Picking the Lock-box

July 9, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

Desktop Dungeons brings with it the old discussion about unlockable content. It’s designed as a short game; Rogue by way of Minesweeper. Finish the game under the right conditions, and you get more conditions that facilitate further unlocking. The game is hard, so you’re only going to beat it some percentage of the time. As you get better — or at least get further into the unlocking process — the game gets harder, forcing the player to put in that much more effort for the next unlock.

It’s a regular progression: play, play, play until you play well enough to meet a condition; then move on and play some more. There’s always another carrot, until finally there isn’t. And look at all the time and energy you’ve invested to get there.

Since I downloaded the game, I have found myself in a feedback cycle. I imagine it’s the impulse that a compulsive gambler feels. Hey, it’s only another ten minutes; I’m on a roll now; I know I can beat that boss if I just choose the gnome and conserve my potions. And so okay, I die. But this next time I’ll make it for sure.

This isn’t healthy. By no measure on Earth is this healthy. And yet for about ten years this has been a popular way to extend the life of simple games. You might call it a sort of meta completion compulsion. Often large-environment games will riddle their worlds with stars and packages and honeycombs to collect, and unless you track down every last one you’re not playing the game right. Often hardcore skill-based games will hand out letter grades for performance, and unless you earn the highest grade in every challenge, you’re not playing the game right. In either case, you’re probably missing out on something. This unlockable business comes from the same place, but translates a little differently.

The Parasite

As with completion-compulsive and performance-compulsive games, lock-box design structures aim to inject long-term “play value” into an otherwise modest design. The idea is that without objective reason to explore every inch of the game, or to keep returning and playing over again, the player will quickly blow through the game or interest will quickly wane. Having exhausted the game of its potential, the player will put the game on the proverbial shelf, and move on.

Unlike the other compulsive models, lock-box designs don’t necessarily come off as patronizing or elitist and they don’t necessarily require much skill from the player. You can play through a lock-box game over and over, and even if you’re not attempting some of the unlock conditions there’s no one to say you’re doing it wrong. In fact, often the only way you can play the games wrong is by not playing them. All these games tend to ask is a deceptively large time investment. So long as you keep pumping in the hours, you’re doing what they expect of you.

Compared to the other compulsive models, there’s something even more parasitic about this kind of design. Again it pulls from classic design sensibilities — the addictiveness of Space Invaders, for example. And yet despite the assertions of addicts, addictiveness and good design do not equate. Pretty much every time a videogame has attained broad cultural relevance, from Pac-Man to Wii Sports, it has risen from an attempt to overcome the typical psychological, demographic, and cultural shortfalls of the time.

What gamers often confuse with addiction is fascination. A healthy drive comes not from a feeling of obligation or Pavlovian response but from a genuine intellectual or emotional absorption into the ramifications of play. Asteroids is fun to play not because it doles out points to spend in a shop to upgrade your ship, or because if you beat it twenty times under the right conditions you get to unlock a new kind of UFO. It’s fun because there is a mental spark, a cathartic a-ha moment, to the way the game reacts to the player’s every decision. The player thinks, “Oh! If I do this, this happens. Now I know. How can I put this to use?”

The relationship between cause and effect is deep and significant enough that however many times you play, there is something intrinsically satisfying about the process. It’s fun to chop up the asteroids and to see where the parts fly. It’s fun to mop up everything on the screen. It’s fun to figure out how to time and angle your shot trajectories to try to finish with as few shots as possible. Not because you’re playing to a proscribed goal. Not because if you use too many shots you fail to win a prize. It’s fun not because it’s work, but rather because it’s pure play.

Cheese Also Glitters

Now, there may well be expressive or practical merit to compulsive play. Super Mario Bros. uses the intrigue of art design, mystery, and flashing colors to compel the player to jump up and touch its [?] blocks. It specifically places enemies to compel the player to react in certain ways, which in turn often teach the player a new concept.

