It’s somewhat fashionable to label any number in a game a currency. In practise, however, it gets a little confusing.
Anyone can grasp the idea that in-game gold is a currency, but what about your character’s health or experience points? Advocates might say that the player is trading health for damage or progress during the course of the game. But to most people that’s pretty tenuous.
I prefer to think of currency as one type of resource instead. This is a post about different types of resources that you could use in your game (including currency) and some guidelines on how to use them well.
Duke Ellington’s point was simple: Across all genres and eras, music needs to swing. It’s a creative constant. I make a similar point about fun, arguing that it too is a creative constant and a game is not a game if it lacks the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.
But some kinds of fun are more appealing than others. Some are innately fascinating and inspire the play brain to play, where others just don’t. I call it the law of fascination.
Experimenting with new interaction is important. Without it, we would never fully explore new interfaces. And yet, new ways of controlling games often feel forced.
The developer reinvents how to jump by tying it to the release of a button rather than pressing it. She crafts a system for issuing orders to units through complicated gestures rather than selection and clicking. Weird controls turn perfectly natural actions into arcane ones, forcing players to re-learn skills for no good reason.
Developers (particularly indies) seem to assume that clever interaction is the key to making great games. Sometimes it is. Mostly it's the opposite. Standardised interfaces form over time for a reason, and running counter to them is usually bad game design.
Game developers ask ‘what is fun?’ and academics often answer that fun is seemingly simple but actually fiendishly hard to explain. Everything is potentially fun and trying to encompass it all in one statement is impossible.
When any debate becomes so wide, the intent of the original question is lost. Developers are not really asking ‘what is fun?'’ in the universal sense. They’re asking why does their game suck. Pragmatically then, fun is:
The joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.
However the idea that fun can be reduced to 9 little words is just the sort of thinking that makes some people angry, because it sounds like (and is) a hard limit on what games can be.
Your MMO guild members may be good friends but they’re scattered all across the world. Your mobile games steal your attention away from talking to people. Your social game hassles you to bug your friends for gifts, but otherwise you play alone. Your co-op sessions of Portal 2 tend to be played with mute strangers.
Most innovations in digital gaming tend to produce solitary experiences. This is fine most of the the time, but players don’t always want to be solitary. They like to gather to play, to participate and hang out. Social contact is healthy, and games have always had an important role in helping to bind communities together.
Video games have not really tapped into that spirit yet, but it feels to me like that’s the next wave. Local games are coming.
CNN recently asked why games are never finished by most players. In an age when production values are so high, it’s a very valid question. The industry response is often that older players with work and family commitments simply can’t play as much as they used to, so this makes the case for shorter, more intense, games.
I disagree. In my experience, players find the time to play just as readers find the time to read. Online games also indicate that games can occupy many hundreds of hours for motivated players in the right circumstances.
The uncomfortable question to ask is whether the problem is the games rather than the players. Simply put, are players not completing games because they’re boring?
When Usain Bolt competes in the 100m sprint, the test is about speed, and he has only one way to win: run faster than everybody else. He has little scope for strategy, no way to outwit opponents and he can only improve at the game through exercise (and good genetics). The 100m sprint is a one-dimensional game.
Some video games are like that. They are often fun, but only in passing. They burn out and have no room for extension because the play brain reaches maximum mastery very quickly. They need to consider their lack of dimensionality if they intend to build a lasting franchise.
It’s important to give players enough to do. Especially in videogames where the focus is more sport- and single-player oriented than in table top games, your game really needs a lot of actions to occupy a player’s time. But of course it’s not just about the quantity. Does every game action cause a meaningful change in the game world? Do most of them?
If so, then you are on the right path. The wrong path is actions which do not cause meaningful change. There are a wide variety of meaningless actions that games incorporate but they all share a common trait:
Meaningless actions oblige the player to crank a handle that the game could easily be cranking for them. Such actions are busywork, and busywork is usually boring.
Fairness is one of the most important aspects of a good game, but it is rarely straightforward. While a game’s rules might be balanced, the player may feel that the experience is not fair, and this is a source of design tension.
The reason is that fairness is not an objective quantity. It’s subjective. Games are fair when the player sees that his actions in the game are achieving tangible rewards, even if the game is cheating to provide them to him.
Most people understand that games restrict a player’s actions. In soccer you are not permitted to handle the ball, for example, and in Halo you may only carry two weapons at once. The ways by which that a game restricts the player are called the game’s rules.
Some rules penalise or restrict, but others enable. In video games, some rules even allow players to do things that they could not ordinarily do. There are three different types of rule that operate in a game world, and they are constants, constraints, and conditions.
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