The feeling of progressing through a game, making character progress, and discovery new locations and things in the game is the experience of progression. This type of experience keeps the game fresh. The mechanics that add progression also has the purpose of easing the player into a game without making it overwhelming by bombarding the player with too much information at once. There exists several types of progression experiences with some examples mentioned below.
Unlocking gameplay
Unlocking new gameplay is likely one of the first things you think of when you hear the word progression. The experience of unlocking new gameplay elements is a key part of the gameplay loop and game experience. The gameplay elements you may unlock can be new weapon types, new abilities, modifiers to weapons and abilities and upgrades for existing weapons or abilities. The elements unlocked can also be new types of buildings in a building game, or new cards in a card-game and so forth. Anything that changes the gameplay elements directly upon unlocks creates this type of experience. The excitement of having something new to play with, or the experience of feeling like you progress through the game. This type of experience occurs immediately upon the unlock.
Long-term progression
The long term experience of progression is another very important and common type of progression experience. One type of long-term progression is character progression: by obtaining equipment, levels, experience and everything else that a character might obtain. It feels like you are progressing through the character and doing something worthwhile with your time. Another type of long-term progression is when a build or settlement grows over a long time. This type of experience is not an immediate and short lived experience, but a longer lasting experience that builds and builds as more and more progression is obtained over a long time.
Obtaining resources
Frequently you need to collect resources in order to unlock new gameplay or collectables. The collection of these resources feels like a small progression towards a goal, it is a gradual but constant feeling of progression towards a goal. You always have the sense that you progress towards a new thing because of resource collection. You might get a sudden big boost because you managed something great, or got lucky which leads to a larger resource drop.
Collectables
Games often features non-gameplay and non-narrative collectables, who’s only purpose is bragging rights or a goal for the player to work towards after they have completed the game. These collectables can offer a completionist experience of wanting to complete every minor thing that the game has to offer.
Unlocking new levels or discovering new locations
Games rarely stay in a single location on a map or use a single level. Most games will have the player progress through something like levels or maps. This can be specific unlocks of levels through a menu. It can be discovering new locations in an open world. It can be discovering a cool map generation in Minecraft. All of these experiences have the player discover a new location where the gameplay can take place.
The overarching experience of progression and discovery
Note that the progression system and the experience of progression are two distinct and different things. A progression system while very often serving the experience of progression also serves different purposes; sometimes you need to introduce a player gradually to a game, or lock something behind progression due to narrative reasons. Every other aspect of the game can influence the progression system, and by extension also the experience of progressing through the game.
A lot of the progression experiences are directly tied to people caring about the game. If they don’t care about the fundamental gameplay or narrative, they don’t care about the progression either. The experience of progression does not stand alone most of the time; there are exceptions in idle clicker games that do provide this experience without too many other types of experiences to support it. Most games do however rely on gameplay, social and narrative experiences to allow the progression experience to work.
A fundamental design premise for the experience of progression is that it should feel like a reward. It should not feel like a chore the player has to do in order to unlock what they consider to be basic functionality to the gameplay for example. The player should feel like the progression is an addition to the game, and not the core aspect of the game. The rate of progression is also very important to tune correctly, you want people to stay around for a while and to get time to play with previous unlocks, but you also don’t want the players to grow bored of the previous unlocks. People usually don’t mind a grind, people do however mind a meaningless and boring grind.