The Tickle Theory
I think game design should be like tickling.
I love tickling. I love it because it brings back a memory from my childhood when my uncle would tickle me.
My uncle was both personally and professionally dramatic in all that he did. Tickling was certainly no exception. When he would get it in his mind to tickle-torture me [I’ll get to the torture in a moment] he’d start with an expression—-nothing too extreme or over the top but there was no mistaking that his attention was on me. He could go from watching TV or chatting with someone to watching me from the corner of his eye with such intensity and focus. Then he’d arch a brow and slowly turn to face me, like a vampire hungry for blood. By this point I could already feel all my muscles turning to jelly. Escape was made impossible by the simplicity of anticipating what he was going to do to me.
As if that wasn’t enough, he’d slowly raise one hand in my direction, which would be tensed into a claw, and say in a cold and evil voice, “I’m going to tickle you and there’s nothing you can do to stop me…” The corners of his mouth would be upturned into a sinister grin; eyebrows knitted together.
By this point, I would be squirming, fruitlessly trying to regain control of my body, with a contradiction of laughter and dread keeping me immobilized and that was when he would slowly rise, claw still outstretched and…
slowly…
and deliberately…
…stalk towards me.
This usually served as motivation for me to try an escape that ended up looking like a scene out of a survival horror movie where the heroine is crawling and wimpering towards an desired egress that she never quite makes. That is precisely when he would lunge, like a lion on its helpless prey, and tickle me until I thought I would pee myself, all the while he’d be laughing like a madman.
As I remember this, I realize that game design is like this. I want players to anticipate the game the way I anticipated being tickled to death. I want them to be pleased knowing what is about to happen and curious about what they don’t know will happen, so that in the end the build-up and the pay-off merge into an experience that players will remember for years to come.
J.J. Abrams has a different spin on this and explains it much better than I have. Check the presentation he made at TED below.