Trigger Happy
things to be cropping up. So really our goal is to make sure that there’s enough there to start off with so that people find our game exciting and interesting, but then the more they play the more they achieve, and they can’t constantly be getting new rewards for all those achievements.
This is what the psychologists call “partial reinforcement.” Yet presumably the videogame still has to keep something back to reward successful play?
It’s always a big argument in game design, yeah, because the problem is, you see, when you release a game like that you get some people phoning up or writing in saying, “Why didn’t I have the Lister Storm [a model of racecar in Codemasters’ TOCA 2] from the beginning? I’ve paid my money for the game and I can’t drive a Lister Storm!” You know, you need to do X, Y and Z before you’re going to get the Lister Storm, or the Jaguar XJ220. And they feel frustrated, so there is some pressure to open the game up and say, “Look, you choose which car you like, race on whichever track you like,” and make the whole game available from when you turn it on. But if you did that a lot of people wouldn’t actually have any desire to drive the Lister Storm because there’s no great progression in getting there.
