Whose Fun Is It Anyway? Part One: Too Much of a “Fun” Thing
Today we’re going to talk about ecological problems as a metaphor for a challenge one will often face in designing a long-running competitive game. Let’s start with the metaphor and work out from there.
When is a Game Like a Pond?
(Credit: Nara Souza, Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission. Public domain.)
Have you ever seen a body of water that looks like this?
What’s often going on in this picture is pretty straightforward. Fertilizer runoff from fields or lawns gets into the pond (or other body of water), carrying with it lots of nitrogen and phosphorous. Much like the plants that the fertilizer was intended for, the algae in the pond grows explosively when given this excess of nutrients. At first consideration, this might seem harmless - it’s just algae, after all. But the algal blooms that form cover the surface of the pond, preventing light from reaching the underwater plants. Suddenly, the plants that were creating oxygen necessary to sustain the ecosystem of the pond begin to die off. Further, so many plants are dying and being broken down in the environment that their decay eats up even more of the oxygen. The environment becomes eutrophic (literally “well-nourished”). Too much of a good thing changes the entire environment and makes it uninhabitable to fish and other creatures that previously called it home. There are things that can be done to mitigate eutrophication, such as planting barrier strips of plants to absorb nutrients between fields and water sources, actively managing erosion with plants that hold the soil in place, and using fertilizer more judiciously by changing delivery methods (or avoiding it entirely, for lawns and other decorative plantings). This is by far the most serious issue this article will address, and is a problem that affects many bodies of water around the world.
A healthy competitive game can often be compared to a healthy ecosystem. And just like a body of water can become eutrophic if it receives too much of a good thing, a game can also become oversaturated in the mechanics that seem fun in isolation but turn the entire environment toxic after crossing a certain threshold. Without meaning to, a designer who is simply trying to give the local organisms “what they want” can easily turn the entire game into a sludge pit.
You Can Always Get What You Want (But You May Not Like It)
They don’t really look like box cars to me. Some spiders have six eyes - feels like a missed opportunity for a theme match with “snake eyes.”
As I discussed in my article on identifying the heart of a game, when you look at player behavior in aggregate, it converges toward the strategies that are effective rather than towards what players find the most fun to play. On the other hand, if multiple options are reasonably close in efficiency, players will generally pick the one they enjoy more.
But there is a second, even trickier corollary to that point: if multiple efficient options exist, most players will choose what is fun for them to play, not what makes the game as a whole the most fun activity to participate in. And this makes sense from the perspective of the player: in a game where you and your opponent both create a list beforehand without the other’s knowledge, it’s hard to conceptualize where their fun will be. Maybe you avoid some of the most egregiously unfun things that you’ve observed in the past, or that the community agrees are unfair, but fundamentally, you’re the one who’s going to have to use the list, not your opponent. It should be fun for you to play.
In games that rely on randomness, dice modification effects can be an excellent illustration of this point. The randomness of dice is one of the most widely reported “unfun” parts of miniatures games like Warhammer 40,000 and X-Wing: The Miniatures Game. While some people love the thrill of clattering dice (be they Christmas-colored octahedrons or other polyhedrals), to many others, they’re seen as a necessary evil. As such, players (especially competitive players) tend to report that effects that mitigate this randomness through rerolls, modifiers, or setting a die to a specific face as “fun.” If you offer players an effect that mitigates their randomness in a vacuum, they’ll usually accept it and tell you it’s making the game more fun. From the perspective of the designer, it can look like an easy win to add tons of these effects, because players almost always love them.
And this remains true as long as they are the ones who get to mitigate the randomness.
When the opponent gets to mitigate the randomness, and especially when the opponent gets to significantly mitigate the randomness (usually by stacking lots of these effects), players often report growing frustrated by feelings of “helplessness.” And this makes sense too; if you have to roll dice but your opponent doesn’t, you’re at a huge disadvantage. Dice in these sorts of games may be a necessary evil in the eyes of many players, but when the dice are allowed to fall where they may, they are at least viewed as unbiased in their unfairness. If the opponent’s mitigation of randomness is significantly more efficient than a player’s own, that apparent impartiality of dice vanishes.
But perhaps more significantly, when both players have substantial amounts of randomness mitigation, the entire game can begin to feel like it is sliding into a series of pointless inevitabilities worthy less of an epic battle directed by George Lucas and more of a novel by Albert Camus. The whole game becomes less fun for both players despite the removal of an element that each player would have reported as impeding their personal fun. And interesting, this loss of fun with an increase in predictability does not depend on one player having an advantage. Even if no player has a clear advantage in their list, games where both players have substantially mitigated the randomness of their army are generally reported as less fun. So this is not merely a question of balance, but of how players experience the game. This was a core problems of X-Wing 1st Edition in its waning days. Randomness might be unpleasant in the moment, but certainty will really squash fun at the larger scale. This is the eutrophic pond.
The Big Picture
The Nazca Lines (The Tree), Photographed by Diego Delso, 2015
Obviously, not all games use randomness, and even among those that do, the place that randomness occupies in the game loop has a substantial impact on how it feels in the game (as explained in this excellent article by Andrew Fischer). But in my experience, the idea that there can be “too much of a fun thing” can be applied more broadly. In X-Wing, it applies to post-maneuver movement effects, as well. At the start of 2nd Edition, these seemed even safer than dice modification - after all, people are moving their ship (the game’s core fantasy), and it relates to positionality and bluffing, two of the game’s pillars. Yet even so, when a ship hit a certain point of saturation of post-movement options - say, Kylo Ren with Supernatural Reflexes - the mechanic that an individual player generally finds fun to use started to become something that sours the overall experience. The algae starts building up.
And interestingly, “too much of a fun thing” can even be relevant when a mechanic is only present in a few pieces of content. Companions in Magic: The Gathering are exactly the sort of mechanic players probably reported loving during testing. And the appeal is really obvious: people love Commander (in large part because of the reliability with which they get to play and use their Commander, as I mentioned last week). What if you could have a Commander in standard games, with a drawback that sets certain restrictions on your deck? But if you and your opponent can both always play your favorite creature on the same turn, games become very repetitive. Because the probability of the event occurring (you getting this creature) is 100%, even a few cards with this mechanic can cause it to become oversaturated in the experience of the players. So it’s no surprise that Companions were quickly changed via errata to have additional costs, making them more subject to the natural rhythm of the game like other cards.
As an interesting sidenote, why doesn’t Commander suffer from this problem? Well, it can, but in my observation, as long as you’re not playing the same decks against the same people over and over again, it won’t. So much of winning and losing Commander is tied up in the specific politics of the table situation. Barring lockout combos that your friends will probably start refusing to play with, the same situation rarely recurs. Commander tends to get stale when you play only with the same people for too long. So ultimately, it’s about the saturation of the mechanic within a player’s experience, not the saturation of the mechanic as a percentage of the content.
When a designer approaches new content, they need to be aware that “fun” experienced and reported at the micro level can create a toxic environment if allowed to build up too much. In this way, actions that seem sensible when considered alone can lead to adverse outcomes when viewed as part of the wider picture. It’s part of the game designer’s job to see the big picture - to recognize that nitrogen and phosphorous are already in the pond, and indeed, are necessary for life - but in excess quantities, they’ll create an environment uninhabitable to fish.
So, what’s a designer to do? Well, much as with eutrophication, there are mitigating steps you can take. But you’ll have to tune in again to see how far I can stretch that already fraying metaphor. Come back next week for Part Two: Designing a Healthy Pond.