Destiny: The Random Psychology of the Game Design Paradigm (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, October 20, 2014, 10:54 (3687 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

All of these decisions pull Destiny's end game away from what Jason Jones described in the 2013 interview.

The thing that strikes me as clueless about that quote is that he assumes that replaying a game in and of itself is something desirable. It's not. What good is someone replaying your game if they aren't really having that much fun, or are bearing a grind to get to what IS fun?

Have you ever heard anybody say, "oh, I paid ten bucks to see this film, but I only got 90 minutes of moviewatch. This other film gave me 180 minutes of moviewatch, so it's better." That's how silly you sound when you talk about how many hours of gameplay you got, as if that means the game is good because of it.

This idea of hours spent on a game being desirable in and of itself, of being an indicator of quality, is the kind of toxic mindset I thought we moved away from as JRPGs started to wane in popularity in the early 2000s.

There is no point in wanting players to replay your game if it's not fun; it's got to be something they do on their own. Halo did this well by offering a wide variety of playstyles, as well as complex and interesting encounters with many ways to approach them. So players would try what suited them if they wished. You could pick what you wanted, so you were pretty much guaranteed to get an interesting experience because you sought it out due to your own interest.

Destiny forces replaying, by holding back progression. I replayed 'A Stranger's Call' this morning in the hopes of getting 2 ascendant energies (I got 2 ascendant shards instead, when I already have a zilion of them). It wasn't really that interesting, and I spent longer wishing I could skip the cutscene than I did playing the mission.

Your goal as a game designer should be, in simple terms, to make each second someone spends with your game as interesting as possible. That typically means not frustrating people with systems designed to lock progression without forced replayability. If your player masters whatever challenge you have thrown at him, he should be able to move on to the next one, immediately, with nothing being put in his way.

You have to offer incentives to people for things they don't want to do. So if you feel like you have to create incentives to play your game again, think about what that actually means.