Gradius V is full of neato unlockable content that both fleshes out the “Gradius experience” (by including some classic weapons that don’t really fit the game’s goals but are neat to have) and rewards the dedicated yet maybe not so proficient player by making the game a notch easier to complete — and therefore practice, and therefore improve at playing. All it takes is a modest investment, to show that the player has tried but maybe needs a bit of help. (Hydorah dodges even this scheme with a progressive save system that gives the player total control over progress and handicaps.)

Pac-Man Championship Edition includes yet obscures a ton of game modes, and rather like Gradius V it initially does so to focus the player’s attention. As the player completes and digests the modes, which happens fairly quickly, the locked modes open up to allow the more experienced player to explore a few more ramifications of the rules.

Other games like Capcom’s early Dreamcast fighters — SNK vs Capcom, Marvel vs Capcom 2 — demand that the player pump dozens, even hundreds, of hours into the game’s arcade mode, often at a high level of skill, to earn the points it takes to “flesh out” a bare-bones set of features, options, levels, and characters. The standard player response was to leave the game running in practice mode for hours at a time, burning out the Dreamcast drive motor, to avoid the annoyance.

Aside from instructional or expressive value, the main reasons for lock-box design are to give a sense of apparent scope and worth for the purchase price, and to give the player a solid reason to keep coming back and playing. The former is a concern of consumer game design, particularly console design, that gained real currency once memory cards became standard. The latter is more of an arcade thing, although in an arcade context the concern is more to keep the players pumping in the quarters. This is where Ed Logg got really clever with Gauntlet.

Perhaps a closer arcade analog is those ticket games where you throw balls into hoops or perform some other monkey stunt to get rolls of pink cardboard. When you have enough tickets, you can trade them in for a prize of some sort. Fair enough for a night out with your friends, but for a home console the mentality is a little weird and insular. There is no social value to unlocking content. Unlike a stuffed Snoopy doll, there’s no genuine practical reward. Any reward just gets funneled back into the hole, as the game keeps absorbing the player’s time and energy.

Although this structure makes sense for a commercial online game like World of Warcraft, it seems odd for a self-contained single-player game. For a free indie game, it seems even stranger. Yet perhaps there is a bit of logic here.

Hacking the Meritocracy

For indie games, currency is word-of-mouth. As long as people are playing your game and talking about your game and thinking about your game, you are in the limelight. The moment people shrug and put your game on the shelf, the world grows cold again and someone else will enjoy the warmth of recognition. There is, therefore, a certain value to producing a game that will hold people’s attention. The trick is in the method. Are you holding their attention honestly, though the sheer fascination of your design — or are you jealously clutching their attention, concerned that without coercion they will grow bored and stop playing?

Even if you only play Passage the once, it will stick in the head; people will be dwelling about it and discussing it for years. The fun is in picking apart what the game means. Likewise, every time you die in Spelunky you realize what you did wrong. You feel like a dolt, and resolve to be more careful next time. Then the next time you die for a completely different reason that is also your fault. The fun is in seeing how all the elements interact.

What does Desktop Dungeons bring to the table? On its own it’s a cute idea; boil down a complex yet fun experience into a few minutes of clicking. And it does transcend its mash-up concept to becomes its own little experience. Yet after a few plays the novelty draws a bit thin. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t play Minesweeper or Spider Solitaire every day, but they’re worth the occasional zone-out. Yet the way the game is structured, it feels like it’s afraid to let go and be shuffled off to my games directory. It gives out these assignments and chores, and because they’re there, leaving these gaping holes in the menu screen, I feel compelled to carry them out. Maybe if I do, the game will be fun again. Maybe it will be more fun than it was before! Meanwhile, the game gets the benefit of my attention and energy. Without a player, a game doesn’t exist. So it’s happy; its creators are happy; I’m paying attention. I give it value, while it gives me… what? The promise of more ways to keep doing what isn’t actually interesting anymore?

As I keep saying, the worst thing a videogame can do is assume I have nothing better to do than to play a videogame. On its own merits, this game is good; it’s just too clingy. Value doesn’t come from more stuff to do, or more stuff to have; it comes from pure fascination. It comes from making me want to keep coming back to hear what you’ve got so say. And you can’t force that. You try, and you’re demeaning everyone involved.