Contrast and Interest Curves

It doesn’t matter the stimulus, you’ll either get bored from or addicted to it, eventually. That’s the sad truth every designer has to face before learning how to minimize this effect.

It can be assumed that the reason behind saturation of stimuli is the necessity of energy conservation and the limits of attention: Animals must be aware of what’s important and new. The activities we already have a good grasp of shouldn’t be occupying space in our conscious attention, otherwise we would never really master anything, from walking to talking to driving to playing, and would end up overwhelmed by the amount of details that go into living a regular life. That’s also the reason why unexpected slips and recklessness emerge: driving at 80km/h will eventually make it easier to drive at 100… and so on.

Knowing that, how can we prevent players from getting bored? Just progressive difficulty suffices? What about new abilities? It is true that the previous two are very important for a good game and observed in most, but the essence behind them is what we are going to analyze: contrast and interest.

Further into this article, we’ll be making some very exaggerated graphs to show how players lose interest over time when exposed to the same stimuli too frequently. We are not specifically focusing on system rewards, though we do talk about them. The priorities here are the actions of players and responses from the game, such as space-time simulation and visual / sound effects (aesthetical rewards).

In my currently nameless top down hack n’ slash shooter (?), your main action is attacking: you “shoot” undead-bullets (skeletons with swords) that dash forward and slash away at paladins.

It is then possible to move the undead-bullet from one point to another for it to block enemy attacks as it moves across. Players will be doing both of those actions most of the time.

Having two core mechanics will make them balance and refresh one another, especially when the player has to interchange their use.

Outside of them, you can (and should, if possible) add more mechanics to make the interest curve take even longer to start going down. Put system rewards in the middle (e.g: experience points), unexpected or predictable power spikes (crits and ultimate abilities) and anything else that makes sense to be there, but obviously minding your intended experience. In our case, for example, we are using Block Utilities and Demons.

Block Utilities are craftable runes that players can take to battle. With them equipped, blocks have a chance of granting special effects such as healing, burst of attack speed and others. Like critical strikes, but not really.

Then, there are Demons. Any paladin you kill grants one or more souls, depending on the strength of its class. Having enough souls allows you to summon a powerful creature of independent behavior that moves around destroying every paladin it sees. We have many interest curve enhancers on this one: First, the earning of souls, which is a good reward (systemic and aesthetical) to show progression. The second one is the summon itself. The other sources of interest come from the amount of times the Demon performs badass abilities that add chaos to the battlefield.

Kills increase interest by quite a bit because it shows meaningful progress spikes.

It doesn’t stop there: Like previously mentioned, the addition of new patterns to both abilities and challenges will keep this cycle fresh for as long as the game lasts.

One of the special things about intertwined interest curves is that all those mechanics playing around within the same world space-time end up creating unexpected situations that increase interest even more than what was predicted.

My book recommendation this time is A Theory of Fun for Game Design.