Some games are really good at keeping you hooked: you start playing and the next thing you know it’s 3am. How can you make games that have that kind of effect? A big part of it is making sure you don’t make the player turn off the game because he’s bored or frustrated, but there’s more to it than that.
Here are four tips to help you keep players hooked to your games:
- Give multiple objectives. In a game like Civilizations you always have multiple goals at the same time: you’re trying to develop the city you just founded, you’re invading your neighbors and you’re developing new technologies relentlessly to be the first to get firearms. Because of that, every time you achieve an objective, you’re close to achieving another one too. So you keep playing until you reach that objective, but then you’re close to another goal, so you keep on playing — and so on until the small hours of the morning. By giving multiple simultaneous goals to players, you keep them constantly interested in reaching the next goal, so they keep playing.
- Eliminate Loading. Long loading time are a natural time to stop playing. You’ve just reached a new location, often reached a checkpoint, so it’s natural to stop playing at that point. The loading time also gives you the time to look at your watch and realize it’s time you did something else. If there’s no loading time, you don’t get that feeling of a pause so much: you’re instantly ready to keep on playing and you don’t have that time to think about the rest of your life that’s waiting for you.
- Change goals during levels rather than between them. That’s one of the things that was great about Deus Ex: you didn’t get your objectives at the start of levels, you got objectives in the middle of levels. You’d get in the middle of the secret base to talk with one guy, who would tell you to go find somebody else at some other place — but to reach that other guy you’d first have to leave the base you’re currently in. When you finally escaped that base and ended the level, you’d be halfway there to meeting the other guy so you might as well keep on playing… Giving objectives in the middle of levels is a simple way to get some of the advantages of the two previous points. First, you have two simultaneous goals: finish the current level and reach your official objective. Second, you diminish the problem with load times (if the game can’t avoid them) because it feels less natural to stop playing right in the middle of an objective.
- Restart seemlessly after failure. When you die in a game and have to replay the last bit of gameplay you failed in, you’d be excused to just stop playing and decide you’ll try again another day. Some games are more clever than that. In Grand Theft Auto, you don’t reload when you fail, you’re just immediately brought back to a nearby hospital or police station. Since you keep on playing, free to retry what your previous objective or do something else entirely, you’re less likely to just stop playing.