How to Keep Players Engaged (Without Being Evil)

I never finished Doom. And I love Doom! It’s amazing. It’s got some of the best shooter combat in years. But I just lost interest at a certain point and never ended up finishing it. Whereas other games, games I don’t even like as much as Doom, have kept me utterly rapt until the very end. And this has left me wondering about how games can do better to keep their players engaged. That’s the word i want to use here, by the way.

I’m talking about engaging games, not addictive games - which I don’t think responsible designers should be trying to craft. So I’m not interested in games that are designed in such a way that players can’t stop themselves, and I won’t be talking about games that use psychological tricks like skinner boxes, daily rewards, resource decay, loss aversion, and the like. This isn’t that video. Instead, I want to talk about fun things that games can do to make you want to keep playing - but without completely hijacking your brain.

So this is Game Maker’s Toolkit, I’m Mark Brown, and here’s how to keep players engaged (without being evil about it).

A crucial factor is pacing, which describes the rhythm of the gameplay you’ll be experiencing and is paramount to making sure a game doesn’t become boring or repetitive. So if we take a game like Uncharted we’ll see that it has lots of different types of gameplay, which are often called pillars. That includes combat, climbing, puzzles, cinematic set-pieces, and even non-interactive stuff like cutscenes. What you’ll notice is that Naughty Dog swaps between these pillars constantly, never lingering on one type of gameplay for too long.

And what that means is as soon as you start to get bored of, say, shooting enemies, the game will switch to something else entirely, and hopefully regain your attention. But you can also consider the intensity of each pillar, as a puzzle is often much calmer than a frenzied firefight. And it’s important to move fluidly between different intensities, as spending too long on calm gameplay can obviously be boring - but, at the same time, trying to keep the game at max intensity for too long will lead to exhaustion or desensitisation.

So Naughty Dog modulates these moods carefully. Look at how we go from calm puzzle solving and climbing, to an intense firefight through the city. Then a slightly calmer exploration of the train yard, followed by rising intensity as you fight your way along a train, leading to a very intense cinematic moment. But that all leads to the calmest section of the entire game as you recover in the Tibetan village and explore a puzzle-filled mountain with Tenzin, before it all kicks off again with an intense siege back at the village.

Uncharted 2 has some of the best pacing I’ve ever seen in a game, and personally I found it almost impossible to put the game down when I first played it. Now, of course, this sort of cinematic pacing is a lot easier in a tightly controlled, linear experience, than an open world game where the player can do whatever they want. But making sure the player has lots of different types of activities they can do, so they can modulate their own fun if they get bored, will certainly help.

Pacing is not just about how well the developer juggles its gameplay pillars, but also how often it introduces entirely new ideas - whether that’s areas, mechanics, enemy types, and so on. The Mario games are wonderful at this, as you never know what to expect from stage to stage. So even though there’s not such a diversity in types of gameplay - it’s mostly just platforming - by consistently introducing novel new ways to play, the game really keeps players engaged and keen to see what’s in the next level.

Novelty can work even better when paired with mystery, anticipation, and foreshadowing, which is when you tease a player about something new coming up so they just can’t stop playing until they see what it is. Take a game like The Witness, where you come out of the starting area and, if you’re like most players, you’ll quickly stumble upon this door which features a puzzle that is essentially impossible to solve with your current knowledge.

It really sticks in your head, though, and you’ll need to know what’s behind that door. This sort of stuff can keep you playing for ages. Remember when you saw Sen’s Fortress in Dark Souls, and just knew you had to see what was behind that giant door? The mystery of what’s around the next corner is one key reason that makes the Souls games so damn hard to put down. Metroidvania games do this well, also, as a game like Hollow Knight quickly establishes that you will be getting interesting new powers, but it doesn’t tell you what they are.

It just teases you with things in the environment that you can’t bypass yet, leaving you to anticipate what cool new ability you’ll be getting next. The thing about giving players new stuff is that each drop is an exciting motivation to stay engaged, but this burns out rather quickly and the player needs another one soon after. But if you tease the player, you can get them excited before you’ve even dropped the new content, which increases the amount of time you can go before dropping new stuff.

