The Skinner Box of Non-Random Unlocks

[droqen]

I was playing Beast Breaker and I was having some trouble. The game itself was interesting. Flawed, but interesting. And yet, I found myself playing it and hating it. I was dragging myself across hot coals for something, but for what?

✨ The Skinner Box
of Non-Random Unlocks ✨

In Beast Breaker, you play the game awhile and the game provides you with new items: a new cloak with better stats, a new sword with weird new abilities, a brand new weapon type. That's all well and good, and I wanted to check out these new items! I wanted to see what it was like to play with them. So I kept playing. Yeah, there's some randomness in the game, but the real randomness that got me was this discrete, staid randomess: each freshly-unlocked item could theoretically make me love the game even more.

I kept playing because I had to play to unlock new stuff, but I couldn't know ahead of time whether the new stuff was going to be good; when I had stopped enjoying the game, I still compelled myself to keep playing because unlocking new stuff, as based on my past experience, could make the game suddenly better! It depends on whether the new stuff was really cool, whether it aligned with my tastes.

HOW TO PLAY: Determine whether I love the game as it is, now. If I don't, I can safely stop playing?

Maybe this isn't even a skinner box thing. the idea falls apart. well, it's not the primordial soup for nothin'.

HOW TO DESIGN: I dunno! I don't think this is a designer problem. Is it? IS IT???A arggghhh