Dangling the carrot is a technique game publishers use to quantify how many hours of gameplay you will get out of a title. They withhold features of the game and to force you to earn them through hours of gameplay-in many cases these features can only be unlocked in single-player mode. The game publishers argue that this means that if you were to play the game from start to finish (at least once) that you would be guaranteed at least xx amount of hours of gameplay--in theory this adds "value" and proponents would argue that it makes the game worth more to the gamer, and helps to justify the steep sticker price. By withholding features they argue they are inspiring you to want to keep playing the game so that you feel both a sense of accomplishment and as though you got your moneys worth. This paradigm is further encouraged by Microsoft’s Achievement Points system which rewards players for unlocking achievements, in most cases, through many hours of gameplay or through accomplishing difficult feats in-game. While all this "theory" does to a degree serve these purposes, keep in mind that the only technique game developers relied upon to keep you playing their games in the early days was superior GAMEPLAY. The emphasis was on making simple games that could be played over and over again and still be fun-even when dusted off and re-released decades later. Because the development process now focuses on these additional variables to essentially force you to play the game for a specific amount of time if you want access to many of its features, in many cases gameplay suffers--or the only reason people keep playing a game is because they are obsessed with getting all the Achievement Points, or because the want to finish, or play the game through to its conclusion-to see how the story plays out-not necessarily because they enjoy playing it. The reality for many is that they either don't have time to play a story driven game from start to finish, or even if genuinely enjoy playing it to the end, they probably don't want to play the story over again. Once you are done with the story, you have to hope online play remains enjoyable if you expect to get long-term enjoyment from your investment.
Perhaps the biggest problem this paradigm creates is that it neglects and disenfranchises the multiplayer-only gamer. If you are not a gamer who generally enjoys, or has time to play games in single-player mode, then this "carrot dangling" presents a HUGE dilemma. Imagine you are not a teenager or recently unemployed (I know that is hard to imagine right now) but please work with me here. Maybe you do not have countless hours of FREE time on your hands, but you enjoy playing the occasional video game with friends, and you just dropped roughly $65-70 USD (after taxes) on a racing game. You plan on inviting three of your friends over after work to race with you (throwing in a little trash-talking and friendly competition.) When you pop the new racing game into your console, you discover that you have only a few choices of cars (most of the faster, cooler cars are locked and unavailable.) Then you RTFM, only to find out that the COOLEST ones can only be unlocked by playing the game in SINGLE PLAYER for countless hours that you do not have to spare. Your only hope now is that you can find a "cheat code" online that unlocks those extra cars or guns, or level maps you want to play with your friends. IN most cases, the end result is that you are now angry that you just dropped $70 on a game that forces you to race your friends in the same cars you all drive to work everyday. You don’t care that more cars can be unlocked in single player, nor do you care how many achievement points you can get--you JUST WANT TO RACE.
Another huge problem with this paradigm reveals itself if you want to insure that you are the only one racking up points on YOUR gamertag. For example, a group of friends are coming over to play Guitar Hero or Rock Band offline, but you don't want to sign-in with your gamertag-because you don't want your friends to get the achievements for you-or mess up your stats. If you sign in with a local gamertag and start Guitar Hero II or III you will only be able to play the first 5 songs at any difficulty until you have played for hours to unlock them all. Maybe you only wanted to play certain songs...and not suffer through the ones you hate...in the end nobody wants to play-either because they get tired of trying to get past the first five songs or they don't like the choices. You may say, but there are some games that allow you to unlock features through co-op gameplay including Guitar Hero--and that’s fine, but it still doesn’t solve a fundamental problem. Let’s say you have a foursome who just got Rock Band and want to start jamming together-so you form a band, and start playing-but you suck. This means you keep must playing the same five songs until you want to strike someone nearby-and all the songs you thought would be fun to sing are at the higher levels that you may NEVER get to-especially if you play as poorly as I do.
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