Breaking Open the Black Box

The Secrets and Stories of Game Design

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Emotional Resonance

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This week’s post will be short.

The second major factor of care has nothing to do with mechanics. Instead, you can often make someone care, simply by displaying factors which echo lessons, feelings or beliefs that are already ingrained into their habits.

My favorite example of this is the art of a huge, flaming fireball. Fire is dangerous, Red is dangerous, Burning Sounds are dangerous.  Little wonder then that player in a sidescroller naturally avoids the incoming attack.  These were not lessons you had to teach the player.

Which is why sometimes they are the most powerful and most annoying thing you can deal with.

I recall a time when we discussed having a dragon who breathed healing fire as a mechanic on a boss fight. While the creative director was stoked at the idea, experience quickly showed that players avoided the fire, unless they were utterly required to sit in it.

While players will often adapt if the rewards are high enough, the price of trying to break these ingrained lessons is rarely worth the cost.

Emotions

Just as visual cues can appeal to the ingrained survival instinct, so too can an appeal to the human belief in saving others. Place a small girl or helpless character at risk and players will often try to take steps to save them.  
Display a tragic moment, a horrifying scene, play a song of triumph and victory.  People respond to far more stimuli than we sometimes realize. 
Look for ways to shortcut your designs by appealing to the heart. 

Tuning: a Tool to Adjust Care Level

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Tuning is the first and most powerful lesson of the Wyatt Cheng school of Game Design. Are you ready?
“Any mechanic, no matter how lame, is considered fun when sufficiently overpowered.” – Wyatt Cheng


It is extremely important to note that this lesson is a WARNING to new game designers. It is important to not confuse good mechanics with overpowered ones. Tuning is a tool which must be used wisely.
If you want to increase how much the player cares about your mechanic, change its tuning. Tuning is a deep topic I intend to discuss multiple times in greater depth, but here’s a quick litmus test for tuning any game mechanic:

Step 1: Observe the Status Quo

Do players enjoy the mechanic as-is? Do they respond with excitement or disinterest?  If they haven’t even identified that the mechanic exists, you have a clarity problem and need to work on that. If they have noticed it, move on to the next step.

Step 2: Maximize the Power

When your game mechanic has the power to obliterate everything on the screen do they enjoy and use it? How do they feel about it? What bad side effects does it cause?  
If players don’t enjoy a mechanic, even when it results in overwhelming power, it’s a very good candidate for cutting or heavily revising.  Maximized power is proof that something is awkward, unclear or otherwise innately flawed.

Step 3: Minimize the Power

Next try to push the mechanic as weak as you possibly can. How far can you go before players stop caring and discard it? Knowing that limit will help you identify how far the usability, clarity and theme of the ability can carry you.  
You would be amazed at how far an incredibly clear, visceral and fantasy satisfying ability or mechanic can take you. If you find that you have very little flexibility to push a mechanic’s tuning downward, there’s probably a deep flaw in either your design or the scenario in which your design exists.

Step 4: If you can’t make Step 2 or Step 3 work… Stop Here!

If you find yourself constantly trying to find a number that works, but nothing reasonable is in the cards… STOP.  Numbers alone are never enough, but if the mechanic just doesn’t work on both extremes, you’ve got a deeper problem. 
Either your problem space is over constrained or you’re trying to force something to fit that just isn’t ready for showtime. Take it back to the drawing board, ask for input and look for alternatives.

Step 5: Balance the Power with the Clarity and Usability

Now that you know your limits, use what you know to pick the right spot for your ability.

The easier an ability to use, the less powerful it should be. The more difficult it is to observe, the less powerful it should be. These are the grey areas in which your will and judgement as a designer comes into play.

Step 6: Beware the Theme

While a deep enough topic for another time, be wary of your Theme.

Consider for example, an explosion. In the real world, an actual explosion is a very dangerous thing. A ball of fire would nearly kill or at least permanently injure anyone actually struck by it. While Super Mario 1 could get away with that, other games cannot.

Thus it’s important to try to give enough power to satisfy the expectations of the player, while keeping the value of the ability within the safe constraints of your game. If your fireball can only ever do a tiny amount of damage… consider changing the theme of the ability and make sure the art reflects its lack of power. Choose a tiny spark of light and not a nuclear holocaust.

(P.S.  My personal word of advice for multiplayer games is start as low as possible, then tune up until people consistently care and mention it, then nerf it by about 10% if it’s a player-used ability and buff it by about 25% if it’s a monster ability. )

Tuning is more than Power

It’s easy to be distracted by power. Tuning is frequently about adjusting power. But there’s a second, equally – if not more – important factor in tuning: time.
The Witch Doctor
A friend once asked me, “Hey Alex, Warlocks in World of Warcraft and Witch Doctors in Diablo 3 seem to have a lot in common. Were the same people designing it?”
My initial reaction was to just answer him, “Oh, no, of course not, but you know, we at Blizzard are full of common practices and do many things the same way! I’m so flattered you can’t tell the difference. Ah ha ha ha! Look at how awesome we are!” 
Then I thought maybe I could reply, “No, of course not! They are drastically different in both mechanics and kit! What kind of nonsense is this!” 
… but thankfully, I didn’t do either. Instead, my curiosity overrode my pride and I instead tried to understand him first. 
The Warlock
“That’s a really interesting comment, Steve*. Why do you say that?” (*name changed to protect the innocent)
“Well, I noticed that a lot of the spells do damage over time like Warlock DoTs and so I thought, maybe the same guy worked on it.”
“Well, Steve, you know… we do share a lot of philosophies and ideas at work, but you know when it comes to damage, we game designers really only have 2 tools.”
“Which are?”
“We either do all of the damage right now – or all of it spread out over time.”

