Game Design the Wrong Way

If a game is a series of decisions, then we need to ask what makes a good decision.

A decision that’s obvious isn’t a good decision (unless it takes skill, or you don’t have much time to make it).
A decision with no consequences isn’t even a decision.

I could do this for a while, but instead I’m just going to assert: What makes a decision interesting is it being a hard decision.

So, what makes a decision hard?

• Time constraints
• Number of choices
• Number of factors to consider
• Severity of consequences
• Duration of consequences
• Skill required

That’s at least a good start. With that, we can say that the difficulty of a decision is something like:

D = n-choices * n-factors * severity * duration * skill required / time allowed

What’s interesting here is that most of these things can vary based on the player.  Skill certainly can.  The number of choices may not seem to, but experienced players can immediately reject a number of choices for many situations, so that they are only focused on a smaller subset.  The factors to consider can similarly be reduced by a player that knows what is, and is not, important for a given situation.

Severity of consequences, length of consequences, and time required may not seem to vary, but I think even those can.  A good player may know how to mitigate the effects of a poor decision, reducing both the severity of duration of consequences.  Even time factors can arguably be mitigated, as a better player may have seen the decision coming in advance, and can have already been considering the appropriate action to take.

So, what value is any of this?

It gives us a way to analyze a decision, or a series of decisions, and describe how or why they are interesting or uninteresting.  If a section of a game is too hard, we can use these rough metrics to try to define *why* it is too hard.  Is it because the player isn’t given enough time?  Because there’s too many possible choices?  Or maybe too many things he has to keep in his mind at once.  Maybe the consequences are too harsh, or are too long-lasting.

Conversely, if a section of a game is too easy, and too uninteresting, it gives us a number of ways to analyze why.  Is it because while there are a number of choices, only one is really valid?  Maybe there needs to be more time pressure.

Another thing that it lets us look at is tension.  I’m going to define tension as “difficulty over time.”  Tension increases as a player has to make difficult decisions, and increases more if the decisions are more difficult.  Tension decreases over time.

If the tension of a game gets too high, the game can become frustrating.  If tension is too low, the game is boring.

And if tension is based on difficulty, and difficulty is based on the player, then it’s a tough job to balance the game to keep people happy.

And that’s, really, what this blog is about.

Well, I’m going to go with the Sid Meier quote, “a game is a series of interesting decisions.”

It’s an arbitrary choice, of course.  Any model we make about games is simply a mental model.  It can’t really be right, or wrong.  It can only be more or less useful.

I like the “decision” model for games because it seems to work the best for accurately describing games.  Let me give you a hockey example.  (I’ll use hockey examples a lot.  It’s a rich game, and far enough away from typical video game design to talk about ideas in the abstract without dealing too much with minutae of a particular genre.)

How would you define what “hockey” is?  Do you define it by the equipment?  If so, then that’s a pretty hard definition, because everything has different equipment.  Olympic hockey uses a larger rink than NHL.  Inline hockey isn’t on ice, and uses a smaller rink still.  Street hockey often doesn’t even have skates.  Both street and inline hockey can use balls instead of pucks.  Protective gear between ice hockey and inline hockey varies somewhat, and by the time you get to street hockey, there’s very little protective gear.  But these are all recognizably “hockey.”

But broomball isn’t.  It’s played on ice, and uses hard “brooms” that are basically sticks.  They even have goalies.  So on the equipment scale, it’s somewhere between street hockey and ice hockey (uses shoes like street hockey, is on ice, is on a regulation sized rink, but doesn’t use traditional sticks).  In terms of just “using the same gear as hockey,” it would seem to qualify.  But nobody would suggest that it’s hockey.  Even if you played broomball with a smaller ball (the size of a street hockey ball), and sticks that looked like regular hockey sticks, it still wouldn’t really feel like hockey.

Is it the rules?  If so, that’s a hard sell, because different places play with different rules.  International hockey is played on a larger rink, and with different icing and offsides rules.  Inline hockey generally doesn’t have icing or offsides rules, and has four players on a team instead of the usual five.  Rules change all the time - icing didn’t exist for many years, and in the last few years, the NHL has added an area behind the goal line where goalies aren’t allowed to touch the puck.

Again, at first glance, broomball has at least many of the rules as some hockey variants.  In terms of specific rules, it’s about on par with street hockey (which generally has few rules).  And the core rules (hit something into a net, past a goalie, using a stick-like thing) are the same.  But yet street hockey is hockey, while broomball isn’t.

What remains the same in all of these games is the decisions that you make, at least at a core level.  In all of these variations, you move around, manipulate a fast-moving object with a stick, and try to outmaneuver your opponents so that you can get a good shot, and hopefully score.

And that’s where broomball differs.  The use of street shoes on ice kills mobility.  The large number of people play take an emphasis off of maneuvering.  What’s left is moving a ball around, and smacking it at the goal.  Since the players are mostly static, maneuvering around a player becomes a non issue - just smack it in the general area of the goal, where you will almost certainly have someone just waiting for it.  There will be somebody from the other team there, too, but so what?  That’s pretty much the case everywhere on the rink.

Yes, different forms of hockey (ice, inline, street) have slightly different decisions to be made.  Most inline and recreational hockey doesn’t allow checking, so that’s one decision that you just can’t make.  But the core decisions that make up “playing hockey” are the same in each of them.  Most of the rules do not change the decisions that need to be made, they just weight the choices differently.

This doesn’t mean that broomball is bad.  It’s just not hockey.  And when we are looking to define games, we want a definition that can be matched to reality, and tested against existing games.

And hockey is a good litmus test for this.  A definition for hockey that explains why street hockey and Olympic or NHL hockey appear to be the same game, while broomball isn’t, is probably a pretty good definition.

And the only definition of a game that seems to do that is defining a game as the decisions that are made.