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Trigger Happy
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things to be cropping up. So really our goal is to make sure
that there’s enough there to start off with so that people find
our game exciting and interesting, but then the more they
play the more they achieve, and they can’t constantly be
getting new rewards for all those achievements.
This is what the psychologists call “partial
reinforcement.” Yet presumably the videogame still has
to keep something back to reward successful play?
It’s always a big argument in game design, yeah, because the
problem is, you see, when you release a game like that you
get some people phoning up or writing in saying, “Why
didn’t I have the Lister Storm [a model of racecar in
Codemasters’ TOCA 2] from the beginning? I’ve paid my
money for the game and I can’t drive a Lister Storm!” You
know, you need to do X, Y and Z before you’re going to get
the Lister Storm, or the Jaguar XJ220. And they feel
frustrated, so there is some pressure to open the game up and
say, “Look, you choose which car you like, race on
whichever track you like,” and make the whole game
available from when you turn it on. But if you did that a lot of
people wouldn’t actually have any desire to drive the Lister
Storm because there’s no great progression in getting there.