If you are a game designer, please take this with a grain of salt.
Fun does not equal repeated challenges. And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.
2. This article also does not say that fun equals repeated challenges. The closest thing in there is that fun is about prediction. Even the definition of "mastery" that the article sets forth is pretty explicitly about every type of cognitive challenge you meet in life.
3. This article does not imply that stories cannot be fun. In fact, I specifically pointed out that stories that you are unsure where they are going, and stories with more interpretability are more likely to be fun that predictable ones. If you follow the links in the article, you will see
4. I don't exclusively work in the MMORPG space. I have worked in tabletop, puzzle, trivia, casual, and single-player RPGs.
Others are very obvious though; MMORPGs are the obvious answer and they often don't even have an interesting story or reward to go with the grind, because the reward is a gamble. Ubisoft games are another example, ever since the first Assassin's Creed their games have generally been the same formula of an overworld with a lot of repeated but sameish "quests". The Division series combines the two with randomized, chance based loot. (...coincidentally I'm playing that one right now).
But yeah, the "repeated challenges" thing is best left to that particular class of games. Some people realy enjoy it though.
For Assassin's Creed, it was so repetitive even within the same game (the first one) I couldn't even finish it once I noticed the grind. It drove me nuts.
A lot of games then followed that pattern (e.g. Shadow of Mordor, Mad Max, and I'm sure countless others -- I just mention the ones I tried). I find some of their mechanics interesting but once the grind kicks in (which is fairly soon, since these sandbox games are all grind-based) I despair and abandon them.
They feel like repetitive work rather than entertaining to me.
But hear this: Papers, Please, a game that is literally a bureaucracy simulator, engages me in a way Assassin's Creed never could. I wonder why! (Random guess: I think it's because PP, for all its repetitiveness, feels like a small game, while Assassin's Creed and its like feel like endless games you could spend your life within... and I have better things to do with my life).
In the case of the first Assassin’s Creed, I’d argue that the “toy” (running around, climbing buildings, challenging yourself to seamless parkour runs, stabbing guards etc.) is a lot of fun, but to progress the game forces you to do those fun things in a series of very rigid, repetitive, arbitrary challenges that can be difficult without adding anything new, and which block the story progression behind a checklist.
Papers Please has simple mechanics, but makes the player balance a lot of different factors while offering a steady stream of surprises and new situations to consider.
There’s an element of personal preference too, of course.
But repeated challenges does not equal grind. Grind typically means repeating already mastered challenges over and over.
The article gives useful theoretical tools for understanding and critiquing such shallow games, actually. Its examples are drawn from many genres, and it's thoughtful and insightful about many kinds and aspects of games.
The comment you call out with your question is indeed a low-effort and low-quality dismissal. I struggle to describe it without being more insulting than that.
For instance, I think that puzzles are ok in Mass Effect, but the many mini-games in Final Fantasy 7 are borderline annoying.
The answer on inferring relationships between flavors of fun, and good colalteral fun activities, is in number 11. :D
But let's simplify this. What are your favorite games, and in what way do they sidestep having any repeated challenges? Do they have one single challenge, after which the game is over? Is that fun?
Sure, RPGs tend to have "repeated" battles or harvesting. Racing has repeated laps. FPS have repeatedly finding someone else to shoot. Coding simulators like Factorio have you repeatedly add automation, and repeatedly replace them with better automation. Platformers have you repeatedly move through platforms.
This is all illustrated and explained in the article, though.
It's kind of hard to stay equipped without salvaging though.
> Dopamine can release for 'richly interpretable' situations
Ok, and? I mean, Oh, right. The dopamine. The dopamine for gamers, the dopamine chosen especially to entertain gamers, gamers' dopamine. That dopamine?
The science on this evolves pretty regularly, but dopamine specifically currently seems to be tied most strongly to prediction processes matching what actually ends up happening, and therefore curiosity, etc.
The "richly interpretable" bit comes from Biederman & Vessel's research on it; for our purposes here we can basically summarize it as "easily predictable situations versus more complex ones result in different dopamine responses."
From the neuropsych side, this is very related to Predictive Processing; Deterding has a good article on that here. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9363017/ It also has a wealth of links that can lead you deeper into the subject.
As far as "OK and?" it comes down to this:
- make games that people can predict easily, and it'll be less fun in the "hard fun" sense
- and that is true of stories too!
