Encouraged Return Visits
Game structures making players wanting to return to certain places or activities in the game.
Some games are created so they cannot be finished in one play session. This of course risks that players never return even if they are playing with or against other players. To make the players of these games return they can be designed to have Encouraged Return Visits, i.e. as part of their gameplay players do plan when they should play again.
Contents
Examples
When players of FarmVille place crops or animals in their farm they are also committing themselves to returning to the game after a certain time since each such placed object only can be activated after a certain waiting period. To further encourage players to return often, there is only a certain harvest window before crops wither and not many crops or animal have the same waiting periods.
Persistent game worlds such as World of Warcraft can have certain quests and items only available at times matching certain dates in the real world (e.g. New Year's Eve, Oktoberfest, and the Day of the Dead), encouraging players to at least play then.
Using the pattern
Encouraged Return Visits assumed that there is a game to return to and that it is possible to join and leave it often, so a requirement for this design choice is that the game in consideration already supports Drop-In/Drop-Out gameplay, and typically this is done through a Persistent Game World.
There are several different ways of encouraging players to return to games. Extended Actions or Delayed Effects are probably the easiest, simply making the period before the effect takes place long enough forces players to leave the game for real world reasons but they still need to return to see the effect. Planting and harvesting crops in FarmVille is an example how this can be used in games. These may be Interruptible Actions but this adds a Risk/Reward component to departing the game - in fact, Encouraged Return Visits can be seen as a way of making Continuous Goals have more Challenging Gameplay when the actions can be interrupted. Investments is a more specific way of achieving actions with Delayed Effects while Collecting is an activity that can support Encouraged Return Visits because the Resources are not always available and appear at Spawn Points or other types of Resource Generators.
Persistent Game Worlds add another option: if they have Evolving Rule Sets due to designers often adding or modifying parts of the game, players will need to return regularly to keep up with the changes in the game or be disadvantaged.
Consequences
Relations
Can Instantiate
with Continuous Goals
with Interruptible Actions
Can Modulate
Continuous Goals, Drop-In/Drop-Out, Persistent Game Worlds
Can Be Instantiated By
Collecting together with Resource Generators or Spawn Points
Evolving Rule Sets together with Persistent Game Worlds
Can Be Modulated By
Possible Closure Effects
Potentially Conflicting With
History
New pattern created in this wiki.
References
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Acknowledgements
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