Behavioral Design

Game engage-ability

Properties2
tagsux, game-design, motivation, emotion, flow
aliasesGame engage-ability, Engage-ability, Three Engage-Ability Pillars

7 min read

Game engage-ability

The second half of Celia Hodent’s Game UX framework (the other being Game usability). Where usability is about removing friction, engage-ability is about generating the pull that keeps players motivated, emotionally invested, and absorbed. Per The Gamer’s Brain (book) (Chapter 12), Hodent organizes engage-ability into Three Pillars: Motivation, Emotion, and Game Flow — while noting up front that the boundaries between all her UX pillars (usability included) are fuzzy by nature, since the same underlying psychology (attention, memory, perception) feeds several pillars at once.

Motivation

Hodent frames intrinsic motivation in games primarily through Self-Determination Theory, citing Przybylski, Rigby, and Ryan’s “A Motivational Model of Video Game Engagement” (2010, Review of General Psychology) as the direct bridge between Self-Determination Theory’s three basic psychological needs and game design:

  • Competence — feeling skillful and progressing toward clear goals. Hodent’s central recommendation is that goals must be both clear (expressed through good usability, especially Signs and Feedback and Form Follows Function) and meaningful to the player at the moment they encounter them — not just meaningful to the designer’s internal sense of where the game is going. Her running examples: Pokémon’s layered short/mid/long-term goals, and Zelda’s practice of showing a “lock” (an uncrackable wall, an inaccessible ledge) well before handing the player the matching “key,” which pre-loads the eventual payoff with meaning.
  • Autonomy — meaningful choice and self-expression. Grounded partly in the IKEA effect (Norton, Mochon, and Ariely, 2012): letting players build or customize something increases the value they attribute to it, provided the customization is actually perceivable (not buried in a first-person camera no one sees).
  • Relatedness — the need to feel affiliated with others. Cooperative and competitive social features both count, but Hodent notes competition carries more risk of frustration (losing, humiliation) and requires deliberate design to soften — reframing personal-best metrics (her Overwatch example) rather than only celebrating the top scorer. For durable cooperation specifically, she cites iterated-prisoner’s-dilemma research (Selten and Stoecker, “End Behavior in Sequences of Finite Prisoner’s Dilemma Supergames,” 1986, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization): players who know they’ll keep playing with the same partner cooperate more than those paired with a stranger for a single round — the basis for her recommendation to support long-term social structures (guilds, friends lists) over throwaway matchmaking. She also devotes a full subsection (contributed by UX researcher Ben Lewis-Evans) to reducing multiplayer toxicity via the “Three Es” — education, enforcement, and engineering, borrowed from road-safety research — arguing engineering (designing the toxic behavior out of the system entirely) is the most effective of the three, and citing Przybylski, Deci, Rigby, and Ryan’s “Competence-Impeding Electronic Games and Players’ Aggressive Feelings, Thoughts, and Behaviors” (2014, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) on the link between frustrated competence and aggression.

On extrinsic motivation, Hodent revisits the Overjustification effect risk directly: rewards that are genuinely external to play (daily login chests, streak rewards) are safe to offer but dangerous to remove once introduced, since taking one away reads as a punishment and can undermine the intrinsic motivation to play at all — the mechanism behind her caution about punishing broken login streaks (see Streak). She also distinguishes engagement-, completion-, and performance-contingent rewards, noting performance-contingent rewards feel the most “controlling” but also communicate mastery most powerfully.

On individual differences, Hodent brings back the Big Five personality traits model (Yee’s 2016 gaming-motivation clusters, Bartle’s 1996 player-type taxonomy) as a way to remember that no single reward structure or mechanic will motivate everyone equally — recommending breadth of mechanics over designing for one dominant player type, unless a narrow audience is the explicit intent.

Emotion

Hodent opens with a direct quote from Donald Norman: “The emotional side of design may be more critical to a product’s success than its practical elements” (Norman, Emotional Design, 2005, p. 5). Her main vehicle for operationalizing emotion in games is game feel — Steve Swink’s term, defined as “real-time control of virtual objects in a simulated space, with interactions emphasized by polish” (Swink, Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation, 2009, p. 32) — broken down into the 3Cs: Control (responsive, comfortable input — her Prince of Persia example, where a 900ms stand-to-run animation made the controls feel sluggish), Camera (framing and movement, balanced against motion sickness), and Character (form communicating behavior and weight).

Game feel feeds directly into presence — the illusion of unmediated immersion in the game world — which Hodent splits into physical, emotional, and narrative components, tied to Norman’s three levels of processing (visceral, behavioral, reflective; see Donald Norman). Her sharpest example of the reflective level triggering a visceral reaction is the tabletop game Train (Brenda Brathwaite Romero, discussed via Katherine Isbister, 2016): players move boxcars of passengers, only realizing at the end that the destination is Auschwitz — a gut-level guilt reaction (Damasio’s somatic-marker mechanism, see Chapter 7) triggered by an intellectual/narrative realization.

The Emotion pillar closes with discovery, novelty, and surprise: once a behavior becomes automatic, attention wanes (the same habituation/dishabituation pattern developmental researchers use to study preverbal infants), so introducing the unexpected — a new ability, an exotic mission, an outright surprise like Fortnite’s chest-that’s-actually-a-monster — periodically re-engages attention, as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of players losing track of their longer-term goals.

Game Flow

Hodent’s third pillar operationalizes Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory (1990) directly for games via the GameFlow model (Sweetser and Wyeth, “GameFlow: A Model for Evaluating Player Enjoyment in Games,” 2005, ACM Computers in Entertainment) — eight elements (concentration, challenge, player skills, control, clear goals, feedback, immersion, social) that Hodent shows mostly reduce to the usability and motivation pillars already covered, leaving challenge as the one genuinely new component.

On challenge, she draws on game designer Jenova Chen’s concept of the flow zone or flow channel (Chen, “Flow in Games (and Everything Else),” 2007, Communications of the ACM) — the band between boring-because-too-easy and anxiety-inducing-because-too-hard, which shifts with player skill. Her practical translation is the “challenge saw tooth”: rather than a linear difficulty ramp, alternate spikes of real challenge with easier stretches where players get to feel dominant with a newly mastered skill — contributed creative director Darren Sugg’s fictional “Crypts & Creeps” example walks through constructing one. On pacing (the pressure/cognitive-load side of challenge, distinct from raw difficulty), she cites Rogers’s Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design (2014) for Left 4 Dead’s “AI director,” which dynamically adjusts zombie spawns based on an estimated player stress level — and warns against compounding difficulty with sensory punishment (Rogers’s blood-splatter-obscuring-the-screen example), since an already-struggling player who also can’t see clearly reads the pile-on as unfair rather than challenging.

The learning curve and onboarding subsection ties Game Flow back to Part I’s learning material (see Constructivism (learning theory)): the same “easy to learn, difficult to master” principle (informally attributed to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell) that governs early mastery should be taught contextually and meaningfully, not via paused instructional text — her three-tier example (no context/no meaning → context but no meaning → context and meaning) mirrors the same “learning by doing” argument grounding Constructivism. She closes with flow breakers: anything that snaps a player out of absorption — an unfair death, a forcibly taken camera, an overlong cutscene, or a loss-aversion-triggering forfeiture of hard-won progress (see Loss aversion).

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