Game Design Zeigarnik Effect Audit

Audit a design by asking how it uses unfinished business and whether that unfinishedness creates useful tension or just psychic clutter.

Use this skill when a feature depends on incomplete tasks, suspended goals, unresolved quests, unfinished collections, interrupted runs, dangling mysteries, near-complete progress bars, or other forms of cognitive open-loop tension. The goal is to evaluate whether the design creates healthy return pull, curiosity, and momentum, or whether it produces guilt, overwhelm, clutter, and coercive pressure.

Read references/family-conventions.md when you want the shared style, prioritization, and diagnosis rules for this game-design skill family. Read references/output-patterns.md when you want the preferred recommendation and minimal-fix structure.

Core principle

Unfinished things stick in the mind.

In games, that can be powerful. An incomplete task can create:

• return motivation
• curiosity
• anticipation
• desire for closure
• mental continuity between sessions