#44/100 Days of experience: Difficulty curve control; or designing for long term usage
Anything that you create that isn't an absolute necessity for your user, will benefit greatly from understanding how the relationship with the user evolves through its lifecycle. Every product will have a lifecycle. For physical products, it can come through wear and tear, but for both physical and digital products, more often than not, it comes from getting bored of the thing. We want something new to use, to try. Because new neural pathways in the brain are interesting to have.
Now you could be making a spoon, in which case, you can assume that 80% of the learning happens in the first 2 interactions with the product. But in case you aren’t, what then? How will you give your user an interesting interaction 1000th time? Something that compels them to come back 1001st time.
There are a few different game types that see players packing those hours on top of each other. You have your multiplayer games, where the feeling of mastery is ever elusive because you have a massive player base to compete with and the metagame is ever changing, but they also have a small match based hook mechanic. Each interaction is long enough that you will get invested, short enough that you can still get out of it, and with other people so that you have a feeling of community.
You have RPGs where the time invested is more often than not going into just living the life of your character. Grinding up the level in this world. This isn't terrible, I enjoy RPGs as much as the next person.
But the most interesting are roguelikes . Give a player a set of rules to play within. And make mistakes have consequences. You die, and you lose all your progress. You’re back to square one. Some might say roguelikes are punishing. But they are interesting because a good roguelike is at the end of the day, an excellent conversation between the player and the game designer. The game designer has left clues and bits and pieces throughout the game world. And now it's on the player to understand what everything means. How things connect. The barrier to entry might be high, but that's what makes the feeling of it being a niche even more prominent.
The way the difficulty curve progression happens in roguelikes is actually by the player more deeply understanding, and hence getting invested in the world and the mechanics. They aren’t shying away from difficulty, but they understand how to value a player who invests more of their time in the game. By helping them feel like they understand the game.
The feeling of a difficulty curve is very deeply tied to mastery and that's what we will discuss the next time.
