This report explores what great games do to create a feeling of meaningful discovery and memorable experiences, aswell as how to facilitate exploration to increase player engagement and immersion.

To do this, we limited our scope to exploring what we defined as "Environmental Discoveries" in Open World games. Defined as so:

“Environmental Discovery" describes the process in which a player discovers intentional game-related content, which is bound to a geographic location within the game, where the value of the discovery depends on the players goals.

To properly explore our findings we created a model to visualize different phases of discovery.

To examine our hypothesis, we formulated and conducted several playtests around the game "Sable". Testers were asked to play for 45 minutes to an hour, whereafter they would answer a questionaire about their discoveries.

We compared the answeres with themselves, aswell as collected session and playstyle data such as "Discoveries-per-minute" and "Player Motivation)

We've chosen to seperate and visualize a discovery as four parameters: Pre-Discovery, Journey, Reward and Post-Discovery.

This model can be used to gain new perspectives on discovery by: 

• Visualizing preffered discoveries as related to archetypes  
• Visualizing different types of discoveries like collectibles 
• Analyzing existing discoveries to gain new insight‍

​We hope through our model, to help game developers better communicate the experiences that arise as a part of discovery. Along with deeper knowledge of what parameters can be tweaked and their subsequent effects.