The player's experience
We need a process and method to outline this enjoyable experience that we create for players. Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan (2006) drafted a paper sharing their research on The Player Experience. They called it The Player Experience of Needs Satisfaction (PENS) model. They evaluated and proved that there needed to be at least three things in the player's experience to make that experience more enjoyable: competency, autonomy, and relatedness.
Competency
Players need to feel like they are competent enough to play the game. However, they also expect some level of challenge throughout the game. The challenge and the player's level of competence should ideally match. As a player becomes more skilled (more competent) at playing the game, the game becomes more difficult. The author, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, refers to this as "flow." It is that ideal state where a task is not so difficult that a person gives up and quits. But it's not so easy that they get bored.
The goal is...