Practical guide to controlled experiments on the web: listen to your customers not to the hippo
Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
A framework for analysis of 2D platformer levels
Sandbox '08 Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Video games
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
Mining game statistics from web services: a World of Warcraft armory case study
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
Analysis of level design 'push & pull' within 21 games
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
Placing a value on aesthetics in online casual games
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The art of game design: a book of lenses
The art of game design: a book of lenses
The impact of tutorials on games of varying complexity
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Optimizing adaptivity in educational games
Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
A trace-based framework for analyzing and synthesizing educational progressions
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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Secondary game objectives, optional challenges that players can choose to pursue or ignore, are a fundamental element of game design. Still, little is known about how secondary objectives affect player behavior. It is commonly believed that secondary objectives such as coins or collectible items can increase a game's flexibility, replayability, and depth. In contrast, we present results from analysis of two popular online Flash games showing that secondary objectives can easily harm the retention of many players. We support our findings with data collected from over 27,000 players through large-scale A/B tests in which we measured play time, progress, and return rate. We show that while secondary objectives can encourage long-term players to extend their playtime, they can also cause many players to play for less time. By modifying secondary objectives so that they reinforce the primary goal of the game instead of distracting from it, we are able to avoid negative consequences and still maintain the retention of long-term players. Our results suggest that secondary objectives that support the primary goal of the game are consistently useful, while secondary objectives that do not support the main goal require extensive testing to avoid negative consequences.