A Small Treat: When to Reward the Player

Hello everyone, and thank you for coming to my talk. Today I’ll be speaking about player rewards: what they are, why and how you should put them in your games. I’ll start as usual with the obvious. People play games for entertainment. People like being rewarded. Video games can provide both entertainment and reward. Therefore, it follows that good game design is about making a game’s rewards equal and appropriate to its associated challenges. I have dubbed this concept “conflicto-payoff concordance”. An example of a game with poor conflicto-payoff concordance is Solitaire, since you do all this work and the only thing you get at the end is an empty table and a pack of cards, which, as we all know, is what you started with. I had a funny slide here with a photo of an old man playing Solitaire but it isn’t working for some reason. Anyway, you want to space out rewards so that players feel compelled to keep playing, but not so often that the rewards don't feel like rewards at all. In other words, my advice boils down to carefully considering your design and not overdoing anything in one way or the other. That’s basically what we did on War Zone of War 2, and it worked out pretty good for us. Thanks for coming.

Comments

[Kimari]

You don't want your games to be too long, because then the player's will never finish the game. But you have to be careful not to make a very short game, because otherwise everyone will be able to finish it and then complain how short it was.We did exactly this in Honor Call of Dead Zone 3: Modern Space and we think we did a pretty good job. The zombie pirates that appear at the middle of the game (2 hours in) add a little extra content, but not too much, so the players won't want to play for more than 2 extra hours. The net result is that we hit that perfect balance of just long enough to satisfy and not too engaging to want the game to be longer.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

[Chuck]

Actually, I would argue that Solitaire has a fairly high conflicto-payoff concordance on the PC, with the cards bouncing off everywhere.

On table the CPC is practically non-existent, but this goes for pretty much all tabletop games.

[thesimplicity]

Sometimes I like to imagine that Grand Theft Auto was birthed from someone playing Minesweeper and saying "wouldn't this be awesome with guns?"

[Thants]

Haha! Excellent parody of a typical GDC talk Matt. Is there anything that can be done to stop the blatantly obvious being repeated over and over? I'll do it! Whatever it is!

[Jeriaska]

I heard the dual oscillating shader management system in War Zone of War 2 is shown to excite the conflicto-payoff concordance of test players in laboratory experiments.

[The Management]

Heh, any particular lecture that set this off?

[Rick]

I'm glad War Zone of War 2 is finally leaving behind it's (now prior) assumed Deadly War: Brotherhood and War 5 supratitle. I think they should have made it its own series in the first place. Honestly, Deadly War: Brotherhood and War 4: War Zone of War was already a mouthful.

Hopefully this change doesn't confuse consumers.

[Matthew]

@The Management: There was no one speaker or session that really triggered this; just thinking about design talks in general made me want to get at some of the annoyances I tend to find in them.

[obdurate hater of rhythm games]

You claim to be innovative but I know that the entire franchise is made of World War II shooters, rhythm games and button mashing games. I know that every boss requires a button mashing sequence. Button mashing sequences do not require skill, merely, repetitive behavior and they are extremely tedious.

Serious post: Games should have fast paces, be very challenging and have little extraneous bullshit. Mega Man 9 fulfilled all three requirements: It was fast, most of the rooms had things like enemies or items, there were no escort missions, button mashing sequences, or rhythm sequences and it was quite challenging. Developers should learn from Capcom's excellent games.

[Kyle Orland]

We'll now take questions from the audience:

Hi, yeah, I'm a student from Podunk Tech Community college trying to get into the game business. Do you think someone without a deep knowledge of conflicto-payoff concordance can get a job in this tough environment, and if not, do you know of any good books on the subject?

Excellent question. It just so happens that _I_ have written a book on conflicto-payoff concordance that I can _guarantee_ will automatically get you a job at any game company in the country. Look for it on Amazon. Next question.