Rewarding Moments in Video Games

What makes a video game worth playing?

March 25, 2025

Role-playing games have a common gameplay loop. The player-controlled character embarks on an adventure, maybe in a cave or fortress filled with baddies, overcomes obstacles, fights a tough boss enemy, and then acquires some treasure. The treasure can be a new weapon for the player character to wield, some macguffin needed to complete some other quest, or plain simple money.

Let’s take the example further. After enough time, the player character accrues enough experience points to level up. Levelling up usually confers additional hit points, making the character more resilient against damage, as well as additional attack power, making it so enemy monsters fall to fewer hits. Sometimes, the character may even gain entirely new abilities after a level up. Don’t you want to try that out?

In my experience, pop-gameplay discussion among enthusiasts tends to emphasize these mechanics as “rewards” for gameplay, likening them to the operation of operant conditioning chambers where lab rats are prompted to hit levers and are rewarded with food if they hit the lever in response to the correct stimulus. Personally, I don’t think it’s wise to compare something as complex and nuanced as a computer game to an apparatus for prompting and observing behaviours of rats or pigeons.

Dear reader, can you name something in the above examples that you think is intended to be a reward for the player?

From my remarks on Skinner boxes, it likely would not surprise you to hear that I do not believe that the rewarding part of a game is the hard-won reward. The reason why I think that is that you, the player, cannot eat a pixellated sword, or an abstract point of experience. You can eat money in real life, in the sense that money can be used to buy food, so it’s sensible that the human brain might see a cash infusion as being inherently rewarding, but that metaphor shouldn’t extend to video games.¹

This entire idea that the rewarding part of the video game is when you claim a virtual trinket really just makes me wonder why most people play video games. Is it to achieve a sense of accomplishment? Because there are few video games I’ve played where I have ever felt like I’ve accomplished much of value to me other than learning—which in fairness video games give plenty of opportunities for.

To get back to my point…

When a player’s avatar character levels up, becomes more resilient, and it becomes just a little easier to overcome certain obstacles, that kind of event necessarily changes the game being played. New routes open up, meaning new possibilities for play. Suddenly, the entire risk calculus of the game changes. That other, tough area you’d been avoiding might now be manageable. You’ll have an easier time just traversing from one point to another in the world. Don’t you want to see what else is out there?

Boons aren’t a “reward” for engaging with the game—they’re an incentive to engage further with the game by encouraging players by giving them new tools. The actual reward is getting to use your character’s expanded abilities to play the game. Isn’t the point of a game to be fun? So a progression in a player’s abilities should in my opinion always be framed as a way to facilitate further interaction between the player and the game.

A similar thought is to progression systems themselves. If the best way for game designers to implement a progression system is for it to act as a way to slowly unblock aspects of a game as the player plays it, then what does a lack of progression do to the gameplay experience?

Humans often seek novelty. We’re curious and inquisitive creatures—that’s why you’re reading this! So let’s think about a hypothetical example.

Let’s say hypothetically your character just leveled up and gained a new ability to put their enemy to sleep. Sleeping enemies can’t attack, and are vulnerable to further damage. But let’s say that an unlucky player tries using that ability only for it to, as it has been developed, randomly fail due to bad luck. This type of outcome might signal to a player that the ability doesn’t work well, but if the game is very calculated in terms of how often it doles out new character abilities, then the tedium of engaging in the same gameplay scenario again and again can easily push the player to keep trying that ability—just to see how it works. This is where I think many games are not very considerate in how they handle progression. When given new abilities in a game world, players should be given plenty of space to self-teach on how those abilities work, and where they may fall short. Self-teaching is one of the greatest strengths of computer games but it’s completely missing from an experience if players can simply move forward at a brisk pace without stopping to smell the game’s mechanics. In my experience, many games would rather have players endure gameplay to get to shiny loot instead of using shiny loot to give more game to players.

This is, incidentally, why I think that games designed entirely around character progression mechanics completely miss the plot. As fun as it can be to watch a number tick up, a game built wholly around that idea is entirely insubstantial. I think great games will build fun systems for players to interact with, then put together a way for players to gradually become familiar with the game’s mechanics at a very deliberate pace.