Posted 4/21/2001 by Beorn

To play Diablo II is to receive a nearly constant stream of pleasant, little rewards. Neat magic items. Levels at regular intervals. Nifty new enemies and surroundings. Gold and spells. The game constantly compensates the player for his or her toil. It is almost impossible not to continuously generate these warm fuzzies. Every minute you play builds your character a little more, and the feeling of satisfaction this gives is, while odd, understandable and compelling.

Jeff Vogel (retro-style RPG designer) praising Diablo 2 in his CGO column, also calling it the most brilliantly designed single-minded game ever, "the computer game equivalent of knitting". He wrote something similar about Everquest:

And when playing a role-playing game, you get a constant, pleasing form of feedback in the form of gold and experience points. Or upgrading from a +1 to a +2 sword. Or getting a new spell, or completing a quest. EverQuest is particularly cunning in the way it rewards the player. It has the character's skills constantly creep upward, a tiny bit at a time, providing a constant stream of tiny rewards.

Actually I think this applies to all computer games, (the successful ones, anyway.) Good games steal a lot of concepts from other art forms: powerful visuals, great stories, moving music - but the one thing that keeps you sitting there clicking away for hours and hours is a constant stream of challenges and rewards. Rewards that get their value from nothing else than the difficulty you had in reaching them, and the amount of time you spent on getting there. Reaching another FPS level, advancing to another puzzle, finding a slightly improved magical sword - on their own these rewards are just empty concepts, but after hours of mindless clicking or mind-wrestling they're just as valuable as anything you can buy for money.

Life may resemble a computer game, (well, at least the starting out with no stash or experience part of it), but it's not a very well-balanced computer game. On one side living is too easy. In the same way that evolution didn't prepare our bodies for a world where food is abundant, it didn't prepare our minds for a life where everyday survival isn't a challenge - the challenges are gone, but the ability and need to solve them is still there. On the other side, the challenges everyday life does have to offer, are often too difficult. Climbing the career ladder or reaching other material goals may be fun for those who succeed, but for those who don't it's about as pointless and annoying as spending your life stuck with the final puzzle in Monkey Island 2. The balance is important, a good challenge is neither too easy nor too difficult, and few people are lucky enough to find that in everyday life, or only in moderate amounts. And this is where computer games enter the picture.

The purpose of computer games is to simulate overcomable resistance we don't face elsewhere. For some people this might involve clicking a million times on anything that moves, for others solving unnecessarily obscure puzzles, but the important thing is that your mind keeps facing challenges, and manages to overcome them after a fair amount of work. That is the heart of computer gaming, and the games we find fun are the ones that strike exactly the right balance between challenge and reward.

Some successful equivalents of computer games, challenge for its own sake, can be found in real life - lifting weights or knitting is possibly very similar to hacking and slashing your way through Diablo 2 or Angband, like solving crosswords is similar to solving adventure game puzzles. These things are propably fun for the same reasons. But computer games specializes in this task, providing a wide variety of well-balanced, rewarding challenges for all tastes and abilities, with a subtlety and flexibility reality can never match.