I’m solving the latest murder in Shadows of Doubt and have just entered my main suspect's apartment when I suddenly hear steps approaching me and rush to hide beneath the bed so they do not catch me breaking into their apartment. As I lay there waiting for a safe moment to exit, a single thought catches my mind: “This floor could look good in my office.”
This thought happened because Shadows of Doubt has a secondary gameplay interaction that lets players customise their apartments using a décor editor. Despite it being quite rough and at times frustrating to use, I still found myself spending a lot of time between cases trying to decorate my apartment.
The secondary gameplay purpose of decorating my apartment got me thinking about all the times that I have become immersed in a game's secondary content as much or even more than its primary content. It brings up memories of playing way too many hours of Gwent in Witcher 3
Or spending hours trying to beat the journey of the prairie king in Stardew Valley
And I am hardly the first to observe this phenomenon of minigames being a major part of some games. In his video, “Why the hell are there so many fishing minigames?” (Adam Millard - The Architect of Games) argues that minigames exist as secondary gameplay loops and as diversions which function to combat habituation, and while I agree with his analysis and conclusion, I do think there is more to it than these minigames being ways for games to create downtime within the main gameplay loop.
Sometimes a minigame is so compelling that it can become the main reason why a player plays the game which the minigame is part of, as has happened with Gwent in Witcher 3 which was so popular that it got turned into its own standalone game, and in these cases I would argue that minigames evolve from ways of combating habituation into full primary gameplay loops in their own right. This can, in some cases, arguably be a failure of the intended main gameplay loop, but might also just be a secondary way of engaging with the game. Minecraft, as an example, has many multiplayer servers comprised entirely of minigames, and for some players, this is their main reason to engage with Minecraft. It is worth noting here that these minigames are designed by the community of Minecraft and not by the developers themselves, and thus they represent a new way of playing the game, which the players themselves have carved out. This also mirrors many of the gameplay modes, which are widely popular and in some cases, like prop hunt or team fortress, are so successful that they get turned into full games in their own right. Sometimes, a pursuit to design a diversion can capture the interest of players to the degree that these diversions become more than they were first intended as.
However, there are also times where minigames fail, by either being uninteresting or by not providing the appropriate break from the main gameplay loop, by either being too close in content to the main gameplay loop or by being too large a part of the game to remain a novelty. Take, for example, the hacking minigame in Bioshock.
In itself, there is nothing particularly wrong with the minigame, and it does function as a diversion from the main gameplay loop. The issue is that hacking is too good a solution to too many problems in the game. Every shop can be hacked to become cheaper, every alarm central can be hacked to be stopped or get on the player's side, and many combat scenarios get significantly easier by hacking turrets and security bots. In other words, hacking becomes one of the main solutions to issues in the game of equal and at times higher usefulness than shooting, and it can not carry the game on its shoulders; it is not designed for that, and it quickly suffers the very same issue of habituation that it tries to solve. Due to this duality of not solving the issue of habituation and not being interesting enough in its own right, the minigame fails.
Minigames are essential aspects of games, especially games where the player is meant to engage in high octane or highly repetitive gameplay loops, and at times the minigames can even serve as games in their own right, however it is essential to keep the balance and to not oversaturate a game with one particular minigame which then destroys the reason for it’s inclusion. Minigames need to be just fun enough not to feel like a waste of time and not to be so omnipresent as to become chores instead of diversions. And sometimes a minigame can be so compelling that it spawns an entire game from its concept and execution.