Television writers live in fear of the commercial break. That's when a viewer is most likely to flip channels and see what's playing on a competitive network.

Many games have breaks in them. It's almost inevitable in games with sequential missions. Often it's because new assets need to load.

If at all possible, create the illusion of the game being ongoing, with no interruption. For instance, in Grand Theft Auto III, an area of blue light indicates where you need to go to receive your next mission. This device accomplishes many things simultaneously. When you play the game:

Empire, Morrowind, and The Sims are examples of other types of games that keep the flow going. Online games like Everquest fall into this category as well.

Game designers will continue to pioneer ways to create the feeling of continuous game-flow.

Another way to say, “Don't interrupt the game” is to say, “Always give the player something to do.”

Whenever you give information to the player, this can also have the negative effect of causing the gameplay to pause. Quite often game designers supply information or mission briefings in spoken or written forms to the player between levels or missions.

It's worth looking at some successful alternatives. For instance, in GTA III, not only do you get information and mission briefings from the men you seek out to send you on missions, but also over police radios while you drive. Getting information doesn't take you out of the game.

In Deus Ex, you get various people communicating to you through a screen in your helmet as you play the game. In the Command and Conquer games, there's a small square in the upper-right corner of your screen where various people on your side can communicate to you during the game. In No One Lives Forever II: A Spy in H-A-R-M's Way, your commander communicates to you through the mouth of a animatronic bird that seeks you at different points. It's effective—and hysterical. In all of these examples, gameplay isn't interrupted as these particular pieces of information are delivered.

We've all heard of a “babbling brook.” In one fantasy game I worked on, I put in a brook that actually babbled. It was like the town gossip. You could lean down next to it and hear reports of other things going on elsewhere in the land.

Because the game took place in the land of fantasy, this fit right in with the genre, yet also provided information without taking the player out of the game.

A few other things to remember about information:

Besides information, you need to give the player incentives. There is a wide variety of rewards that past games have offered players, and that future game designers will dream up.

These rewards include an expansion of abilities, weapons, and defenses. They can also include treating the player to intriguing pre-rendered cinematics.

There's a piece of street wisdom often repeated that a game should, early on, provide the player with lots of quick successes to get him or her excited about the game. After that, as the common wisdom goes, rewards should come less frequently, and be much harder to earn.

It's true that in games and in life, you want to take on progressively harder challenges. A player usually expects to and wants to get clobbered or killed by the game's biggest boss numerous times before finally being victorious.

But there's a danger if the game designer takes the player's willingness to continue through a game for granted.

Many game companies rely on extensive testing of their games to see where “good frustration” ends and “bad frustration” begins.

But in some games, the problem persists. Don't be overly stingy on giving the player those carrots.

A related issue is that not every enemy needs to be difficult to conquer near the end. You can throw in some fodder. The player has worked hard to build up skills, weapons, and defenses. Let him or her enjoy clobbering some baddies with his or her hard-won fighting skills.

As mentioned in the last chapter, repetitive gameplay isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can allow a player to either continue practicing a skill or enjoy using a skill he or she has mastered. And, of course, some games rely on repetitive gameplay, such as race-track games—not to mention Tetris or chess.

And even in games where it's desired to minimize repetitive gameplay, quite often the gameplay needs to be repetitive. After all, the publisher doesn't have endless money to fund a hundred kinds of gameplay, nor an endless amount of assets. Also, there are only so many mechanics^[2] a player wants to master during the game.

In games with stories, I've seen boredom set in when the gameplay gets too repetitive. In an earlier chapter I mentioned that many players never made it to the end of Ico, despite its many breakthroughs in terms of bringing emotion into a game. The principal reason some players quit was that they felt the gameplay was too repetitive.

There's no unexpected revelation in saying that boredom needs to be eliminated from gameplay. Boredom can be skirted by:

These are obvious and just about all games do them. There are other ways, though, to stave off boredom. Here are a few of them.

I was watching a demo of a first-person shooter set in the Middle East. The mission demo took about 30 minutes to play through, and involved the rescue of a wounded soldier who was trapped behind enemy lines.

I was bored ten minutes into the level. I'd played other shooters and didn't see the compelling reasons that would make this one stand out. Why not put in a plot twist?

For example, let's say you're trying to kill an enemy soldier, and then headquarters radios you that that soldier is a high-level defector possessing key intelligence information. He's only shooting at you out of self-defense.

You stop shooting, so he stops shooting. But now others from his side come after the both of you. So, now you've got to defend the guy you were trying to kill as you try to make it back to safety.

Closely related to plot twists are unexpected consequences to your actions.

