constructing the rules of a game, the formal system that produces this pleasure, is the challenge of game design. As usual, the key to understanding is meaningful play. The core of meaningful play lies in the relationship between action and outcome. As a player uses core mechanics to take action, outcomes accumulate. These outcomes take many forms: sensory feedback, strategic achievement, emotional gratification, social relationships, and so on. As a player advances through a game, it is crucial that the game provide meaningful play at every moment. For example, as a player achieves a short-term goal, the movement toward, through, and beyond that goal should be clear.The game must communicate where the goal is, how it might be achieved, whether the player is making progress toward it, exactly when it was reached and completed, and its impact on future play. There is room in this experience for uncertainty and ambiguity, but a certain kind of clarity must underlie every action in a game. Even in the inexact, messy realms of pleasure and desire, every game choice must be discernable and integrated. When game actions are discernable, the events of a game and the outcomes of choices are always evident. Discernable outcomes drive the experience of meaningful play and facilitate pleasure. In DOOM,for example, the monster opponents that players battle hardly exist on their own. Until the player enters a room full of monsters, they will "idle," walking in place, waiting for the player to enter so that they can spring to life and attack. Although some players regard this aspect of DOOM as comically impoverished, in fact it is key to the successful play of the game. Because monsters have little or no life "off camera," all of their important activity happens "in the face" of the player as he encounters them in battle. The game events that result in rewards and punishments for the player are always clearly communicated because they almost always occur in the presence of a player. The need for events to be integrated into the larger fabric of the game experience is perhaps even more important than discernability in sustaining player pleasure. As long as a player understands the implications of the game's system of rewards and punishments, he or she can use that knowledge to set new short-term goals. This allows the player to maintain an overall sense of progress toward a long-term goal, such as winning. In the popular online game NeoPets, a player is continually rewarded for taking game actions, exploring the game world, caring for her pets, playing simple games, and interacting with other players. Each of these simple activities rewards the player with a small amount of points. These points are then used to facilitate new purchases, which in turn make new activities possible. The steady stream of incremental rewards forms a tight loop of desire, a compelling system of pleasure where short-term and long-term goals are constantly forming on the horizon of player action. When game events are not discernable or integrated, boredom and anxiety, the enemies of pleasurable flow, can result. Does the game program know that a player just took an action? Why did all of those important events happen off-screen? Does it matter which piece a player just moved? Why is the game so hard? Designing for meaningful play comes down to treating players with great care and concern at every moment of the game. Too often, for example, a digital game just doesn't feel right. The interface is clunky, the player is not sure what to do when the game begins, or the first level is too hard. Retail digital games are usually designed for 30 to 40 hours of play. That kind of commitment demands a tremendous amount of trust. If the first five minutes are unpleasant, why would a player want to continue?
There is a reason why Myst was superior to all of the CD-ROM multimedia game clones that followed it, or why Super Mario 64 is still better than the scores of 3D over-the-shoulder, char-acter-based console games that are released every year. Myst and Super Mario 64, although very different in the experiences they provide, have one thing in common: they both treat the player with a tremendous amount of care. From the moment the game begins, the player has clear direction and purpose. As players explore their expansive worlds, both games provide a satisfying increase in challenge, while never leaving the player feeling lost or confused. There is clarity to the way that these games construct player pleasure.
Neopets
Crafting this degree of pleasure is extremely challenging. Pleasure is difficult to design because it is an open-ended, multifaceted, and exceedingly complex concept. But that is also why it is such a fertile avenue for exploration by game designers. There are multitudes of game pleasures for you to create: pleasures that go deep into the hearts of your players; pleasures that transform your players and the ways that they understand the world; pleasures that expand the very medium of games. The process of discovering and inventing these pleasures is itself a unique form of bliss: the boundless joy of game design.