Frequency

The second tool of tuning is frequency.  The frequency at which an event occurs can drastically change how the player feels about it. 
Imagine if the Star was as common and lasted as long as the Mushroom in Super Mario Bros. 1. 
The majority of your play experience would be something like this:
  • Play carefully until you get a star
  • Run recklessly around the level, killing everything
  • If you fall into a hole, die or otherwise lose the star, you become irate and frustrated until the next Star comes along.
With that change, suddenly the Star ceases to be a bonus and becomes a mandatory part of how you play. 
Instead, look at how Nintendo designed it:
  • You generally play very carefully until you learn a level
  • Slowly over time, your mastery over the level increases and you can play more recklessly
  • While exploring, you occasionally find Stars which allow you to play recklessly for 10 seconds.
The result is that Stars allow you an early taste of what will be possible once you’ve mastered the level, and give you a period of reduced tension and greater enjoyment. 
None of that would have been possible if Stars were common or long. 

Tuning is Not Everything

Power and frequency alone do not define what makes players love an ability. 
Consider the following two abilities:
Fireball – Deals 100 damage instantly. 10 second cooldown.
Corruption – Deals 15 damage every second. Limit 1 per target.
Pure math will show that Corruption is 50% better than Fireball. However, even given that difference in power, the average game player will greatly prefer the Fireball and be disinterested in Corruption. 
Furthermore, in many real situations, that decision will be 100% right. …Why?
The answer is surprisingly deep. I’ll talk about the first piece next time, as we explore my next topic: Responses.

Lesson 2. Care

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John McWhorter teaches linguistics. Long distance running is popular in Israel. San Pan Tong was renamed from Ban Mae in 1939. Pachycalamus brevis, is a species of reptile in the Trogonophidae family.

Q: What do these four facts have in common?

A: You probably don’t care about any of them. 

Sorry, guys!

Your hair is on fire. You were fired. There’s a bear under your desk. Your wallet got stolen.

Q: Do I even need to ask you the real question?

A: No.


Those statements are so intrinsically important to you that you are concerned, invested and ready to take action.

In order for a player to take action, they have to care.

Thanks Gamespy!

If you’ve been playing video games for a while, you probably recognize the three power-ups above this paragraph.  In fact, you would probably go to extreme lengths to pick one of these up while playing a game – even if it was a new Super Mario game you’d never played before. Why?

Because years of experience taught you to care about them.

… but do you remember the first time you saw one?

I do. The first time I saw a mushroom, I confused it with the Goomba monsters and tried to jump on it. My dad laughed and told me it was OK to touch that one – but that moment of confusion stuck with me.

Super Mushrooms had a Clarity problem. They were easily confused with the most basic enemy. However, once I eventually did touch a Super Mushroom, I consistently began seeking out Super Mushrooms and using them.  Why? Because they allowed me to make 1 mistake that would otherwise end the game.

Consequentially, I rapidly taught myself to overcome the clarity issue. Because I cared about what they could give me.

The Product of Iteration

Future Super Mario Bros. game went to great lengths to positively reinforce the beneficial effects of Super Mushrooms and reduce the clarity issues. After Mario 1, Super Mushrooms consistently had faces and were red and white – a different color scheme than Goombas who remained brown.

The mechanic of granting you additional hits went untouched until Mario 64. That was 11 years of importance that are now deeply ingrained in your psyche.

Changing gears a bit, let’s talk about the Invulnerability Star.  The first time you saw one, what did you notice?

  • It was bouncing
  • It was flashing
  • It was running away from you
If there was a lesson you had quickly learned from Super Mushrooms – it was that things which are running away from you are things you want to catch. Catching an Invulnerability Star was a pain in the ass – not only did it move faster, it bounced and frequently fell into pits!
So why on earth would you bother with risking your neck to catch a Star when a Mushrooms were more plentiful and easier to catch?
“Well, duh, Alex, it made you invincible and you could kill anything you touched!”
That answer seems obvious now, but it leads us directly to the tool which allows us to control how much the player cares about a game mechanic. 

Tuning

Tuning is a massive topic that I will only gloss over here. However, it is the fastest way to test if a player will ever care about your mechanic.  What made the Invulnerability Star better than a Mushroom, but still allowed both to coexist within the same game? Tuning. 
The Mushroom allowed you to take additional hits and break blocks. 
The Star allow you to kill monsters you when touched them.
What an amazing power up! It reversed the fundamental nature on which the game was built! No wonder players cared!
Watch this video at around the 38 second mark:
Why didn’t you stick with the Star the entire game? Well… because you can’t. The designers decided that invulnerability lasts for a limited amount of time. 

Invulnerability lasts about 10 seconds… then slowly wears off.

Why? Let’s pretend that had been forever. How would the game change? How would the game change if it only lasted 1 second? Exploring this space will be the topic of my next post…

Bonus points:

What does Super Mario do to reinforce and clarify how drastically the game experience has changed while you are invulnerable?  A quick glance above should reveal at least 3 major things. A skilled eye will catch a few more. Post how many you caught in the comments below.