The Point Is the Challenge, Not the Goal

I once designed a little exercise game for myself. I hung a motorcycle tire from a rope tied to the ceiling of a high garage. Halfway up the rope I also attached a heavy weight. This created a compound pendulum, whose mechanical properties are quite complicated. When the tire is placed in motion, the intermediate weight is dragged along with it, and starts oscillating in its own fashion, dragging the tire in its turn. From ground level, the tire appears to gyrate in wild and unpredictable ways. Then I drew a circle one meter in diameter on the floor directly underneath the pivot point of the rope. This was the field of play.

The goal of the game was to hit the tire with my sword as many times as possible, without stepping outside the circle or being touched by the tire. This required me to weave, duck, twist, and turn to evade the tire when I couldn't hit it. Of course, hitting the tire sent it off in new and more complicated gyrations. It was an excellent game and provided me with much all-body exercise.

Quite proud of my design, I showed it off to another designer. I explained the rules to him and handed him the sword. He stepped inside the circle and began lightly tapping the tire with the sword. When I asked him what he was doing, he replied, "Winning the game."

My game designer friend's clever trick demonstrates a crucial factor in the enjoyment of challenge: It's easy to ruin a good challenge by exploiting loopholes in the rules. No matter how carefully you set up the challenge, somebody will think of a way to subvert your system. One solution to this problem is to write reams of rules to prevent every imaginable form of cheating. For example, I wonder if baseball has a rule that makes it illegal for a runner to shoot opposing players to prevent them from tagging him out. Probably not. But in what we call "friendly games," players rely on simple rules and reject clever tricks that subvert the challenge of the game. "No fair!" is a cry that makes up for a lot of complicated rule-mongering.

A variation on this problem is called the "lock on victory." This is a strategy or technique that guarantees success. For example, in the classic game MazeWar, one of the earliest multiplayer games, the players move around through a maze shooting at each other. Sometimes a player would back up into a dead end, facing the only entrance. The moment somebody passed by, the dirty rat would shoot them. Since nobody could ever get into position to shoot the rat quickly enough, he was guaranteed never to lose. This behavior was perfectly legal within the framework of the rules, but everybody knew that it was "no fair."

This is a key element of challenge that is often misunderstood. The player's formal goal is to beat the system enclosing the challenge, but the player's ultimate goal is to overcome the challenge. Thus, even the cheater who finds a way to beat the rules without beating the challenge feels unsatisfied with the result. Of course, with computers, it's much easier to enforce rules you simply make undesired behavior impossible to execute. Nevertheless, you should always be aware of this potential problem.

LESSON 8

Eliminate loopholes that allow the player to evade the challenge of the game.

I well remember a big wargame that I played many years ago with a friend. There was an unfortunate ambiguity in the rules; we both perceived the problem and, after some discussion, agreed on a patch to the rules that fixed the problem. Unfortunately, the patch itself had an unintended ambiguity, and the two of us interpreted that ambiguity in opposite fashions. We played the game for many hours and then, as the game came to its climax, my opponent pounced with a move that I thought was illegal. Only then did we discover our misunderstanding. All our hours of careful play had been a complete waste of time; the game was ruined. We abandoned the game and parted in foul moods; each of us felt that the other had somehow been stupid to misunderstand our agreement.

The primary purpose of rules is to prevent strategies that subvert the challenge. In most sports games, there is some sort of boundary and any play that goes "out of bounds" is forbidden by the rules. That's because, if players could run around outside the boundary, then they'd come up with all sorts of creative ways to circumvent the real challenge of the game.

There are a myriad ways to play a game, but a good design ensures that only the challenging ways are possible. This raises an interesting design problem: What constitutes a challenging strategy? There is no objective answer to that question. Tic-tac-toe is challenging for some people and devoid of challenge for others. Your job as a designer is to define the challenge in the game and then make that challenge as clear and precise as possible.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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