Little Game Design Takeaways
I've been reading a lot about game design the past few months. Multiple books, articles, a bunch of talks... I'm even going to GDC 2024 this march to try and get some more knowledge in the field, both practical and theoretical (hopefully, also a job). However I don't have a lot of experience in the field, which bothers me somewhat. I read and think about game design a lot, but my actual creative output has been very limited. I have about two unfinished "video games" if you can even call them that; closer to being tech demos for not-that-impressive tech. I do have a handful of tabletop games in various degrees of polish, which is nice, but it's still nothing to really write home about.
I'm trying to get more stuff out of myself (ironically by reading more, but this time it's a book of exercises), but until then, I should probably do something with all of those thoughts rattling around in my head. So, I'll write down three of the takeaways I've had while playing, making, reading about, and critiquing games.
1. Avoid "inevitable conclusion" scenarios whenever possible: If there's a portion of the game where the players' optimal play is algorithmic, you need to fix that. This can come in many different flavors: for example, the end-game of a complex strategy game where one player has an obvious advantage and is merely counting the turns until the other player is ground to a pulp. Conversely, you have games like Chess where the starting positions have been extensively studied, both players are just trying to get it over with and reach the fun part.
This may sound like an obvious piece of advice, but this situation is harder to spot during development than you may believe. For example - I was making a secret identity tabletop game, one where each player was assigned an identity they did not know of and had to discover. Each identity had a different win condition, so you had to figure out which identity you had (to avoid people just ignoring the main mechanic), and also created some theoretically comedic situations by having players misunderstand who they were playing as. However, in practice, this caused the game to have two informal "phases" - discovery, and race. In discovery you poked around, seeing what info you could gather about who you were, and in race you just spammed whatever your win condition was as fast as humanly possible.
Sure, in the "race" you still had to work towards that win condition, but it was so much less complex and satisfying than the discovery that it felt like the game was being dragged on for longer than it needed to. Were players just to win once they correctly discovered themselves, it would be much more satisfying. I could have also made the "race" part more exciting, but at that point the "secret identity" portion would be outshined by a significantly more fun second part, and it'd be better to do away with it entirely.
2. Avoid Creating the Chip Taking Game: This is a takeaway I learned in the book Characteristics of Games, and it's an absolutely fascinating one for multiple reasons. In the book, the writers mention how most games can be essentially boiled down to a "fundamental game" that you're really playing behind it all. The easiest example I can think of is a game called "Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock:" a riff on Rock Paper Scissors, but two extra options are added, and a lot more interactions are created as a result. Even though the game is more complex in theory, you are still just playing rock paper scissors; that's the fundamental game. The addition of extra mechanics hasn't changed any of it, just made the fundamental game a touch harder to spot1. With this in mind, they present a problematic fundamental game that rears its ugly head most games with more than three "teams" competing for supremacy: The Chip Taking Game.
The Chip Taking Game works as follows: Each player begins the game with a certain amount of chips (let's say, three). On each player's turn, they take a chip from someone else and remove it from the game. If you have 0 chips, you are out. The winner is the last player standing.
This game sounds incredibly boring, because it is boring, but you have already played the chip taking game. In any game with more than three unique teams in open competition, and no limits on inter-team targeting, the game will eventually devolve into the chip taking game. Have you ever played, let's say, Monopoly or Super Smash Bros, and had one player take a visible lead? What is everyone's instant response to this sight? "Drop everything you were doing, GET 'EM!" The instant someone has a lead, they become everyone's target, and why wouldn't they? Going after the strongest player makes your own chances of success better2, so no one has a reason not to do that. Goals, gameplay mechanics, all of that goes out the window in favor of "take this player's chips".
So how do you avoid this? There's two main ways: Firstly, making the leader hard to spot. If no one knows who's in the lead, no one has any particular reason to team up against a given player (outside of table politics). Secondly, you could limit the ability of inter-team targeting. For example: in racing games like Mario Kart, you have over 12 players locked in a race, and yet it never turns into the chip taking game because only the second (and maybe third) player can attack the leader.3
It's important to note that most people will choose to avoid the chip-taking game when it gives them no significant gameplay benefit, because the chip taking game is the least fun way to play.
3. More gameplay mechanics is not synonymous with more fun: People who play tabletop games or fighting games extensively know exactly what I'm talking about. It's very important we distinguish between two similar but not equal concepts: Complexity, and Depth.
Complexity is the amount of rules that exist in a game. It's all those little asterisks that are added late in development because you realize the way you intended an item to be used is not at all the way people are using it. Complexity is nightmarish in long-developed games, such as CCGs (pokemon, magic the gathering, yu-gi-oh), where a lot of rules need to be added after development to fix broken gameplay strategies. With the advent of video games it became a lot easier to add more complexity without scaring away players, as the computer will handle the rule-lawyering aspect on its own. Additionally, games can slowly introduce mechanics as the game goes on, rather than requiring the players to memorize the rulebook before even setting up the board.
Depth is the amount of choices the game's rules allow you to partake in. Depth is extremely dependent on the game's rules for obvious reasons, but also on the players' knowledge of the game. Let's look at Tic-Tac-Toe: for anyone over the age of 14, this is not a particularly exciting game. We all know the game will end in a draw if both players know how it works. However, for children, this game is exciting because they don't know the game's winning strategies; It's the first game most people "solve" on their own4. It's possible that in the future chess will also be seen as boring because we'd have solved it, so the ending is pre-known, but until then it's seen as one of the most "intellectual" games out there.
Many developers seem to think that Depth and Complexity are directly correlated - the more rules you add, the deeper the game's possible strategies are, and the harder it is to find the one perfect strategy. This is true to some extent, but adding more rules doesn't necessarily increase depth by as much as people imagine, and importantly it skyrockets the barrier to entry. The more rules you have at the entry point, the more a player has to memorize, and the greater the chance they'll be reluctant to start playing. If the amount of rules a player needs to know to start playing is above a certain threshold, they'll just come to the conclusion that they'd better spend their time playing something else.
Rather than making 20 sub-games in your game, you'd be better spending your time crafting one really really good game with an ocean of depth. This game may not be as deep as our theoretical complexity monster, but more people will play it, the mental game will be more interesting, and you'll have more to build on when you make games in the future.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Well, maybe not in this specific example where we straight up called the second game "Rock Paper Scissors [extra stuff]", but still.↩
Not always, the book goes over cases where that actually harms your chances of success. Regardless, that's what people think will help them the most.↩
This is why the blue shell is so infamous. Were you able to select what item you got in Mario Kart, no one would pick anything but the blue shell, and the game wouldn't be fun anymore regardless of any other existing mechanics.↩
Solvable games are games where there exists a strategy that guarantees a victory to one player regardless of the other players' choices, and in the absence of that, guarantees a draw when optimal play is achieved.↩