What Makes Video Games So Attractive?

Written by Louis Chan

Video Games Existed for More Than 30 Years

Starting in the 80s, video games kept evolving along with the platforms, and every evolution was a huge success in both business and popularity; no matter which type was existing, or what platform they were using, video games are usually popular with the market and the public.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

With a short but rich history of development, video games are influencing the world by their diversification such that they can reflect histories, present different cultural phenomena, and even provide prospects for the future of the world visually. The expansive content span of video games can build collective connections worldwide. Therefore, people are seeing video games as a common topic, which can cross cultures and races.

Metal Gear Solid

Video games became more advanced interactive entertainment today, and a lot of people are playing them in a normal relaxed way. Whether the PC platform or the mobile phone platform, markets for video games grow enormously along with the increased amounts of players. It shows that more people are finding video games interesting to play and able to bring enjoyment. Some people even award video games as special and modern art. All those compliments started when more people found video games attractive.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

However, most people who play video games never thought about why they want to play them; they did not seek the reason for video games being attractive to them. With the influence of video games getting broader at present, there is a necessity to look deep into the reason behind video games’ attractiveness.

Emotional Experience Makes Video Games Attractive

Life is Strange

Emotional attachment is an indispensable part of video games to provide a virtual experience to let people escape from reality. With this purpose, emotional experience is becoming an important consideration while designing games. By defining natural and complicated interactive emotions, different ways to design the elements that are able to provide immersive emotional experiences in video games’ frameworks were discovered to create emotional engagements for the players.

Players can easily immerse themselves into a video game while they are generating an emotional response to it. Thus, most of the attractive video games today are focusing on leading players to generate emotions with finely designed elements.

Since emotional experience is essential to let the players immerse themselves in the gameplay, there are a few strategies being used in the design process for emotions of video games:

• Fluent — The design process on emotions should be smooth.

• Real —— It is necessary to let players believe the emotions they generated were real.

• Strong Feedback —— Players should feel the emotions strongly.

The sense of emotions can create a strong connection between the players’ minds and unrealistic scenes, stories, and characters. Only when players get into the mental flow during the gameplay, they can have a profound experience by going through the carefully designed level of emotional proximity on elements like the narrative, NPCs, etc.

The Last of Us

Therefore, the emotion triggers designed by video games should be smooth enough to let the players experience the natural flow of emotions without realizing those were intently designed by the game. Also, this lets players realize the emotions they have generated as a reaction to the gameplay, creating long-lasting memories that are implanted in their minds. Furthermore, the players can receive strong feedback from the gameplay by recalling the memory, and they will have a slight illusion about what they had experienced is true.

The Last of Us

Using emotions to strengthen the interactivity of video games is one of the reasons that makes it attractive to people.

Learning Curve Makes Video Games Attractive

Dark Souls

The learning curve is is a graph that represents people’s learning rate through the process of gaining new experiences, which is important to video games to lead the players to keep playing. Applying the relationship between the learning curve, and the reward loop to different elements in video games are essential for keeping video games attractive.

Video games are entertainment tools, which can fulfil people’s imagination, and achieve human’s interaction with art at the same time.

When learning curves were hidden in video games, and being able to let players experience them, a reward loop was created. A great example would be souls-like games, Darks Souls series, Bloodborne, Sekiro, etc. They are role-playing games that are known for high levels of difficulty, emphasis on environmental storytelling, and memorable and brutal boss fights.

Bloodborne

Their core game loop is well designed to produce a cycle of struggle and satisfaction in its players. In other words, the games force players to use the accumulation of failure to build up skills and use the frustration from players' multiple death in the process due to high difficulty to build up a huge sense of accomplishment after their success.

Why would players keep playing the game if it's remarkably hard? The concept of the reward loop had shown its importance here. Every time the players fail at some point during the gameplay, such as boss fight, or being killed by opponent NPCs, they will gain experience from it. When they face the same obstacle again, there will be two situations:

1. Either they learned enough to overcome the obstacle

2. What they learned is still insufficient

Thus, players will struggle at certain points but keep gaining experience about how to get over it. A good gameplay design will let players keep acquiring new experiences when they are going through the obstacles repeatedly. In the reward loop of emotions, the longer the players took to adapt, the stronger their excitement, joy, and sense of accomplishment.