It’s economical! Perhaps the most obvious place for mystery, though, is the narrative. Traditional media uses cliff hangers and unanswered questions to keep you turning the page or watching after the adverts, but it's surprising how few games really nail this. But every now and again I’ll play something like Firewatch, which is a game about a man who works at a fire lookout tower and gets embroiled in a thriller that will keep you going until you find out exactly how it ends.

And yes, the ending is satisfying. You just didn’t get it.

Now, one of the most compelling things a game can do is let you make progress towards a long-term goal. Give someone a level cap they can work towards, or a map full of collectibles they can find, and they can be stuck in for weeks. But let’s dig a bit deeper into that. So a game that does this really well is the charming farming sim Stardew Valley which comes with an implicit long-term goal - you start with a messy patch of land and no money, but in time you’ll have transformed the land into an incredible farm that makes you loads of cash.

And it’s that dream that can sustain many hours of toil, hard work, and, to be honest, kinda repetitive gameplay. So why does it keep us going? Well, I think it’s cool that you can make your farm however you like. You get to express yourself, set your own goals, and build something you are really proud of. The game has lots of short term goals to keep you going. Smaller rewards like the community centre and important milestones like adding buildings or improving your house give you something immediate to shoot for on the way towards the longer term ambition.

There’s also a huge element of planning, as you must think long term about decisions when it comes to different crops and animals, seasons, romantic partners, and so on. You’re not just trudging mindlessly towards the goal, but making strategic choices to help you get there faster.

There’s also the thrill of exponential growth. In the game you’ll make a bit of money, so you can buy more seeds and better tools. This lets you make more money, to buy even more stuff, so you can go on to make loads of money. This positive feedback loop is at the heart of lots of engaging games, such as looting monsters and upgrading your character in Monster Hunter.

There’s also something really fun about optimising the system in Stardew Valley. You start out by watering every crop by hand, but eventually you’ll come to have sprinklers that do the hard work for you. A game that does this sort of thing wonderfully is Factorio, which tasks you with building factories. You start out by digging up resources manually, but eventually create machines to do it for you. And while those machines initially need to be fed fuel, you’ll eventually have them powered by natural resources that don’t run out.

Maybe its just a thing that appeals to programmers, but the desire to create an optimised system that works on its own is very potent.

One final reason we like long term goals is that players can fantasise about what it will be like when they finally reach that point. An example is a skill tree in a game, where the player isn’t just ticking off these skills because it’s something to do - but because they’re looking forward to the day when they can use all of these skills, to absolutely wreck shop and make light work of stuff they found difficult at the beginning.

Oh, and speaking of difficulty: Another huge motivator is a compelling challenge. A game that is constantly pushing you to show your mastery of the game, in varied and interesting situations, can really keep you going. This requires pitch-perfect difficulty, though. As we talked about in the Resident Evil 4 episode, players only get into an engaging flow state when they meet a challenge that isn’t so easy as to be boring, but isn’t so difficult as to be stressful.

Resident Evil uses dynamic difficulty to keep players in that sweet spot, but for most games, a finely tuned and fiercely play-tested difficulty curve is the way to go. Remember, though, that failure isn’t a bad thing. Some of the most engaging games like Tetris and Spelunky are filled with failure, but people will keep coming back if the runs are relatively short, if they feel a sense of getting better each time, and if they know the next session will be markedly different from the one before - often due to random generation of some kind.

Also, note that there are different ways to challenge a player, so its not always about having a constant stream of reflex and skill checks. Consider challenging a player’s problem solving skills, or spatial awareness, or decision making for a mental stimulation to balance out the more physical challenges. So, those are the factors that I’ve found really work on me, and can help explain why

I’ve found certain games irresistible. For me, nothing gets me going quite like a game filled with novel experiences, that are teased through mystery and anticipation. Games like Dark Souls and Metroid and The Witness are impossible for me to put down. But it also helps me understand also why I didn’t stick with other games. As good as Doom is, the pacing is way off with long stretches of high intensity combat that gets pretty exhausting, and there's just not as much novelty as, say, Titanfall 2.

But different things will work for different players. Maybe you need competition with other real-life gamers or rewards you can show off to other people. I dunno, I don’t know you. So in the comments below, think about the last game that you found totally engrossing and tell me why you think you just couldn’t put it down. Thanks for watching! One of my goals with GMTK is to get you thinking about why you like the games you like, and hopefully I’ve given you some food for thought here.

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