The Adventure of Games
Every good game plays with the idea of continually adding new content to the game. The idea of a game depends on there being new experiences. This has been true since the beginning of video games: Pong has uncertainty from the minds of competing players, Rogue has randomly generated levels and permadeath (creating the Rogue-Like genre). Campaigns in games unlock new content with new gear or abilities, even in something like Minecraft where you have to first craft a bucket or mine diamonds to go to other dimensions. There are games that unlock new content through the player becoming more skilled: Spelunky 2 will give more and more challenging levels that seem to never end; Stephen’s Sausage Roll never once gives new tools, but offers more challenges from the player discovering new tricks the player can make. And there are games that are similar to an anthology: It Takes Two will give the pair of players completely new game mechanics with which to fight new monsters and solve new puzzles, Last Call BBS lets the player bounce between several games all following the same theme. Games with a story will slowly feed you new story elements while you play the campaign: the Half-Life series has a story happening unintrusively around the player, while the Far Cry series has cut-scenes you can’t miss.
There are a lot of things a game can do to keep the player’s interest in shorter time spans rather than across the whole game. Let’s use the example of a boss battle. The attacks from the boss can start slow and predictable and slowly become quicker and more varied. There can be ways of adding more enemies to the battle, say by a summoning spell or a door breaching. There could be changes in the room favoring certain strategies and disfavoring others. You might think you have the boss all figured out until, when the boss reaches half of its total health, it evolves into a faster, stronger, red-er version of itself. To keep the players interested, the developer has to continually add new ideas.
A lot of what is unfun in a game comes from the game offering you an incorrect amount of challenge. It isn’t fun to play Chess against a significantly better player–it isn’t fun to play chess against a significantly worse player. (It isn’t fun to play Chess if you don’t like Chess because the game won’t offer you anything but Chess.) In the same way it isn’t fun to listen to the same song for an hour, it is unfun to play puzzles that are greatly below your skill level. Challenge is a great way to Keep it Fresh because it makes the player toil over different strategies to use, making new ideas in the players head.
The original Half-Life was phenomenal at keeping the players interested. It starts off with a lot of world-building and environmental storytelling. The game quickly has you face enemies with no weapon, then with just a crowbar, then with a pistol and low ammo. Every few hours the game gives you more story, new weapons, new enemies and radically different environments to move around in. When you are given a new weapon, the levels and enemies will be shaped to favor that weapon. After a few minutes of playing around with your new tools, you will become an expert at using them. By the game's completion, you have 14 familiar weapons you can use to face the scariest hordes of enemies or bosses the game has to offer. There aren't any two moments that are the same, and that is what makes the game so fun and exciting.
New experiences are at the heart of the fun in gaming. It is the surprise, the excitement, the skill development, the challenges, the story, the aesthetics–the adventure. This same idea is why TikTok is so notorious. But the same thing can be found in the absolutely mind bending Steven Sausage Roll, or the tactful Slay The Spire, or the precise Cuphead. After playing a great game, there should be a lot to talk about. You don’t have to look long or hard to find this sort of adventure in games.