> Contrast this with an FPS or platform game. Your character isn't remarkably different from beginning to end. The only thing that really changes is your skill

> Contrast this with an FPS or platform game. Your character isn't remarkably different from beginning to end. The only thing that really changes is your skill level, and/or the items you collect (but which are usually expendable, or lost upon death and respawn). I believe the term you're looking for is "emergent gameplay," where the player's deeper understanding of the game is rewarded with new gameplay mechanics, perhaps forcing them to revisit what they already know. And I'm not simply talking about unlocking new guns. I'm speaking more of new abilities that put new demands on the player. Things may be harder in the short term. One example would be the portal jumping that the original Portal required. One of the last levels in the game had you peering several stories up in a room and realizing you had to get there, and you had to figure out how to do that. The portal jump could be frustrating to learn, and yet, the game required you to do so on one of the final levels. IMO, most modern games falter when they require too little of the player. The same basic gameplay is rehashed over and over with tiny tweaks applied each year -- Call of Duty is essentially the Madden strategy applied to FPS games. The skill curve is far too shallow, but if it were deeper, then they may not buy the next version. This is probably because people don't necessarily want to learn some fresh and interesting way to compete, they just want to take what they already know and go at it.