Games adults will want to play
Video games are being forced to evolve as the average player's age has increased to 28 years, and the time it takes to play a game to completion is now as much as 20-40 hours due to the rise of online gaming, according to this New York Times story (registration required):
For arcade games - much like pinball games before them - designers knew that good timing was the way to keep young customers playing. "You wanted to have something that the player can feel is successful in the first three minutes of the game, and something suspenseful a few minutes after that," Mr. Jenkins said. "Arcade games are five-minute games, and the players have to be in the middle of something when the machine kicks down so that they'll put in another quarter."
..."You work in cycles of time,'' said Steve Gray, director of game development at Electronic Arts. "The MTV generation has a three-to-five minute cycle that is important. There's 30 minutes for the TV cycle, and 90 minutes is the film. In games, you don't want three to five minutes to go by without giving them something."
...Traditionally, the best way to get a young player to keep playing was simply the score. But this kind of motivation can become stale quickly with more experienced players, said Bob Stevenson, one of the creators of the game Giants, a traditional action shooter that uses unconventional humor as a payoff system. "Scores are the most fundamental motivator," he said. "Our reward system is comedy within the game. It makes you laugh and motivates you to move forward in the narrative."
...But to keep their audiences engaged over the long haul, games can't just deliver satisfying payoffs: game designers also have to defeat their customers in interesting ways. "You need interesting, diverse ways of failure," Mr. Wright said. "Gamers have to believe that the next time they won't fail, because they now know about the monster hiding behind the door, or that you need to feed your Sim before it dies. You have this physiological urge to go and finish the problem: Your brain knows what to do now, and it wants to go back.."