For instance, you shoot your enemy, but when he falls, the thud he makes alerts other enemies who otherwise wouldn't have known you were around. Suddenly you better get out of there fast.

Of course, if this happened every time, it would no longer be unexpected and thus would lose its effectiveness at combating boredom.

Action puzzles is my term for puzzles that take place in the middle of action. Furthermore, they're puzzles that take doing something active to solve the puzzle (i.e., achieve the desired result). They're not puzzles that merely require thinking. They aren't appropriate for every game, but for the right game, they can be quite involving.

For instance, maybe you're fighting in the American Civil War and it takes a long time to reload your rifle. A better way to fight might be shoot an enemy, pick up his gun and use it to shoot another enemy, pick up his gun and use it….

One of my favorite action puzzles was in Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. You're on an alien ship and some very frightening aliens come through the portals. If you destroy the portals, beautiful little creatures that look like fireflies swarm around the portals and repair them. It's annoying as hell, because you can never keep the portals damaged for long.

Down a long corridor is a transporter you need in order to get out of there. But it's broken. Suddenly it occurs to you how to fix it: You go back to the main area and start shooting objects along the corridor. This lures the “fireflies” to follow you, for they're drawn to broken machinery or devices.

They repair each object you damage in turn, until they finally “see” the broken transporter. They swarm around it and repair it, allowing you to escape.

Not only was this a wonderful action puzzle, but it was also a great plot twist in that these “fireflies,” which previously you hated, turn out to be the only solution to your problem of transporting out of this dangerous environment. Brilliant.

One big danger in action puzzles is making them so difficult that the player can't figure them out. The result can be a tremendous amount of frustration.

Mystery works in films, it works on TV, and it works in games. When you play Thief or Thief II, you're thrown into a strange world, full of mysteries. Figuring out how they all fit together motivates you to continue. The same goes for a quite a number of games—Myst, Morrowind, the Panzer Dragoon series, and Grim Fandango, to name just a few.

There is a possible danger of swamping the player with too many mysteries. The result can be one big confusion. A solution is, once the player learns the answers to some of the game story's mysteries, you can then introduce some new ones.

An Example

In the game illustrated on the next page, you're a detective, spying on a mob boss. You had a hunch he was paying off someone in the police department to minimize police harassment and investigations. But here you find your own police chief paying off the mobster. What's going on?

You, the player, are suddenly saddled with a mystery. The desire to solve it will help motivate you to move forward in the game.

By the way, your motivation will be stronger to unravel if the corruption in the police department that you first suspected, and that caused you to spy on this mob boss, has a negative impact on you or someone you care about.^[3]

It sounds obvious that a plot should be interesting, right? However, Metal Gear Solid 2 sold about a million less units in America than its predecessor, despite greatly enhanced visuals. Many people felt this was in no small part due to problems with the plot. Quite a few American players regarded it as silly.^[4]

There's no shortage of boring, cliché plots out there, and plots with no emotional engagement. I and The Freeman Group have been called upon to handle these problems on more than one occasion.

The truth is that coming up with a great plot, whether it be in a film or in a game, usually takes a tremendous amount of time, thought, creativity, and work.

Furthermore, the plot should unfold in interesting ways, with plot twists, unexpected revelations, causing the player to reassess what's going on or adapt to changing circumstances. You want the player to always be dying to see what happens next.^[5]

It's worth noting that a traditional way of keeping motivation going is to allow a player to compete against a previous high score—either a personal best or one set by another player.

This technique is a double-edged sword, however. On one hand, the player will want to continually get a higher score. At a certain point, however, the player's rate of improvement flattens out and previous scores are beaten only slightly, if at all.

When this occurs, the very thing that drove the player to try again—getting a high score—might now be a turn-off, because getting a higher score becomes difficult or impossible.

It's a mistake to think a player will automatically want to continue forward in a game. We designers need to always be asking ourselves the questions, “What will make the player want to continue on to the next mission or level or game experience?” “What could turn off the player or cause boredom?”

Remember the problem zones, such as anything that can stop gameplay, like a break between levels or missions or the delivery of information. Try, if possible, to find inventive ways to handle these areas without ripping the player out of the game.

Or, if you need to rip the player out of the game to deliver this kind of information, have the information be presented in a way so that it's so entertaining or so intriguing that the player looks forward to it.

To some, it might seem strange to include, in a book on bringing emotion into games, a chapter that focuses so much on gameplay. However, an audience can get bored watching a film, a magic show, or a juggling act. A person can get bored on a theme-park ride. And a player can get bored in a game. It's the responsibility of the creators behind all these entertainment and art forms to know what it takes to ensure that boredom never sets in. For nothing will counteract an audience's or a player's emotional immersion faster than boredom.