Trigger Happy
How do videogame designers achieve such a delicate balance? Such considerations are very important to Richard Darling. He argues that what makes an action game (driving, sports or shooting) fun is precisely this: “The player’s efforts being rewarded by achievements.” It’s not so simple, however; Darling continues:
And those achievements need to appear to be worthwhile to the players, they need to be visible and valuable. Of course, people’s perceptions of what’s needed to make a game fun have been stretching and stretching as games have got better and better. A long time ago you had Space Invaders, where basically you move from one level to the next level and you’re very excited because you’ve achieved the next level. In fact, the next level was exactly the same as the last one but a little bit harder, but you’re still very pleased: your score’s gone up, you’ve moved to level two, and the same thing happened when you moved to level three, four and five. That had a simple reward system whereby you achieved a certain goal in the game and reached a discrete target and you got rewarded by a score and a level change.
In principle it’s the same now, it’s just that people’s expectations are much greater than just wanting the score to be ticking up. If you move from one level to the next you want a new experience, new gameplay features, new