- and that doesn't mean there aren't other sorts of enjoyment (which are covered in several images and links there) -- and as it happens, those are mappable to particular endorphins too!
- So it's not that game designers should try using endorphins as a tool, but rather that there's a wealth of science in a half-dozen different fields that backs up what this article is saying.
Bottom line: "dopamine" isn't a useful tool. Knowing those four types of fun and what elicits them absolutely is. Knowing they really do map to specific human sensations is. And following some links deeper into the topic will lead you very specific techniques you can use to elicit these different reactions predictably.
Stories are obviously fun, otherwise no-one would read books, but a story that you interact with meaningfully, that you can change significantly, really hard to do well.
Like every game where you can do good thing or bad thing, and the game punishes you for doing bad thing. It's really hard to write a compelling story where a nasty piece of shit still somehow saves the Fantasy Kingdom from the Prophesised Doom and becomes the hero.
I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.
I think of the Mass Effect games and their attempts at this, "Oh you were only 92% Paragon, so now we're at the end, _this_ crew-member has to die for some reason, if only you'd known that 30 hours of gameplay ago when you punched that grifter in the Citadel!"
Or one I still bear a massive, MASSIVE grudge against, Fable III, where if you didn't massively grind for resources before the bit you thought was the end-game - where you fought and defeated the evil oppressive king, you found yourself making ridiculously stupid binary decisions like "Should this multi-storey building be used as an orphanage? Or as a whore-house?" That's literally one of the decisions you had to make. Oh, and the game made sure to tell you "Btw, because you didn't grind enough, if you choose the way that earns less money, EVERY ONE DIES BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO HELP THE ORPHANS."
It was an interesting attempt, to be sure, a brave experiment but I resented the game so much for the heel turn it pulled - "Actually, the evil oppressive money grubbing king you overthrew was RIGHT! Now you have to do what he was doing! Mwahahaha! Irony!"
Worst of all, it never let me make nuanced choices - why can't it be orphans downstairs, sex workers upstairs, and during the daytime, I pay the sex-workers to look after the orphans? Nope, it was either "look after the innocent children" or "four floors of whores". Complete with animations of crying children if you chose sex-workers. Or crying sex-workers if you chose the children. Once again, not kidding.
Once you knew the heel-turn twist, you could game it massively beforehand, one of the best strategies was to buy properties, become an incredibly oppressive landlord by demanding extortionate rents, so when it came time for the "orphans/whores" decisions, you had so much money you could could choose the good path and everyone declared you a saint.
But I felt so disrespected by the game that I didn't even bother.
That's the problem - good stories need direction towards a satisfying end, and it's really hard to give a player agency in a good narrative, and so I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices.
Honestly, I think the only games that have ever done the good/evil choices in a story well were the Knights of The Old Republic series, but once again, it stopped being so much fun when I had to keep on being evil because I'd chosen evil stuff prior.
Can't I just be evil today, and maybe a bit nice tomorrow? After all, the best villains are the mercurial ones.
I think the main problem with Fable or Mass Effect was that the game wants to converge to one of a few endings, but definitely for ME there's a bajillion decisions you can make until you get there.
I don't know if you can get rid of this "definite" ending thing per se; some games say they have X amount of endings, but again, I can't really name any. It's probably more gratifying to have more self-contained sub-stories where the decisions made e.g. an hour ago have an effect on the progression and outcome, but not too much longer than that. You should have the choice as a player to switch from e.g. "good" to "evil" partway through your playthrough. References back to previous quests and their outcomes are nice but shouldn't be as heavy as "your one choice made 30 hours ago affect the ending of the game in a significant and irreversible way"
Choices occasionally feel fairly binary good/evil, but more often all choices have their pros & cons, and it's more about story and narrative in making my decisions.
Rimworld and The Sims. Both are procedural story writers.
> I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices
I agree: All these AAA titles essentially are movies where you get tons of "agency" in choices which are irrelevant to the story, but the main plot is hard scripted into a few predetermined paths.
Until we have full generative AI as game engine the only alternative remains the procedural approach mentioned in the beginning.
Perhaps that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (that's what the hpmor at the end means) is such an appallingly written piece of... I hesitate to use the word literature... that you wanted to demonstrate how not to write?