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Emotional Design: Hope Springs Eternal
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Location: Blogs Theoretically Speaking |
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| Posted by: Andrew Douglas |
7/8/2006 |
I really don't want to make gamers cry. If you play my game, and you cry, then I've failed.
Maybe
I'm jaded, and closed-off emotionally, but that's not something that I
find fun... and I really want my games to be fun, first and foremost.
Emotions do have to be played upon though when designing your game,
even if you are doing it unintentionally, or if you don't quite
understand why it is that you're doing what you're doing. We are
emotional creatures, and in order to have fun while playing video
games, we must feel like we have some hope of succeeding, even when
that chance is slim to none. Well, that's easy enough, right? Well...
no... no it's not.
The first trick is that you can't let the
gamer know they are going to win. An inevitable victory does not
instill hope, it instills boredom. That's an emotional state I want to
avoid when designing my games! I can't tell you how many games of Warlords II
I played - it was a great game - but it was a lot more games than it
needed to be. See, after about 20 turns or so, I would find that I had
reached a dominant position on the board, and once one player got in
the lead, the resulting victory was nearly entirely assured. Once I hit
that point in the game, I would quickly lose interest and start a new
game, and return to feeling like one small little village that had
nothing but a hero and a prayer.
On the other hand you have
certain, abject failure. We've all run into it in a game, where we've
died so many, many times that it begins to feel more like we are
trapped in the movie GroundHog's Day than we are playing a fun,
entertaining video game. And we all know that feeling when the tide has
turned against us and there is no longer any chance for survival. This
death march into defeat ain't much fun either. My youngest son is fond
of shutting off the game console right in the middle of playing certain
games with his older brother, because once my oldest starts winning,
there isn't any hope of catching him. It's a failure in the game's
design if falling behind by just a little is all it takes to lose any
hope of winning the game. That, and it's an example of how my youngest
can be a bit of a spoiled brat, but that's another story altogether :)
There
is also a place, in the middle of this spectrum that is composed of
completely random game elements that make strategy pointless as at any
minute, any number of possible outcomes could occur. There are several
examples I've come across, especially while playing games with my
children, that fall into this trap. But there are some great examples
of games that require using strategy to steer what is otherwise a
random event, which allows the game to stay remarkably balanced for
everyone playing. Yahtzee! is a fun game, not because it's completely
random, and therefore fair. No, it's because with strategy you can make
the most out of what is otherwise a completely useless turn, and turn
an early failure or two into a late game victory. You have to play
smart and get a little lucky to win. It's like the collectible
card game - Magic: The Gathering. You never really feel completely out
of the game, even when you have one point of life left and your
opponent has a superior board position. You always have the possibility
of a comeback through drawing cards and by playing the right cards at
the right time. Top decking a fireball for the win doesn't feel like
pure luck either since you put that fireball spell in your deck, just
for such an occasion. Sure, MTG has problems (mana screw for example
just isn't fun for anybody), but it does an amazing job of giving the
player hope, right down to the end, because you never know when you're
going to draw your win condition.
I'll wrap this up with an example from our game, My Bogle,
where we ran into a hopeless situation - well, rather, we needed to
give the player more hope. Our game is essentially a game of tactics,
and that means you want to have superior forces with a superior board
position to win. Trying to win a game of chess when all you have left
is your king and a rook is difficult indeed. If only you had a pawn,
then you could get your queen back! Even the mighty game of chess has
rules designed specifically to give the player hope. Anyway, the
problem was that once you actually got a superior force, the game play
quickly became a "mop up" operation. We found that there were seldom,
if any, "Rocky" endings, where the person who got beat up early had any
hope of coming back. When it did happen, it was great! We wanted to play up that experience as much as possible. So we had to construct
another layer of game play that allowed a smaller, weaker force to
defeat their larger, more powerful enemy. But it had to be a strategic
element, one where the player was in control, as we could not allow our
tactics game to turn into a game of sheer chance. We wanted the player
to be able to use the element of surprise, to create a mismatch in
their favor, so we developed what is essentially a power-up mechanic
that is up to the player to dole out to their characters when and how
they see fit. We are now working on embellishing the power-up system
even further to add more tactical decisions regarding your board
position - do you stretch yourself thin and go for the power-up, or
forgo the power-up to concentrate your forces against your opponent's
weaknesses. We specifically avoided a resource based system that can
just exaggerate the imbalance between players, and also turns the game
in a direction that is far less "pick up and play". The great thing
about the system is that it provides the ability to strategically
"Surprise!" your opponents. And that's where I'll pick up next time:
Playing with Fear. Until then, think about ways to make your games fun
for the guy in second, third and fourth place. We all end up there at
one time or another, and if your game isn't fun while playing from
behind, then your game hasn't got much hope :)
-Andrew
theoreticalgames.com
P.S. Obligatory graphic below. Enjoy!
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