Emotional Design: Hope Springs Eternal

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!