SAN FRANCISCO – The catchiest videogames, the ones that grab players immediately, share a certain set of traits that designers ignore at their own peril, says a veteran gamemaker.
In a Game Developers Conference speech titled "Designing the Five-Second Game," designer RJ Mical laid out the results of a study he had undertaken recently, in which he analyzed dozens of instantly addictive games from Pac-Man to Plants Vs. Zombies. Mical, who co-created the Atari Lynx and 3DO game machines and worked on the PlayStation Vita, found certain elements that persisted across decades of development.
"We've all managed to tap into something in the human psyche that's really working," he said.
Simple interface. "The hardest part about [learning to play] Tetris is figuring out which way the buttons rotate the block," he said. This is always paired with...
Simple strategy. You should be able to learn the rules and the goal of the game in 5 minutes, he says. "If you've created a game where the interface is easy to understand but you don't know what to do, that alone is a game-killer," Mical said.
Short levels. Besides being convenient for players if the levels are short, knowing that the game's levels are broken up into easily absorbable chunks of gameplay might convince players to game more: Mical said that he found that people will start playing game levels even if they know they might not be able to finish them. "You know you might get interrupted, but you don't care," he said. "The experience is supposed to be a transitory one."
Models the physical world, at least somewhat. Even the abstract Tetris references the real world, Mical said; the blocks fall like realistic objects. But things can't be too realistic – you rarely see a game like this use a 3-D world instead of 2-D, he said.
Great sound effects. Instantly addictive games might have impressive, beautiful graphics or simple, functional visuals, Mical said. But what they absolutely must have is excellent sound effects. "I've been in the game industry my whole life, but was still not conscious of the importance audio has," Mical said.
Mical said that he was surprised to find that only about a third of the games he surveyed had catchy tunes that played during gameplay, but stressed that every great game had high-quality sound effects.
He also noted that, while not every game in his study incorporated this particular design mechanic, far more hit games were about destroying (think Asteroids or Angry Birds) than building. SimCity be damned – more people want to smash civilization than construct it.
