Alongside the Formal Elements of Game Design, there are also the Dramatic Elements, they are also very important.
Challenge:
Without challenge inside a game, the bliss reward for completing challenges and reaching goals may not be too challenging or bliss to begin with, it'd be rather boring to play and will lack any feeling of accomplishment.
Challenge can be implemented and varied within a game to generate very good experience.
Conflict, a previously explained formal element can be implemented to create challenges for the player and also generates that feeling of accomplishment you were unable to feel beforehand, by implementing frustration and an overall drive to want to beat the game.
As the player begins to learn the ropes, they'll get better at the game and generate a higher success rate. If you fail to counteract this growth in skill level by increasing the skill cap then the player will lose interest in the game and move on.
Be wary, increasing the skill cap is going to make it too hard for people to carry on with the game, you must find balance. The balance of achievement and frustration is key to keeping a player engaged throughout their playing experience.
Play:
Determining how you allow the players to play the game is a great way to help keep them engaged. Different types of play allow for numerous variations of player to want to be apart of your in-game world.
One type of play is the sheer competitiveness of E-Sports, which comes from games such as Overwatch, League Of Legends and Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, and speed running sessions, which consists of players trying to beat the entirety of their selected game in the fastest time possible. Competitive play helps to give your game a reputation and allows people to see that your game is a game worth trying to become the best at.
Another type of play is allowing the player to create their own stories and adventures, World Of Warcraft is the best example for this kind of play. Leaving the premise of the game to the creativity of the player allows for immense replayability.
Play should always be narrowed down to the premise you develop it to perceive, whether that be a combat-based RPG or a post-apocalyptic run and gun, but allowing for a breathe of freedom within the game is also good.
Premise:
The premise of a game is what the game is in a brief few sentences without going into detail about any actual detail such as settings or plot.
Premise is a good way of tapping into a wider audience. By summarising the concept of your game into something more people can somewhat relate to, more people are going to end up playing it.
A good example of the premise of a game is 'Falling into the Underground, with the power to become the best of friends or the death of everyone'. This premise is for the Indie RPG 'Undertale'.
Character:
Characters are major story elements that you have the power to control and influence in order to help absorb you into the in-game realities.
If a characters are designed well enough, then the character you play as as well as the characters you interact with should embody a long lasting emotional effect on you. To feel a love for the characters makes you fall in love with the game.
On the other hand, if a character is poorly designed then it can't reflect the story well. You'll end up getting bored of this character and moving onto something else because the character is the one telling the story.
An example of good character design is Joel from 'The Last Of Us'. The reason why he is such a good example of good character design is because he is a blank canvas for emotional and psychological development as the story progresses. In the beginning of the game, Joel lost his daughter due to misinterpreted identity (assumed she was infected from a disease sprouting zombies). As a result of this, Joel became a lot more reserved along with trust issues towards other people. He was sent to escort (smuggle) a girl, who was believed to posses the cure to this disease. As the story progresses, Joel becomes more and more open minded due to this new girl embodying sheer resemblance to his lost daughter (a reconstructed Father/Daughter relationship.
Story:
Story is the final dramatic element of game design. A game without story can definitely exist but a game that has story elements is a very good way to help immerse a player into the game.
If you want to include story, it has to be balanced. A story driven game with minimal story has nothing else going for it. A story driven game that is too story based might as well be labelled a giant cut-scene in some cases, a reason many take up on when disliking the Telltale franchise.
In a game where story and gameplay coincide, a good story based game focuses on story alteration. This allows for player choices to matter, further emphasizing character development. As this is a coinciding relationship, these story changes will in turn alter the gameplay experience. This allows for multiple story paths to root, creating replayability which differs almost entirely in a well developed example.
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