Whose Fun Is It Anyway? Part Two: Design a Healthy Pond
Last week, I discussed the challenges of “fun eutrophication” in long-term game design: How designs received as “fun” in isolation can build up to overwhelm the system and make the game as a whole less fun. But I punted on actually discussing how to address this problem, because the article was getting a bit too long-winded. Today, we’ll dig into that topic: What are some ways a designer can prevent and mitigate fun eutrophication?
To get what is hopefully obvious out of the way at the start, the answer isn’t “whenever testers/players report enjoying a piece of content, don’t implement it or remove it.” This is a course-correction error it’s easy for designers of highly competitive games to fall into, and it leads to its own problems: long-term stagnancy of design and, ultimately, decay of enthusiasm for the game. While not all content needs to be competitively oriented, some portion of it needs to be for a competitive game to thrive. A similar phenomenon to fun eutrophication, the dreaded “power creep,” occurs in many competitive games because the alternative to making progressively stronger content is making new content weaker than old content. And that will starve the game for certain, so if you must err in one direction, err on the side of content people will actually want to use. The same is true of fun in design. A pond with no nitrogen and phosphorous is one without plants, which means the other forms of life that can thrive there are much more limited. Too much of a good thing does mean that on a certain level, the “thing” is good, and perhaps even necessary.
Instead, as with preventing eutrophication while continuing to farm (for which some amount of fertilizer use is usually necessary or at least helpful), what is needed are management techniques. Fertilizing efficiently, planting buffer fields, and even artificially cycling the water to spread oxygen can mitigate or prevent eutrophication. To keep testing the elasticity of this metaphor, I’ll use these as three models for managing content in a game environment.
Using Nutrients Efficiently
A little push goes a long way.
In the early days of most games, there are things that would never have gotten have printed later. Magic’s “Power Nine” are a classic example, but even much more mundane cards like Dark Ritual (get three mana for one) from the original set had enough of an unbalancing effect on the overall game to be pushed out over time. Dark Ritual is fun (for the player using it) - you get more mana, so you get to play more cards, and people love playing their cards. It’s less fun for the person sitting opposite, who gets to watch turn one Hypnotic Specter get played five games in a row. I got well acquainted with this back in high school (spoilers: I was not the person casting Dark Ritual into Hypnotic Specter, but I was the person just about ready to throw my deck at my best friend if he did it again).
In X-Wing First Edition, one place where fun eutrophication occurred was dice modification (as discussed last week), but another was action economy (cards that gave a ship extra actions). The card Push the Limit made action economy widely available to all pilots and, at the time it was printed, seemed like a really good idea. It was well-received in development for giving fragile ace ships that much-needed bit of extra maneuverability while still being useful to less maneuverable ships by granting access to double modifications. And it was fun! Doing a boost into a barrel roll with your A-wing or TIE interceptor made you feel like you were behind the stick of a zippy, maneuverable starship. In many ways, it was a great piece of design.
In other ways, Push the Limit was a huge problem. Its ubiquity made the Elite Pilot Talent slot nearly a requirement for a pilot to be considered for competitive use (outside of some niche cases). It so dramatically increased action efficiency that going without it was a very unusual choice, but what’s more, it didn’t improve the performance of all ships or pilots equally. High Pilot Skill pilots got vastly more use out of it, as did any pilot who could stack it with other forms of action efficiency. Because extra actions often translated into extra dice modification (through the Focus, Target Lock, and Evade actions), it also stacked well with other forms of dice modification. It became hard to design pilots without the Elite Pilot Talents lot because lacking access to Push the Limit so dramatically curtailed their effectiveness. Meanwhile, it became challenging to design anything for one of the most ubiquitous slots in the game because this one card was so desirable. Push the Limit was the equivalent of dumping fertilizer all over your field and letting it run into the pond: it was way too much of a good thing.
When Frank, Alex, and I sat down to discuss X-Wing 2nd Edition, we knew that Push the Limit was going to be one of the most complex cards to handle in the process of translation. On the one hand, it was beloved. On the other hand, it singlehandedly reduced the variety of viable lists more than any other card and made numerous already-pronounced issues even worse. We knew that we needed to preserve some ships being able to do multiple actions in a turn, but we also knew that letting nearly any pilot do any two actions was unbalancing in the extreme. And this is where we came up with the idea of linked actions: actions that directly lead into another specific action.
