Status as a Game Mechanic

Note: I've been using "mechanic" to refer to what the game does "behind the scenes", and using "gameplay" to refer to what the player does with his time. However I'm used to using "game mechanic" and "core mechanic" to refer to what I'm now referring to as gameplay... I think I need to revise my nomenclature. (See my previous post on game design theory for some discussion on these terms.)

Definitions

Players give many reasons for playing games, but do you trust your players? Are they all sufficiently introspective and educated to understand their own motivations? They know if they enjoy something, but I'm talking about why they enjoy it. I'll go into my own theory of fun at some later point, but for now, let me say that one of the reasons that players enjoy games is the status that they can show off for their achievements.

I'm not talking about achievement directly. If happiness is the achievement of value, then a well-adjusted person is happy (and enjoys a game) when he achieves game goals that he values. But that's not status -- status is telling your buddy how you did in the game last night, or riding your new mount through a capital city in Warcraft.

The issue is a bit complicated becomes there's both showing others as well as knowing that you achieved that status item. The braggart doesn't care about getting a status item except to the extent that he can brag about it. The latter is like the guy I mentioned above, someone that has internalized the game goals as his own values and enjoys the status symbol as a record of achievement.

My point is that it doesn't matter why a given player wants a status item -- just that he does want it.

The lesson is obvious: put status items in your game.

Examples

Many games have implicit status items. In RPGs, it's your character's gear. This is one of the great driving forces in WoW: do you have your dungeon 3 set? A flying mount? An epic flyer? Tier 4? Tier 6? Legendaries? Status in MMOs also comes from the group you play with: has your guild cleared Kara, Gruul's, or Black Temple? How far are you through the Plateau? I'm calling these status items implicit because the only obvious score in the game is your level - and is the same for all players at max levels.

In platformers, progress through the game and the accumulation of collectibles and tokens are status indicators. The game tells you what the status items are, and how many you've gathered so far. Yet these items are intrinsic to gameplay; the game is essentially nothing but pushing your status up.

In multiplayer first-person shooters, your status is your standing on the leaderboard. There's not much else to the game other than that score. Single-player shooters might also have a leaderboard that's shared; XBox 360 games typically have a Live component that shows how you measure up against the playerbase. (Level-based shooters have implicit status measured as progress through the game.)

The 360 brings up another way of gaining status: achievement points. I was playing Guitar Hero with a friend last weekend and he was going for a bunch of easy achievement points to push his Gamer Score over the 20,000 mark. We were joking about the arbitrariness of the achievement, even while going for it.

That's the way the brain works

It's the way the brain works -- which is my message here. Even if you know you're shooting for an arbitrary or meaningless goal, you do it anyway. Some people gloat in their shiny new beemer or tier 4 set piece or gamer score, and for them status symbols are clear motivators. The rest of us kinda catch the same disease by association. We might not feel the need to tell everyone about our status, yet we seek it just the same.

It's the score, it's what you're supposed to do.

This ties in a bit with my previous discussions on open worlds. Be careful of removing any sort of status indicator, or your player might think he's stumbled on a toy and wonder what he's supposed to do with it. Obviously we don't want to play or design boring games that people feel stuck playing just because they're chasing some status symbol. However, if your game is good, that status symbol can show them the way.

Don't be afraid of character levels; players like them. Use them to point your players towards the fun stuff you put in the game.