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Tempo

The music, the environmental feel, and the action or tranquility of the game is the tempo. The important part is to change between fast/exciting and slow/relaxing. Otherwise each will lose its strength. The contrast is actually vital to uphold each extreme's meaning.

Even by itself the tempo can be very powerful in capturing the player for hours.

There is a lot to be learned from the movies industry. Did you know the best way to describe silence is to have a distant and small sound that reminds one of the silence? This could be something like a crow, a creaking door, and so on.

If you put the player in a very intense environment where she has to put her senses and skill to the test, you will need to give her some time in a calm and tranquil environment afterward so that she can rest. Also, the contrast will make her feel the intense environment fully (once it starts again).

The grand ending

If the ending is very good the player will have a solid anticipation when she is playing your next game. Not only that, the ending is one of the things people tend to remember long after they have played the game. This is the final reward and the meaning of the game. This is where the meaning of the hours played will be revealed.

The ending is a very important part and actually often overlooked. One good method is to design the ending early in the development.

Complex UI

If the players are motivated enough you could have the most complex UI ever created. Now, I'm not saying that a complex UI design is the best way to go, but often a more simple design is used when a more complex one would be better.

A UI that is mastered by the player should not hinder his abilities to interact with the game. This means some slow method to achieve something will have to adapt to the skill of the player, providing a faster method later on. In the end the UI is almost "invisible".

An example: To choose a weapon the novice player will probably use a menu and see the actual weapons and so forth. But the expert will use the keyboard to do the same action. The keyboard is the final level of UI to achieve this purchasing of weapons.

Another one: a very advanced navigation system might require five frustrating hours to master but in the end the gameplay will benefit from the rich environmental feeling, especially if navigation is a major part of the game (such as in space games).

The optimal approach is to provide the player a set of interfaces for different levels of mastery. The hard part is to make these sets work together and resemble each other. Since the player might master one aspect of the interface (e.g. navigation) and not the rest. This sounds harder than it really is. All you have to do is to provide an alternative, faster way, even if it demands more from the player.

That's my silver coin.
Good Luck Champions!

Sarbasst Hassanpour