Rethinking Feedback to Keep Players in the Game

Most games are challenging by design. Winning every time isn’t fun, but neither is always losing. The typical user experience is somewhere between these two, with most players experiencing some degree of failure. Players will lose races, blow up, fall to their deaths, get lost, or fail in thousands of different ways. Some will persevere and continue to play, while others will get discouraged and give up.

As we game developers seek to expand our audiences, some traditional methods of keeping players engaged are becoming less effective (according to Microsoft’s databanks, which I use as the main source throughout this article). Fortunately, we can do some relatively simple things to motivate players.

Keeping players motivated is difficult. The most popular solution is to manipulate the game’s difficulty using tutorials, dynamic difficulty adjustment, player-selected difficulty settings, feedback systems, userfriendly controls, and in-game hints. The goal is to strike the right balance between difficulty and player ability, thereby always keeping the player within arm’s reach of a new achievement.

Despite these attempts to balance difficulty for a wide range of people, the players will still experience failure. More importantly, many of these folks will stop playing because of these failures. It’s rare for people to leave a restaurant because they don’t like the food, and it’s not too common for people to walk out of a movie because it’s bad — but game players do put down the controller and leave the game all the time. What’s worse, when game players have a negative experience, they are likely to tell their friends, family, and community. … Full text

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