So, like a farmer using an irrigation system to deliver nutrients to the roots of plants directly, we built a system for delivering specific action combinations to specific ships, while giving a couple of ships innate chassis abilities that granted even greater freedom of actions. This meant less design “runoff,” significantly reducing the unintended consequences of players stacking multiple actions with other beneficial effects. Action economy is still an important part of 2nd Edition, but it’s distributed by the system itself rather than being delivered in an unregulated manner via a generic upgrade card.
To generalize this idea: when you find something that is both fun and warping to the ecosystem, figure out how to deliver the experience of its fun in the smallest dose that accomplishes what you want. You don’t need to maximize the quantity or value of a good thing for it to be enjoyed by players. With the benefit of hindsight, one can say that if First Edition Push the Limit had allowed a ship to perform a specific action on its action bar as a second action (such as a boost or barrel roll) or if Dark Ritual had some additional requirement that made it less likely to be useful on the first turn (like many of its successor cards), it would have been strong enough, and still been a fun tool for players that achieved its purpose without having such a dramatic effect on the overall game.
Planting Buffer Fields
The color pie helps keep effects from eroding into one big, colorless slurry. Kind of like the planeswalkers stopped the Eldrazi from turning the multiverse into one big colorless slurry. Actually I have no idea if that’s accurate or not. My Magic lore knowledge is mostly from Invasion. Is Gerrard still around?
Another means to keep fertilizer out of waterways is planting buffer fields (also called riparian fields). These are grasses and similar plants that both absorb runoff nutrients and slow the process of erosion, which prevents soil from flowing into the waterways. In game design, buffer fields are the internal limits you place on your design space and the external limits you place on the choices players are allowed to make. Both of these are means of “siloing,” which keeps certain pieces of content from interacting.
A simple example of an “internal limit” buffer field is Magic’s famous Color Pie, the thematic constraints that define certain mechanics as “belonging” to certain colors. The color pie isn’t coded into the rules of the game in any way; in theory, a designer can make a blue card that deals direct damage. However, the internal convention says that such cards should be infrequent, and less efficient or more limited than their red counterparts. This has important thematic ramifications, helping to give each color a personality and feel. But importantly, it also prevents players from doing everything with a single color. To combine certain effects, a player must accept some amount of inefficiency - either building a multicolor deck, or choosing less efficient cards. Because this paradigm exists within the design of Magic, the content of the game naturally pushes back against efforts to simply put all of the best cards into a deck. If the best creatures are green but the best direct damage is red and the best card draw is blue, one must naturally accept a tradeoff: either the deck becomes less efficient (because it becomes more likely that the cards you draw won’t match the lands you need to play them) or the player gives up some types of effects (or at least selects less-efficient cards to produce those effects).
An example of an “external limit” buffer field can be seen in Warhammer 40,000 8th Edition’s detachment system. For many years, Warhammer 40,000 had hard limits on combining armies (with a few thematic exceptions, it was impossible). But combining armies was thematic to the lore of the game and had obvious sales ramifications, so eventually the designers relented and added a thematically driven alliance chart. Unfortunately, much as tearing out a barrier field causes erosion that exacerbates eutrophication, when this system was opened up, the game was quickly plagued by power combinations created by taking the best force-multiplying passive abilities from several armies and using them together to get dramatically more value out of all of the army’s units. With 8th Edition, the option to combine armies remained (as it had proven quite fun), but much of the barrier field was replanted with a simple change: the passive aura abilities were no longer shared. Each army could only improve its own units. And since each army is already siloed to a large degree, this meant that the number of ways a unit could be improved was naturally limited. Combined force armies remained popular (indeed, too popular due to some unrelated issues), but this issue was resolved.
X-Wing 2nd Edition had a number of these buffer fields, but one of the clearest examples was created for the Tactical Relay upgrade slot introduced with the Separatist faction. When I was designing the first cards for this slot, I knew that the Tactical and Super Tactical droids needed to be an important part of this faction thematically and area buffs were a fun way to reflect their different personalities and strategies. But I also knew that we would quickly have stacking problems if multiple Tactical Relays could be used in the same list. While one answer would be to simply make Tactical Relays really expensive to make taking more than one unappealing, the practical implementation of this solution would likely have made taking one unappealing, as players reasonably shy away from extremely expensive upgrade cards when they can be destroyed along with a single ship. As such, I created the Solitary restriction for Tactical Relays, preventing multiple Tactical Relay cards being taken in a single list. From a design perspective, this solution is a bit direct (some might argue hamfisted), but it worked. Tactical Relays provide playstyle-defining effects at a competitive price, something that players enjoy, but you always have to choose which one you want.
