New Ways to Motivate Them: Three Design Techniques for Getting Players to Pursue the Fun
There are a lot of different ways to view game design. One helpful lens I want to talk about today is viewing game design as “the art of aligning player motivation with player interest.” In other words, if you reward the things people enjoy doing, they’ll like your game more. I’ve talked about this general concept in identifying the heart of a game experience and on its pitfalls in the risks of fun eutrophication. Today, I want to get into the nitty-gritty technical side with three specific techniques to create motivation for players to engage with the fun parts of your game.
Abundance Incentive (aka “You Optimize by Using It Up”)
I wanted to use a cornucopia, but do you have any idea how hard it is to find a public domain image of a cornucopia? Anyway, enjoy the dated meme.
Luke Skywalker is one of my favorite X-Wing cards, and the reason for this is really simple: his ability encourages you to play like a cocky kid who doesn’t see any challenge as insurmountable and always trusts his own instincts. When we were designing him, we wanted to use him to highlight the fun of the new mechanics for the Force. And we also wanted to do this while keeping one of the best parts of his First Edition ability: the fact that he can comfortably spend resources to attack while still having a solid defense. Luke’s Second Edition ability means that more than almost any other Force user, he will be spending a lot of Force charges. It was a good way to introduce people to a mechanic that could easily fall prey to one of the challenges of resource-based mechanics: the tendency to hoard.
It’s a common joke that if you give a gamer an exhaustible item, they’ll hold onto it the entire game, asking “What if I need it later?” well past the point where it is actually relevant or useful. In competitive multiplayer games, people usually spend consumable resources as efficiently as they can, because their desire to win outweighs their desire to hoard resources. But even so, the choice is often difficult and perhaps satisfying, but not especially fun. Even if spending a key resource keeps you in the game, it can feel like a serious loss to expend it.
So how do you get people to want to spend a resource? Make it so that they can only optimize the total amount of that resource they have over the course of the whole game if they actually use it. Force charges do this by having a low maximum (2 or 3 for most characters), but recharging every round. If you spend a few Force charges every round, you’ll likely spend a lot over the course of the game. But if you hoard them, you might only get to spend a few the entire game. Spending the resource is how you earn more of it. A game piece like Luke (one of the first pilots most players have access to) encourages them to try using the resource frequently in a low-risk environment, further breaking them out of the “never use valuable things” mindset many new players get trapped in and making the resource feel rewarding to use.
Pressure Incentive (aka “The Shrinking Circle”)
Image courtesy of the Fortnite Wiki, because I am far too much of a geriatric millennial to actually be hip to what the kids are up to. Are they still really into dental hygene?
The meme goes “the only way to win is not to play,” but much more of a real problem is “the only way to win is to drag out the early stages of play as long as possible.” In any game where both players have significant control over the terms of engagement, the initial pass is often crucial to determining the outcome. This means that each player will want to do everything possible to make that initial engagement favorable to themself. And while some amount of jockeying for position and head fakes can make for a lot of excitement, if it goes on for too long, it can suck the fun right out of a game. After all, unless the game ends after that initial engagement, it probably isn’t the most fun part of the game. In X-Wing, players’ early decisions are certainly important and exciting, but the game really comes into its own when the ships are in the scrum, dodging and weaving each other by narrow margins in a cinematic space battle. If both players feel the pressure to engage is too low compared to the risks of an imperfect engagement, the game can stagnate.
The shrinking circle is a form of pressure that highly incentivizes players to get to the core loop of the game. In X-Wing, the shrinking circle is time and, in theory, the Final Salvo tiebreaker, which usually favors one player or the other. These have generally proven sufficient to keep X-Wing games moving, but there have been notable exceptions, when both players felt better going to Final Salvo than actually risking an attack. Of course, these are pretty soft forms of the shrinking circle (which is why they haven’t always worked perfectly). The peril of ignoring them is low, and the amount of time you can potentially ignore them while hoping your opponent will give in first is high. In the popular digital genre of Battle Royale games, the shrinking circle is just that – a literal shrinking circle – and it moves quickly. A team can’t sit waiting for the perfect ambush because they know the map will shrink unpredictably, eventually killing them if they stay in that place for too long. A bit hamhanded? One could argue that, but it undeniably gets players to the action of running and gunning that most of them wanted in the first place when they showed up for the game.
