I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for a drive to work.

Okay, so today is another in my series, 10 things every game needs.

So I've talked about goals or goals, I've talked about rules, I've talked about interaction.

Today we get to the ketchup feature.

Okay, so I'm not sure if there's a better name for this category than the catch up feature.

When you talk about game design, this is the term that gets used, but I'm going to broaden a little bit today.

Really what I'm talking about with this mechanic or with this element of game design is you need to give your player investment slash engagement.

So here's a little secret.

When you design a game, you were trying to make sure the group as a whole is having fun.

But each individual player is judging the game on, did they have fun?

Was it enjoyable for them?

If people play a game and all their friends are having a wonderful time, but they're not, they don't walk away from the game

necessarily going, that was an awesome game. So one of the things that's very important is you want

to make sure that everybody playing the game has some investment in the game. And that's really,

really important.

And part of what the catch-a feature is, is really talking about how can we make sure that there's investment?

How do we keep people invested?

Now, number one, I'll talk this about a little more today, but number one is, can they

win?

That's the easiest way to keep them invested, which is, what can I do to win the game?

The second that somebody feels they can't win, that they are out of it, if you will, it is very hard to stay invested.

So there's something Richard used to call kingmaking.

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