Cycling Content
Not that kind of cycling!
While researching this article, I encountered one unconventional solution to eutrophication I hadn’t heard of before: cycling oxygen into the water source via a bubbler. Doing this keeps the water oxygenated, preventing excessive buildup of plants and allowing animals and other things that need oxygen to thrive. It’s not a perfect solution - it requires external energy to run, which isn’t ideal, and it works better in some environments than others. It also has an excellent analogue in gaming: cycling of content.
Cycling is quite simple. Every X amount of time, you kick some of the content out of the game. An MMO like World of Warcraft does this very organically by introducing a new dungeon or raid which has gear that completely outperforms whatever you acquired in the previous set of dungeons or raids. While the game doesn’t take away your old gear, you don’t need it any more and will likely stop using it. Magic: The Gathering and other card games do this by cycling out various sets from its competitive formats. X-Wing 2nd Edition does this through Hyperspace rotations, and (infrequently) by recosting troublesome upgrade cards to a price that is higher than their perceived value so that design space for similar cards is created underneath them. For instance, Precognitive Reflexes was brought in to essentially replace Supernatural Reflexes, which had proven too potent over the first year of the game. It didn’t technically replace the older card, but it was much more competitively costed for most pilots than Supernatural Reflexes, which had been increased to a price point well above where most players considered taking it.
Cycling has an obvious advantage: the designer gets a partial or total refresh, a chance to take what they’ve learned and iterate in new ways. The new content will almost always be better than its predecessor because it was made with vastly more information about the way it will be used. Further, old ideas can be iterated upon in new ways, including by creating more controlled doses of fun effects and siloing effects that were previously too efficient in concert from each other. From the perspective of the players, it gives them the chance to re-explore familiar concepts within the context of a new environment instead of having to learn entirely new paradigms of play.
It also has an obvious drawback: it renders the content people acquired less valuable, or potentially erases its value entirely. This means that cycling works better in some games than others, and some player bases will accept it while others won’t. For instance, a game like Warhammer 40,000, where a player puts tons of time and energy into each miniature, can’t really cycle content on a timescale that matters to the current player base. While it can shuffle up the metagame with new codex releases and price updates and periodically phase out really outdated units, there are limits to how much the player base will tolerate.
Finally, cycling can also have a subtler drawback. Like the bubbler in the lake, it requires energy from outside the system to run and maintain. The designer (or someone else) has to manage the process of the cycling itself, planning out the course of the game over time in a highly regimented way, and then communicate the changes as they are implemented. And the player base has to spend energy keeping up with the changes. All of this takes time and energy over and above what proactive efforts like judicious design and siloing require. Once the player base is accustomed to a rhythm of cycling, it may take less energy to implement, but will also take more energy should the designer want to change it in the future.
Closing Thoughts
Of course, these three methods are not the only ways of dealing with the problem of player-selected fun making a less fun game. Some games heavily limit player choice about certain things; there is no army building in most versions of chess, after all. Other games, especially small, tightly designed games, can have baked-in limits on player interaction that prevent player choices from fundamentally altering the feel of most games played. In the base game of Carcassonne, the player’s choices are so simple that there isn’t much they can do that is extremely unfun for the rest of the table (except perhaps spend too long deciding where to place their piece). On the other hand, most games of base Carcassonne are very similar to every other game of Carcassonne, because the players’ aggregate choices have so little impact on the experience of the game. This can be a positive or a negative, depending on your perspective (personally, I find Carcassonne very meditative, and an excellent palate cleanser after a more cutthroat game).
For large, ongoing games, however, the challenge of fun eutrophication is a very real issue, and not easily avoided, because it rarely occurs due to a single decision. Instead, like water eutrophication, it accumulates over time, and can be quite difficult to undo once it has set in. There is no silver bullet method to avoiding it or undoing it. Proactive management methods like judicious design and content siloing generally have fewer direct drawbacks than reactive ones like cycling, but for most long-running games, a combination of all of these and other methods is required to maintain a healthy pond.