When I designed the rules for dueling in the Legend of the Five Rings roleplaying game, I knew I wanted a strong pressure to engage. Duels are an activity undertaken by two players, and therefore almost always put one player character in the spotlight against a non-player character while relegating the other PCs to the background. So they have to resolve quickly enough that everyone else isn’t rebelling against the GM for ignoring them by the time the duel gets done. However, duels are also high-risk, high-reward affairs – a PC is far more likely to actually die in a duel than in a battlefield skirmish (fitting with the cinematic tradition that inspired L5R). To this end, I added the Staredown. This mechanic works as a clock that gives each player strife (a resource that can reflect stress, excitement, and nervousness, among other things). The amount of strife received increases each round, and if a character’s strife exceeds their composure (a stat that reflects capacity to stay alert under pressure), their foe has a chance to make a special finishing blow, potentially concluding the duel. The math works out such that taking a defensive strategy can work for a few turns, but inevitably, a player needs to make an aggressive move if they want to win. This keeps most duels in the 2-4 round range, which is about what most groups I had observed would tolerate in terms of watching one player fight alone.
Even if there isn’t an audience of other players to keep engaged, though, a shrinking circle can do a lot of good for a game by highlighting the core loop for players and leading them back to it when they go astray. Without it, they can get stuck in the land of analysis paralysis or attempts to win by reducing gameplay to the absolute minimum.
Risk-Taking Incentive (aka “Failing Forward”)
If it lands on 35, everyone gets a free drink. Does it cover the cost of your bet? Of course not. But hey, free drink!
Most games require risk-taking to win. But risk-taking is also where the biggest frustrations crop up for many players. Some days, if you need to make an average roll of 7 on 2d6 for a charging unit to reach the enemy in Warhammer 40,000, you just can’t see any outcome but that damned 6 (or snake eyes, if fortune has really decided to make the game a farce). But making risk-taking necessary isn’t the only (or even the best) way to incentivize it. Enter a popular RPG design turn of phrase, “failing forward.”
“Failing forward” refers to ways a GM can have a player character’s failed roll nonetheless move the story forward. It doesn’t mean player characters can never fail, just that their actions rarely do nothing. While some games benefit from failing forward and others are stronger without it, it’s a popular concept for a reason: for players, risks that are interesting from a story perspective can still seem very daunting if you’re likely to fail. Swinging on a chandelier during a swashbuckling duel is iconic and cool, but if you need to roll a 17 or higher on a twenty-sided die to avoid falling flat on your face instead, a lot of people will squash their creativity and say “Eh, I’ll just make a standard attack.” Some people love tossing the dice for the thrill of a low-probability gamble, but a lot of people find the risk too off-putting. However, if the player is confident that their chandelier antics won’t prove to be a waste of time – and even their fall will somehow factor into the story in an interesting way – then for many people, the risk becomes a lot more tolerable.
There are various ways to incorporate this concept into wargames, as well. Loss-triggered abilities are one example. These are abilities like Hate, that activate upon suffering damage or having some other bad thing happen to one of your pieces. After all, in an ideal game, your ship with Hate would never be shot. But if it’s going to get shot (and it probably is), at least you get something to help offset that negative outcome, opening up new possibilities for you by giving you back a valuable resource.
Another way to engage failing forward in competitive games is with ancillary results. In the Runewars miniatures game, the surge icon is such a result. Surges are a result on die that don’t contribute directly to success, but can instead be used to trigger other abilities and effects. While rolling surges won’t usually get you exactly what you wanted when you rolled, it opens up a new set of choices. Sometimes you’ll still roll all blanks, but when you’re picking up the dice for a risky roll, you can imagine not only the unlikely success, but also the more-likely option of having surges to spend on secondary abilities. Engaging the player’s imagination is just as important as giving them options to work with after the fact, and together, the two can be a powerful motivator to take high-risk actions that many players might otherwise find unpalatable.
A third option is abilities that reward you with some secondary outcome when you fail. These are a bit of a tougher sell in competitive games, in which nobody wants to imagine failing when they roll dice. They tend to work best when they are small abilities attached to more substantive effects, or highly thematic abilities. That way, they feel less like insurance and more like an extra option if your best plan doesn’t work out. Compared with loss-triggered abilities and ancillary results, these are the weakest of the three for competitive games, but rewards for failure can work when applied in the right circumstances.
Risk-taking incentives also have another benefit: they encourage players to build the flow of the game into their plans. Not only does this mentally prepare players to take some losses, but it also frequently improves the game for their opponent, as to fully optimize, one must allow that one’s opponent will likely gain some ground. Encouraging fair play behaviors in design is a topic that deserves its own article, though, and since I’ve wandered into a new article topic, that’s the sign that we should wrap up for today.