Progress and the lack there of

Progress and failure are related subjects, and failure normally means a lack of progress. On the other hand, however, lack of failure is not necessarily a sign of progress. A player needs to make progress in the game if he or she is going to keep his or her interest. Lack of progress will often lead to the player dropping the game before finishing it. What progress means may vary from game to game. In level based games, it means getting closer to finish the level. In sandbox type of games, there might not be any goals set by the game's designers, and the player is allowed to create his or her own goals. But even so, it is still just as important that the player can track his or her progress against these goals.

There are a few, commonly occurring, situations where lack of progress happens in a game.

• Excessive failure. This is the most common variant and occurs frequently. See my post on failure for a longer discussion.
• Game is lost, but failure has not yet been detected by the game. This is a common state in strategy games. For instance, when I played Civilization IV, I put to little resources into building military units. The computer opponent recognized that I was military weak, and attacked. At that point, I had already lost the game. There was no way I could make peace with my enemy, beat him in the field or make another civ join the war on my side. I could continue playing the game for many turns before I was completely conquered, but it was just prolonged losing.
• Player get lost, or don't know what to do next in order to create some progress. This happens frequently in games that are heavy on puzzles. It isn't always clear what is expected of the player, where the actual puzzle is, or how to manipulate the environment in order to solve it. A special kind of puzzle that easily halts my progress is when I have to run back and forth through one or more empty levels to deliver something picked up at one point to another point. Legacy of Kain, Defiance had a lot of these puzzles, and even though you always had access to a piece of text that explained what to do, finding a specific point in a maze with no map or compass proved difficult at many times.
• Player is making progress, but progress is painfully slow. Some times, the rate of progress is just to slow. There is a certain satisfaction in seeing new things and accomplishing new feats. Looking at something static, however, is not much fun. When I was playing SimCity 2000, I came to a point where the only new, and exciting thing I could build was the giant (half a million people) condos. I'm not sure how long time I would have needed to play in order to gain enough funds to build one, but at the rate I was gaining funds, it looked like I would have to be playing for months, or years before I earned one.
• The player is actually making progress, he or she just don't understand that he or she is. Some times, games have bad feedback systems. The player can make all the progress in the world and not appreciate it if he or she is unable to recognize the progress done. Many games have scenarios where the player is told to defend a position from enemy attack. If the game does not explain to the player that he or she is making progress by killing the enemies, the player may start to look around for that enemy spawner that must be shut down or that lever that shuts the gate or any other thing that might solve the situation. The same way goes for games where there is an enemy spawner that must be killed and the game does not clearly communicate this.