Anyway, I'm a little bit skeptical of your wording - "longer goal-chain > greater depth of engagement", because that kind of suggests that games should be really long. I would say it's more about how much each "intermediate goal" (arc) tightly relates to the final, true goal of the game, not the "number of intermediate goals". Basically I think the number of intermediate goals does need to be higher than some number and lower than some number, but within that range, the numeric value is totally system dependent. Sometimes a very low one will be preferable to a high one, etc.

Click to expand...