All players know that video games are unreal, but they can still sense reality from them. Integrating certain elements from practice, such as real histories and types of art into the build-up scenes, imaginary characters, and even along the narrative can be an authentic experience for players.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

The strong ecstatic emotions and letting players have an experience that mixes perfectly with both verisimilitude and unreality makes video games attractive.

Interactive Narrative Makes Video Games Attractive

Designing gameplay narrative interactively is useful in contributing to the gameplay. Since narrative techniques are getting mature in the industry, like interactive dialog, movie narrative, Computer-generated imagery (CGI), etc., most of the interactivity of video games is from the narrative.

One of the most interesting parts of playing a video game is the players exploring the interactive potential of a video game that will lead them to discover the content and meaning of it, so-called “interpretative performance”.

In 2007, Grant Tavinor, a researcher who focuses on digital technology, including videogames and virtual reality in its philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions said that “game players often go beyond what is necessary to produce an instance of the game, exploring and experimenting with the game to tease out content that might cast further light on the meaning of the work or its interactive structure”.

A successful interactive and interpretative video game narrative can always lead to the desire of exploration.

Half-Life 2

Most of the good narrative video games today require the player to play the game multiple times to experience the full game content by providing different choices on the narrative. With a good balance between the elements designed to be hidden and those designed to be shown, players would initiatively play the game repeatedly to reveal hidden plots, areas, or Easter Eggs.

If designers want to increase the interactivity of narrative, they can hide some clues or certain contents inside the game, even the endings of the story.

NieR: Automata

With players being able to choose how the story develops, they can experience the full narrative by themselves and discover the true part of the story by putting all the clues that they found together. The players’ sense of accomplishment is also being fulfilled by interacting with the narrative during gameplay. By having an interpretative design on narrative, the interactivity of video games can be fully exerted.

Engagement Makes Video Games Attractive

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The main idea of designing a video game is to engage players, and the best way to achieve that is through gameplay.

Michele Dickey, author of Engaging By Design: How Engagement Strategies in Popular Computer and Video Games Can Inform Instructional Design, states that “elements of interactive design include the various dimensions of a setting, the roles and characters within a game environment, and ‘hooks’ that afford actions and feedback to the players” in her book. She also says that understanding the role of narrative and aspects of interactive design in popular video games can provide a precious message to designing engaging learning environments. It means different strategies and techniques are being applied to help with interactive design today, which intends to create a learning and exploratory environment to engage players via the gameplay.

Providing a learning environment for the players in video games means that a relatively new environment is designed for them to explore and interact with; meanwhile, having enough level of identification. Hence, the game environment shall neither be obscure and leaves the players confused or difficult to adapt to the game nor provide an experience that they are too familiar with and make them feel no novelty to stimulate their exploring desire.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

Engagement level of video games is dependent on the effect of the integration and composition of different elements.

Different elements constitute the environment in video games, for instance, narrative and gameplay; both are the elements that players are familiar with, but how are they able to create a learning environment for players?

The narrative ways have kept innovating, from using the fixed perspective of cameras to play

Resident Evil 2 (1998)

to the mature usage of film narrative.

God of War (2018)

Various storytelling techniques would help to create an intuitive visualized new experience. During the gameplay, players will experience different scenarios. Reasonably speculating the art design that fits the games’ worldview settings, imaginary scenes and buildings will blend fantasy with reality. With that, players can gain an emotional experience from a world full of exaggerated imagination, which is impossible for them to achieve in real life.

A successful learning environment in video games can convince players to immerse their senses in the game, and a willingness to learn from the will-designed gameplay.

Conclusion

Tron: Legacy (2010)

Video game is the only kind of art that can interact with people. From the evolution history of video games, every generation had succeeded in both market and people; the reason behind their success is the nature of attractiveness. All the visually presented elements functioned for creating mental and emotional experiences for the players. Different combinations of components in video games would be able to provide various experiences for players, so the level of attractiveness depends on the way of integration between elements. Finding the relationship between different components that build video games is an important research direction for further seeking the reason for their attractiveness in the future when technology is more advanced.