Engagement is key whenever one designs an entertainment experience. As a writer, I can testify for the fact that something that is boring won’t get read. Great games are made by people that recognize this concept and apply it to its fullest. The core principle behind engagement is the idea that players should always be focusing on the current action or a future action.
Current action is perhaps the most simple to design around. Stuff blowing up, immediate concerns, and high stimulation environments can provide a great and simple way to create a current action. This works in most cases; when someone comes under fire in a military game they are immediately pulled into the task they are doing, even if they’d been doing a slow march for the past kilometer or so of Altis. These actions are the simplest to plan and act around because of the simple fact that there’s no consideration needed to get them to work. If one wants to have an explosion, they can create it. There’s no requirement for things to be pre-scripted or dynamic, and to a certain extent actions don’t even have to be responsive in order to gain the player’s focus. Even if a player intentionally ignores something, say, running straight through an artillery strike, the addition of more action to the scene will provide something for the player to think about. These environmental current actions provide a cheap but meaningful event, and give the player something to do in downtime or as a brief respite from challenging segments-pausing on a ledge outside a window as a guard finishes his cell phone conversation can be just as engaging as being in the center of a firefight if the developers and writers play their cards right.
Current action can also take the form of actions that the player is undertaking. Picking a lock or hacking a computer in Fallout 3 can be just as engaging as having a mine go off underfoot. If a game can lead a player to undertake actions that are meaningful to them within the context of the narrative or as an exercise unto themselves, then it is still successful at creating an engaging experience even if the actions themselves lack a meaningful base of stimulation to keep players constantly assessing and reacting to their environment. However, player-driven current action cannot be discounted as a powerful force; if the player is bored with the setting, narrative, and aesthetics of the game but is enjoying the simple action of fighting monsters or matching jewels into rows of at least three, they are still engaged in the game.
Let’s take the Hitman series as an example. While they tend to shy away from having constant action, there are few cases where the player is disengaged, because the player is always working toward an objective. Future engagement is an important factor in a lot of player interactions with games, particularly more cerebral ones. This is where things like predicting, planning, and conceptualizing come in, and Hitman’s a particularly good example because it relies heavily on all three processes.
Predicting is a more advanced form of the situational awareness exploited and used by environmental stimulation. The action of predicting is itself engaging; the player is taking in information and figuring out what they believe will happen. For instance, if a guard is reaching for a pack of cigarettes, he will likely go out for a smoke. Not all players really think this through, which is somewhat of a shame, but the players who jump the gun on this are typically still focusing on current stimulation in the environment and are likely already engaged. Figuring out how opponents and threats act is a core element of the predicting component of future engagement.
Planning is the application of predictions; at this point players have begun to figure out what they will do. Most players plan, even if they skip straight to it from the predicting phase. It comes directly prior to the actual execution of an action, and involves a somewhat complex process of weighing options and future actions that is beyond the scope of this article. However, the important thing to remember about planning as future engagement is that the first steps toward action are likely to begin at this point, and it is often used in conjunction with a rote action (such as moving) toward the goal of achieving whatever action is being planned (kicking the guard off a bridge).
Finally, conceptualization is future engagement at the moment at and directly following execution of an action. It’s a reaction to the events that have occurred in order to figure out what will follow. Whether the player’s actions went as planned or not, the conceptualization is the immediate recognition of the events that have occurred and represent a return to the prediction phase. This is when they begin to study their environment and figure out what happened before they continue with their actions. Games that focus a lot on foresight and planning but don’t allow for sufficient time can become too busy, and become confusing or frustratingly difficult.
However, it should also be noted that engagement doesn’t always have to involve taking up all of a player’s mental capacities or even focus their attention; if they can willfully participate in the game’s events without them feeling cheapened as artificial, they still matter enough to keep players engaged. A thief in Skyrim who’s maxed out the stealth tree probably doesn’t have to be keeping too close an eye on the detection meter as they creep up behind a brigand. Competitive games can also do this well; Audiosurf and other rhythm games are examples where players can often operate on “autopilot”, and be thinking about other things while mechanically completing the necessary tasks. This partial engagement is not necessarily something desirable as a core goal of a game, but it can still offer something to a player, even if their mind is wandering away from the game.
In short, engagement is important for game designers. The same things that lead to it can cause confusion or frustration, but without it a game becomes incredibly boring. Engagement comes in two forms; current and future, which can also be analogized to environmental stimulation versus intellectual stimulation. At the end of the day, a highly successful game will utilize many forms of engagement to satisfy all a player’s desires for an engaging experience.
Kyle Willey
Kyle is a future educator as well as a game design theorist and practitioner, essayist, and reviewer of various, mostly gaming related, things. He can also be found at Kyle's Game Development, which he updates at least four times a week.
Have you read the MDA games study? In particular, check out the section on Aesthetics; it talks a lot about different ways to engage people. 🙂
Interesting. I’d probably combine the mechanics and dynamics into a single, larger category (in fact, I actually have a brief start of something on games as they relate to multiple intelligence theory in which I do just that, albeit without prior knowledge of MDA), simply operating with mechanics and experience (some of dynamics actually goes into experience, but it’s largely integrated into mechanics in my model; experience addresses several different preferred experiences). Of course, I’m also operating with a different model; of the eight different categories of experience listed in the MDA study, I combine multiple into certain preferred experience categories, and touch on a couple of contingencies that MDA doesn’t do.