I’ve been playing Drop7 on my iPhone. It’s a game that its developer, Area/Code, describes as “Tetris meet Sudoku.” You blow up numbered circles by dropping them to make contiguous rows or columns of circles equal to the number. Blowed-up circles create space for gravity to pull previously stacked circles downward, which can create chains of blow-up.
The game is addictive, falling squarely into the class of games you’d call “time-wasters.” You look up and it’s been half an hour since you thought to yourself, “I’ll just play one quick game.”
In this case—and in the case of most successful games of the time-waster genre—I think the game’s success arises primarily from two factors.
The first is that Drop7 is remarkably successful in getting a player into a state of flow, where time passes even as you remain completely focused on the task at hand. You’ve had this experience, mentally entering a timeless state of just doing your work, or playing a game, or reading a book, or watching a movie.
The key work on this mental state is called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
The mental tasks of Drop7—simple counting in two dimensions, multiplied by the future effects of the space created when circles are destroyed—fall solidly in this band.
The second key factor is slot-machine style reinforcement. You’d have to be a savant to predict all of the chain-reactions that will result from a given play. But at the same time, long chain reactions reward you with both multiplicative scoring and an escalating “lights-up-and-makes-noise” experience. As research shows, random reinforcement is even more effective than predictable reinforcement. That is, the rat pushes the feeder bar even more tenaciously when he gets a food pellet some random percentage of the time than when he gets it every time.
Drop7 rewards continuing, solid play with relatively predictable rewards—you clear circles and score row advancements—but you also score big-time payouts, both in circle-clearing and big bonus scores, at more-or-less random intervals. (Again, unless you’re a savant, in which case I suppose Drop7 is not all that interesting to you. Drop7 savants, please weigh in in the comments.)
The effectiveness of flow, especially, in creating a compelling game experience is particularly frustrating to me when I’m wearing my board game designer hat, because it’s particularly difficult to promote a state of flow in a board game. Because the common design of board games involves turn-taking, each player’s flow-potential is constantly interrupted by the end of his turn. The promotion of flow is, in my estimation, what makes a continuous-play game like Jungle Speed so much fun.
Conversely, random payoffs are relatively easy to achieve in table games. Readers for whom the relationship between dice and randomness is confusing are remanded to remedial game education on the forums at rpg.net, from whence one assumes they will never emerge. (Are the new viewers gone yet?) Elements like critical hits are especially effective. Rolemaster was particularly good at this, even if its general system overhead repulsed as many players as its awesome E-crits attracted.
Fluxx is another pretty good example of this. The most obvious thing that helps to maintain flow in Fluxx is the potential for the end goal to be changed by any player, at any time.
You juggle so many mental variables playing Fluxx (play rule, draw rule, special rules, keepers & creepers, goals), but each one is essentially simple and always clearly represented on the table.
Most turns provide innate payoffs – as you try to give yourself a clear advantage whilst unable to predict which turn will be your last. Most of the time you’re effective at either weakening your opponents positions or (all too temporarily temporarily) strengthening your own.
Winning is clearly the ultimate payoff, but the rapidity of change in the game is such that you rarely feel more than a few turns away from the prize.
Combine unpredictability with strategy, give it a simple, easily readable form, and make every action significant. Abstract puzzle/strategy games readily capitalise on these things.
That’s interesting. Fluxx changes so often, that it often seems pointless to me to even pay attention. By the time your next turn comes around, everything has completely changed. I find it completely impossible to maintain flow when playing Fluxx because it seems pointless. When I’m playing, I usually feel more like part of a computer executing random commands inflicted on me by some random instruction generation system.
But the game’s obviously popular. I just don’t get it myself.
Clearly, I did see the game quite differently. I should admit that I haven’t read the work on flow you’ve cited, I just went with what your post threw up instinctively in my mind. Sorry if I missed the point a little.
You talked about the way that random rewards can help sustain constant player interest and engagement in gameplay, and with Fluxx I found this was achieved in a way I’d never seen before in a card game.
Fluxx is definitely an oddity in the way it mixes strategic and random elements. The random element definitely seems dominant (in fact, even though you know your opponents actions aren’t random, strategically speaking, it makes little difference to assume that they are). However, if anything I found this fact reduced the cognitive load of the game.
I found flow (or something close to it, in turn-based game terms) in my focus on the visible state of play relative to my hand. I could see the strategic ‘value’ of my hand changing during my opponents turns – but didn’t have to actively consider my own strategy until it was my turn.
Despite the unpredictability of it all, I was still actively interested in how my opponents’ turns effected the state of play, because the cards they played could potentially effect my strategy.
Anyway, I think the main reason I thought of Fluxx because its a game where every turn (whether yours or your opponents) has the potential to benefit you. The potential to be rewarded at any time – even if it comes with a similar chance of punishment – is what kept the game interesting for me.
You talked about the way that random rewards can help sustain constant player interest and engagement in gameplay, and with Fluxx I found this was achieved in a way I’d never seen before in a card game.
That’s interesting. I wonder if there’s any research on whether random feedback is more, or less, compelling as a function of whether the test subject directly causes the feedback or not. That is, assuming that you’re winning the money from the slot machine in both cases, does it matter whether you pull the handle, or your friend pulls it while you’re standing there?