What Games Are

The Lesson of Mafia Wars [Design]

Although it's not the first of its type (that honor belongs to Mob Wars) I've come to regard Zynga's Mafia Wars as a milestone moment in game design.

It was in many ways the signature social game, the one that defined what Facebook games were likely to be. It established the common parlance of levels and experience points among executives who'd never heard of D+D. But more than that, Mafia Wars was an unbelievable game.

It was a success that made no sense in the vein of how most of us thought of games. The idea that lots of people would engage in a game so apparently basic, and for so long, was incomprehensible. Love or hate it, Mafia Wars taught us something very important about the difference between how we think players play, versus how they actually play.

Choose Fairness Over Balance [Game Design]

 

If a game feels unfair then few players want to play it.

What players see happening in the game and how they interpret it can often be at odds with what the game maker knows goes on under the hood. Fairness is subjective: a game is only fair if its players believe it to be so. To the player it really doesn't matter how the game engine does what it does, whether it's actually balanced or full of hacks that break balance in their favour. They only know what they see and what they think they see. That can be very hard for the maker to understand. 

Designing for fairness sounds like a simple principle, but because it's about feelings rather than facts it's actually very complicated. Particularly for multiplayer games.