I was wondering what could get people in to a specific mindset of wanting to partake in a hypothetical mission/fight/quest. I was finding nothing until I started playing Rocket League and I had forgotten that I always play music to get myself into top gear, without music I won’t waste as much energy into every single jump, shot and slide.
Now let’s imagine you were set on a very important quest inside a video game. What would trigger your motive to see the quest through? What would it need for you to want to give it all you’ve got? What would get you into the right mindset?
Good gameplay. I wouldn’t bother playing the game for long if it wasn’t actually fun to play.
Been playing a lot of Enter the Gungeon lately and the motivation is born from the gameplay being smooth with unique aspects, presenting a difficult challenge to overcome and just being fun in general. For me the fun is in the challenge, as you practice and try harder you see the improvements happening, can kill things faster, get hit less, complete tougher goals. Always just that next step that you can strive to reach.
Gameplay all the way, at bottom i see a game as a “compelling task”. Getting all people to care about your lore is hard, and there is no way of catering all preferences, but this is how i would do it:
You could offer multiple mindsets that share the same means of accomplishing them without asking the player to explicitly state which one he has chosen. E.g. You wake up and find yourself in a complex built to annihilate the existence of humanity. Whether you want to stop the perpetrators or you prefer to just escape the complex and save your skin, the means of accomplishing both entail the same: gather keys and fight your way through a cascade of immanently hostile bosses that cannot be reasoned with.
That way the player can decide for himself if he only cares about humanity, just wants to be a hero or merely craves freedom. Did you play Portal 2? Why did you follow through? Curiosity? Kill GLaDOS? Freedom? All goals shared the means.
Add some kind of cumulative progression. In “Enter The Gungeon” you seemingly start from scratch every time, but you unlock things like weapons (which get added into the random-pool) or shops. This progression yields a feeling of “i didn’t play 2 hours for naught” because the game acknowledges the players accomplishments in future runs. If your game doesn’t acknowledge what the player did they will quit soon, the times of Tetris are over.
Portal 2 for me was the gameplay. I enjoy the odd puzzle game and Portal offers a unique and interesting take on it, new mechanics etc. Not so unique anymore due to a number of games inspired by it that have been made since.
As for progression style like Enter the Gungeon the progression for each run only matters if your game is intended to be played repeatedly through many loops. You need some kind of measured progression for players to feel like they’re getting somewhere even if they keep just dying to the same boss. Take a game like Skyrim with a 60hr+ long campaign and if you give me unlocks/progression I can make for my “next playthrough” then I’m probably not going to care because I don’t want to repeat 60hrs+ of content over and over.
It’s all about the discovery. Environmentally, mechanically, from characters and narrative… One way or another, when I play the games that hook me the most, I’m intensely curious to see whats new, and I feel that way because the game has shown me early on that there is a promise of discovery if I am willing to play some more.
A pretty general answer, sure, but I thought it important to point out the basic feeling that makes me look forward to coming home from work.
What new areas will I find? What horrible monsters are waiting to be destroyed? How many people will I save or fail to save? What advanced techniques will I learn from better players? I want the questions answered, so I play again.
A great example to look to for well designed quests is the legendary Chrono Trigger itself.
The hook for the game is actually pretty slow- you run into a pretty girl at the fair and she asks if she can tag along. You run around for a few minutes playing minigames and the pretty girl will comment on things you do. Then a science demonstration goes wrong, the pretty girl you just met disappears into a portal leaving only her necklace- you are left standing just there. Where a lot of games start in “medias res” to get the player straight to the action, CT follows the hero’s journey pretty close and takes its time in getting you to the meat.
The interesting thing is that you aren’t actually compelled to do anything through the entire prologue. You go to the fair because it looks like the most interesting thing to do. You let the girl tag along because she’s pretty and you don’t have a reason not to. Nobody yells “Somebody will have to go and rescue the girl!” The necklace just sits and waits for you to interact with it, and everybody is surprised you’d be willing to try and go after her. Winning the game only requires that you beat the end boss- you can fight him almost any time after the first act of the game is over. Effectively the entire 3rd act is optional. You can pursue a line of story or not, it’s up to you- the game trusts that the player wants to have fun, and allows him to pursue it on his terms, more or less. The player makes the choices that spur the story, rather than the story spurring the player- and I feel like that was really important to providing a sense of agency.
The game teases you with what you don’t know throughout. First you want to know what happened to the girl, then you want to know what happened to the queen of 400 years ago, then you meet a Knight who was turned into a Frog and you want to know about that, then you fix the past, but get arrested in the present, and you want to know how you are going to escape. There’s a country of monsters that worship this dark wizard for some reason, and black boxes that you can’t open for a different reason. The game hits you with mystery on top of mystery to keep you intrigued, and it works, because each piece fits into the whole of the story in a satisfying way when it is resolved. Maybe it reveals a part of a character’s backstory, maybe it unlocks a bunch of cool items, maybe it leads to new lines of story with mysteries of their own.
CT also does a great job of acknowledging the player’s actions by changing the world appropriately- If you eat a NPC’s lunch, it will come up when you are on trial for kidnapping the princess. If you cultivate a wasteland in the past, it will be a lush forest in the present. Open a magic box in the present, you can open it again in the past for a different item. But open the same box in the past first, it will be empty in the present. This kind of thing gives weight to the player’s decisions and makes the player wonder what the effects of any given side quest or activity might be on completion.
Most games have small, overall and end-game objectives.
Fallout 4:
Small: Liberate settlements
Overall: Survive and complete missions
End-game: Kill the Institute or Brotherhood
GTA 5:
Small: Complete points in the store
Overall: Survive, run from cops and rob people
End-game: Rob the largest bank
World of Tanks:
Since this is a multiplayer game, it is endless.
Earn credits and XP.
Play clan events to get free gold (premium currency)
Angry Birds:
Complete levels, earn points
So basically people want the game to be fun and to complete objectives. The motivation can be to be able to buy a new weapon, unlock a new level, map etc…
A feeling of purpose. That’s really it. That purpose comes in the form of saving the princess, building a house, or getting the best gear, or solving a mystery… but it’s purpose.
Just consider whether or not you would be interested in accomplishing the goal of X and use that as your baseline for determining whether or not it will motivate a player. Sometimes you have to lay the foundation for the player to make their own goals as well, so you should intentionally define when that is and then ask yourself the same question: Will the player be motivated to making some aspect of this their goal, and is it enough?
It depends. In angry birds, I forgot about the “story” premise 90% of the time, focusing more on the satisfaction of smashing building or flipping a trick shot with an oddly shaped bird. In the Mata Nui Online Game, I forget about the fact that I’m basically just clicking through different interactive images, instead focusing on the incredibly evocative world, and fantastic sense of exploration. And in minecraft, my motivation is based on crafting an idea into a digital model.
In short: Satisfying combat, deep exploration/story, and an outlet for creativity.
I’m yet to find a game that includes all three in an equal balance. [:P]
