Unique Solutions

For me, one of the most exciting moments of being a game designer is when I hear someone talking about playing one of my games , and they explain a successful tactic for a given situation that I had never considered . This could be a solution to a specific puzzle, a new strategy to incapacitate challenging enemies, or a method for maneuvering a perilous canyon. I see the games I develop as creating situations in which game players can utilize their own creativity to succeed. When players creativity can lead them to solutions that I had not envisioned , it shows me that the players and I are sharing in the creation of their experience, instead of my dictating everything. And when the players and I share in the authorship, I feel my game is doing its job.

Anticipatory versus Complex Systems

Good designers will try to guess what players are going to attempt to do and make certain their game responds well to those actions. For instance, take an RPG that features a puzzle that involves placing weights on a series of pressure plates. (Having put such a puzzle in a game of my own, I would like to implore game designers to be a bit more creative than that, as pressure plates are surely one of the most overdone puzzle devices. But I digress.) Suppose the designer leaves a conspicuous pile of rocks a few rooms over from the pressure plate puzzle. The obvious solution to the puzzle is to use those rocks on the pressure plates to achieve the desired results. But what if players try dropping their various weapons on the plates instead? This is a perfectly valid solution that should work equally well, provided players have weaponry of the appropriate weights. What if players have the Summon Minor Threat spell, which allows them to summon a variety of different small monsters? If players summon those monsters onto the pressure plates, they might do the trick too.

Now the designer, having thought through the puzzle fully, can have the programmer-add in code where the game reacts correctly if rocks, weapons, or monsters are on the plates. This is the anticipatory school of game design, where the designer thinks of what players might do and hardwires the game to work well with those actions. I agree that this tactic is surely better than allowing for just one solution. However, what if players think of some other weight they can place on the pressure plates? What if players use their Berkshire Blizzard spell on the pressure plates, causing snow to fall on them? Enough snow could conceivably pile up on the plates to have a significant weight. However, if the game has been hardwired only for rocks, weapons, or monsters, the game will not react appropriately. Players will have thought of a perfectly reasonable solution and the game will fail to recognize it.

Instead of hardwiring, however, what if the designer had the programmer come up with a system where every object in the game had a weight associated with it? This would include rocks, weapons, monsters, weather effects, blood, and any other dynamic objects found in the game-world. If the programmer then made the pressure plates simply measure the weight of all of the objects on top of them, regardless of their type, then this global solution would work for all objects. If each object was set up with a reasonable weighting , it would not matter what objects players tried to place on the pressure plates, as they would all work automatically.

This latter method is less of an anticipatory technique of game design; it is more holistic and systems-based in its approach. It relies more on creating reliable, consistent systems with which your game will function. With these systems in place, the game becomes more a simulation and less of a hard-coded puzzle. A game need not be a flight simulator or a SimCity- style game to include some level of simulation; indeed almost all games include some degree of simulation, however crude it may be. The more designers recognize the value of simulation over hard coding and emphasize these complex and interconnected systems in their games, the deeper their games become. In a game with a more simulation-based approach, containing a puzzle such as the pressure plate one described above, the designer and programmer come up with a series of success conditions for that puzzle. Instead of the puzzle is solved if players use rocks, weapons, or monsters to offset the plates, the rule is the puzzle is solved when the plates are offset by the correct weight being placed on top of them. Certainly the example of this puzzle is a simple one, but the same techniques can be applied to much more sophisticated and interesting systems that engender a wide variety of successful playing styles.

Emergence

It is the development of numerous robust and logical systems that leads to player-unique solutions to situations in the game. One could describe these solutions as emergent from the systems design of the game, a popular buzzword in game design circles. Establishing a game universe that functions in accordance with logical rules players can easily understand and use to their advantage allows those same players to come up with their own solutions to the problems the game presents . Nothing is more rewarding for players than devising some obtuse, unobvious method for solving a puzzle or a combat situation and then having it actually work. The more complex systems work correctly and concurrently with each other, the more interesting and varied the solutions to situations become. Consider the game Civilization , with its numerous systems running in parallel. These systems work together to create some of the most compelling gameplay ever pressed to disk.

The Civilization games are some of the best examples of complex gameplay emerging out of multiple consistent systems running in parallel. Pictured here: Civilization II .

At the same time, many designers fear players discovering emergent strategies they can use as exploits: tactics that will allow players to finish a game too easily, skipping a lot of the fun. With its complex systems design, Civilization was a prime candidate for player exploitation. In the original game, players were able to exploit a rush strategy where they would never build cities of a size larger than two while staying in the most primitive form of government, quickly sweeping over the world and winning the game prematurely. This strategy was so effective it was clearly the best strategy to use and allowed players to miss 90 percent of the game. Sid Meier ended up patching the game to increase the citizens unhappiness when this strategy was used, fixing the exploit. In this case the emergent tactic revealed a shortcut through the game that needed to be fixed.

Another example of this sort of emergent strategy that might be regarded as an exploit can be found in the original Centipede . Anyone who has ever played the game knows that the piling up of mushrooms is one of the greatest impediments to a long game, and many players understand the importance of keeping the play-field as clear as possible. As the devotees of the game pumped quarter after quarter into the game, they began to notice some patterns. First, they recognized that the flea is responsible for dropping most of the problematic mushrooms, though destroyed centipede segments also drop them. Second, they saw that the flea does not come out on the game s first wave. Third, it was observed that the flea is triggered by the absence of mushrooms in the bottom half of the screen. Thus the famous blob strategy was developed, one that the game s designer, Ed Logg, never anticipated. To use the blob strategy, players would clear all of the mushrooms from the board on the first wave, and then allow mushrooms to survive only on the bottom-right quadrant of the screen. If, through careful destruction of the centipede, the players only allow mushrooms to be created in that section of the screen, the flea will never come out, making the game much simpler indeed. This is an emergent solution to racking up a high score at Centipede , one which players no doubt felt quite proud of when it was discovered . It was a tactic that Logg, as the game s creator, did not even know was there to be found. Unlike the Civilization rush strategy described above, the blob strategy was so hard to pull off that it was not truly an exploit, merely an alternate tactic that required a good deal of player skill. Though some designers become distressed whenever an unanticipated strategy emerges in their game, it is important to look at the given tactic and determine if it ruins the player s experience or if it is a technique equally or even more fun than what the designer had planned. If such emergent strategies do not completely break the game, they need to be viewed as a boon to the game s depth and the direct result of good game design.