I’ve chosen to talk about Stardew Valley for this exercise. Among many of its mechanics, I’d like to highlight how several of them work towards incentivizing collecting / looking for unique items as a dynamic. At the most basic level, the inventory system, where players can use/store several items at a time, is a core mechanic that allows for the foraging and collection of new items. Other mechanics, such as having rare items like the Prismatic Shard (that have drop rates of 0.001% etc) explore incentives for collecting items due to their rareness. More complicated mechanics, such as unlocking upgrades by completing the community center, use the previous fact that some items are more rare than others to continue the incentive and proportional rewards regarding finding certain items. All of these mechanics (and many more, such as the fishing and randomly generated mine systems, a “Pokedex” style of completion for items, collecting food recipes, etc) create situations where players are incentivized to keep exploring the world that the game has to offer. This is very fulfilling, as the exploration usually impacts many other aspects of the game, such as more efficient farming, new buildings, weapons, and much, much, more!
