Advancement and Involvement

This post is based on conversations over the last two days related (mostly) to this subject matter. What emerged from this is the basic idea that playability = advancement + involvement. Let's first define our terms:

Advancement: The rate at which the resources controlled by the player change in some way in a (usually) positive manner. "Positive" is of course relative to the player's goals: if your goal is to lose everything, then losing can be considered positive.

Involvement: How much you relate to the overall narrative experience of the game, and want to see it progress. I can't really say that this is entirely story-based, either. One might reduce it to "the next big carrot on a stick."

Playability: A moment-to-moment evaluation of advancement and involvement, which represents how much the player is actually interested in the game. Basically, the idea is that if this theoretical value dips too low for too long, the player becomes more and more likely to just stop playing the game altogether.

Another way of putting it: Advancement = pushing forward. Involvement = pulling forward. Playability is the sum of these, or overall forward motion. Advancement offers small and frequent rewards, while involvement offers the big payoffs.

The most applicable examples mentioned in conversation with Jason were Diablo 2 (PC), and Ninja Gaiden 2 (360). I'll toss the recently reviewed Braid (XBLA) in there as well.

Diablo 2

• Advancement: Constantly given new items, new skills, new levels, and new environments. Grade: Excellent.
• Involvement: The story is fairly interesting, with promises of showdowns with the big baddies. For those interested, the Diablo lore is actually quite deep. Grade: Good.

The overall feel of D2 for me is that the first play through is awesome, while subsequent plays are still great due to replayability and advancement. There's a million possible items for your character, and tons of possible skills and stats to tweak as you level.

Ninja Gaiden 2

• Advancement: New weapons / skills become increasingly rare as game progresses, character really doesn't advance too much. Not a lot in the way of rewards, apart from the feeling of success in any given victory. Grade: Average.
  
• Involvement: Where NG1 had at least a passable story, NG2 had an old rehashed "Bad people released fiends, fiends destroying stuff, go kill fiends" story. Boring and really didn't offer any desire to advance to the next chapter: You already know the next chapter is "go kill the next fiend." Grade: Poor.

I really wanted to love this game. It has awesome action gameplay and style galore, but style alone cannot save a fundamentally flawed game. Infrequent rewards and a bland storyline had me putting this one back in the stack halfway through.

Braid

• Advancement: Constantly challenged with new puzzles, each puzzle revealing a new piece to an image, and each world introducing a new gameplay style. Grade: Excellent.
• Involvement: The story in Braid is a fascinating narrative, and you can always see your goals - the attic "world," and the worlds that you have not yet unlocked. There's a lot of "wow, I wonder what they'll cook up next," which just increases the forward pull. Grade: Excellent.

I've pretty much reviewed this one already.

Conclusion(?)

During the conversation, there was a point where Jason asked me what I thought of "sandbox" games like SimCity or Spore. At the time, I said something to the effect of "They're like crayons. Crayons are just FUN." After a bit more thought, I think that these kind of games actually just rely almostly purely on Advancement - tiny rewards very frequently. You feel accomplished creating things, then bringing those things to life. Even simple puzzle games, Tetris for example, are subject to mostly advancement: rewarded by points and levels, you play for the fun of it. These games don't have to rely on Involvement quite so much because their Advancement is being constantly bumped up by the gameplay itself.

Involvement, on the other hand, seems like you might think of it as the lower-boundary of your gameplay experience. If you're really involved, you can survive an advancement lull in order to see what happens next in the game. If that involvement isn't there, a lull in advancement can absolutely kill a game.

Future posts will reference this one in regards to replayability (more Diablo/StarCraft) and story accessibility (yay, I get to write about Silent Hill.)