One overlooked aspect by most people when it comes to progression design is the element of punishment. Often seen as a negative thing, this is actually an extremely important element in any progression system and will be the main theme of our last post in this series about progression in games.
Every game comes with rules. Therefore, it’s needless to say that, with rules also come the things that you can and cannot do. Permissions and restrictions. How to win and how to fail. So it would be a huge mistake if one would simply dismiss this, as it is a crucial aspect of any game design.
As we’ve seen in the lasts posts, progression is nothing more than how things change over time in a game. And the way that most game designers choose to deliver such changes is by gating them with challenges.
“In the majority of games, inside their progression curve, what they do is that the challenge ends up regulating the way in which the player gets new content.” Explains Ygor Speranza in the video that inspired these posts.
So, say, if you are spending too much time in a certain area trying to overcome a certain challenge, being rewarded with new content once you do it (like the next part of the story, for example) is a nice way to make the player feel that keep pushing through the game’s progression curve is worth it.
However, like we already discussed previously, games aren’t infinite. Sooner or later, you, the developer, will run out of new stuff to keep the player engaged, and the more time the player spend playing your game, the less new content they will see. It’s kind of inevitable. So how to solve this issue?
Well, gating content through challenges is the answer (well, obviously, since I gave the answer before the question)!
In short, this means that the challenges in the game will need to get increasingly harder before the player can be rewarded with new content. This way, the developer can better distribute the content throughout their game by putting what’s new locked behind harder and harder challenges, so when the player finally overcome’s it they will feel like it was worth their time and effort.
The reason why this is an ingenious solution it’s because it solves two problems at once. Not only you will be able to deliver the new content at a better pace, but the challenges will also feel rewarding no matter how hard you decide to make them (with a limit, of course).
But wait. This isn’t what the post’s main theme is all about. Where does the “punishment” factor come in?
Well, everything I’ve been talking here has everything to do with punishing. Because blocking or restricting what the player can have access to is a way to modulate the pacing in which you chose them to see more content.
Punishment here might not be used as a negative form of the word, since it’s merely a functional way to keep players engaged in your game, but there is a kind of a cruel aspect to it, since that means the player is technically being manipulated. Ygor Speranza compares this with the Sisyphus myth from Greek mythology because, in a way, it is an extremely similar concept. Sisyphus was faded to keep pushing a rock to the top of a ramp, just to see it roll down all the way to the bottom so he had to keep doing the same ordeal again and again.
Similarly, here the player is “trapped” in a cycle where they keep pushing themselves to attain higher and higher levels of skill only to surpass challenges for the promise of getting more content for their games. But what happens after you fail a challenge in a really hard game? You just go back and have to do it all over again. In fact, if perfected, every time they fail the player will be even more and more motivated to keep going forward in order to surpass the challenge. Just like Sisyphus kept pushing the rock up the hill no matter what.
You can see it very clearly in some examples such as Celeste and Super Meat Boy, both cases of extremely tough platform games that can make players feel more engaged and stimulated to keep trying to surpass their challenges no matter how hard and frustrating they may be. This can trap the player in a cycle of trying to overcome a situation that they wouldn’t normally care about.
Games also have this power, and as a game designer it’s important to keep that in mind.
This goes double for some genres such as roguelikes, because they will send you all the way back to the very beginning of the game. They literally reset ALL your progress. But even in face of a punishment as big as losing all the progress they made, players will still refuse to give up, since they’ve been fed with the idea that they will be rewarded with more new content. It’s like you’re rewiring their brains.
Of course, the type of “contract” that each player accepts when they start playing a game varies from people to people, and it’s up to you to understand the average profile of your playerbase. Different people will accept different levels of difficulty. And difficulty in games is very associated with progression and punishment, because it can be defined by what and how much is lost when you lose.
This is also something to be careful about, because just as there’s people who can take a bigger challenge, there’s also those who can’t stand losing something as precious as progress. That’s why some times we have a screen or textbox warning you to save before entering a point of no return that happens at the end of some games, for example.
And this is probably the most important thing when it comes to punishment in games, since punishing most certainly means frustration. So, in order to make this work, you have to make the player feel like he deserved it. And that’s a very hard thing to balance.
A good challenging game is a game where when the player loses, they feel like THEY are the ones who did something wrong, and not the game. If they feel like it was the game that made them lose, then the situation pretty much reverses and the player will be more inclined in putting the game down.
“The gamer have the tendency to tolerate punishment (regression or denial of content) when they feel they deserved it” – says Ygor. “It stops being challenging and it’s just a frustrating experience. Something truly challenging gives you a chance. If you never had a chance, then it’s not a challenge, it’s just literally carrying a rock on your back.”
And with this last line, I think it really sums up the whole deal about punishment when it comes to progression design, which concludes this series.
And what about you? Have you ever considered that punishment itself could be a good element to keep players engaged? Keep working on your design skills and one day you may perfect the art to engage people through punishment, too!
