Breaking Open the Black Box

The Secrets and Stories of Game Design

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Pacing

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Most people would say they want a life full of positive experiences. “No hardship, much wealth, health and general success.” In their minds, this is true – they always want to follow the path of least resistance. However, it is not the way to make people happy for an extended period of time.
In truth, when players constantly face a void of challenge, they quickly disengage and lose interest. At the same time, if they constantly face an unbeatable challenge, they become discouraged or excessively frustrated. 
So what’s a good game designer supposed to do? If everything is doable, people are happy, then immediately bored. If everything is difficult, people are frustrated and quit.
The answer is remarkably simple:
Alternate between positive and negative experiences. 
The execution of this answer is devilishly difficult.

The Trap of Difficulty

There’s an art to creating a satisfying experience. It has to be varied, full of positive, happy experiences and also constantly interspersed with new difficulties and challenges.
Not sure what D&C is, but this picture rules.
When I see new content designers sit down to work on a boss encounter, I regularly see them fall into the trap of the image to the left.
When they think “let’s make this a little more challenging”, they dramatically overdo it. The player is then like the poor, fat, little bike-rider – wondering why these gentle, rolling hills suddenly became burning mountains. 
Highly skilled players often react to these situations with renewed vigor. Like the red bike-rider, they forge on ahead until the challenge is overcome. Years of experience showed they can win.
I’m fairly confident that this type of development work is where the concept of Boss monsters came from. “Man, this game has started to drag on… we really need something here to mix it up.”  In fact, this type of logic is a great way to break-up a section of dungeon or raid trash that has gone on for too long. 
… but that’s not going far enough.

Understanding Which Way You’re Bent

I’ve found that most designers come out the gate with one of two polarities – pro-player and anti-player minded. Pro-player designers want all mechanics easy to learn, sold by great visuals and showered with rewards. Anti-player designers want to exert their will and vision on the players, forcing them to jump through hoops, make difficult mental connections and make small, marginal gains at every turn.
As a result, pro-player designers tend to drift towards class, quest, event and item design while anti-player designers drift towards boss, dungeon design and marketing. (Just kidding, Marc)
Neither of these views is enough. In fact, inappropriately applied, both can cause massive harm to a game. 
If a pro-player designer gives out an item too strong too soon, they can ruin hundreds of hours of potentially rewarding quests. If an anti-player designer creates a challenging boss before players have the experience to beat it, players can quit the game entirely. 
Instead, the first major challenge as a designer is to learn how to temper your natural polarity with the opposite one. In truth – few people are completely pro or anti-player – but becoming aware of your bias helps inform your design decisions.

What’s the most satisfying type of pacing?

If you were to ask most players, they would state that their favorite type of pacing is when the game starts out gentle, then gets harder and harder and harder until they finally beat the boss and obtain his massive stash of gold.
This isn’t true. In truth, the player is most satisfied when you push him as close as possible to their breaking point – without breaking them – then release the pressure.
Unfortunately, the more people that play your game, the greater the variety of experiences, tolerances and fickleness that you have to handle. Calibrating the difficulty of your game is increasingly difficult as the audience size increases. 
If you’ve been around the video game scene for enough years now, this is why you frequently see people who will rave about a specific indie video game, while another person will play it and find it utterly dissatisfying. 
The game that entranced the first player put them in a situation where they were captivated by its challenges and opportunities. The same game could have been either too difficult or too easy for the second player.
The rare super successful game in the independent game field has often been one where the challenge of the game scaled with the ability and interests of the player. Minecraft is an amazing example – whether its a tree fort or a fifteen story skyscraper, your creation was a by product of your own limits.

Thinking Like the Devil

A player’s stress level should not consistently increase or decrease while they are playing your game. It should be an unpredictable stream full of spikes and valleys, alternating between moments of difficulty, challenge and release. 
There’s a few major points to keep in mind. When a player first begins your game (or any new environment/experience) – they are immediately in a high stress state. Your first task is to release that high stress state with some simple challenges to reassure them before throwing more difficult tasks at them later.
Secondly, while the spikes and valleys are alternating, the difficulty and thus the stress level of the experience need to be generally increasing over time. This allows you to compensate for the player’s personal growth, skill and general comfort level as they have adapted to the game and environment. 
The next major point is that stress levels and difficulty are *not* a 1:1 relationship. In fact, the difficulty of your game can climb steeply while the player’s stress level is actually decreasing. 
The human mind is a tool of adaptation – it works harder the more “different” things are from its currently established baseline. Increased challenge levels incur increased stress. However, once it has adapted to a particular level of stress, the same stimulus that was incredibly painful before is now barely noticable. 
Clever use of severe, short difficulty spikes can actually result in decreased stress in the long-term – so long as the difficulty spikes can be overcome. 
The art of adjusting these peaks and valleys is known as Pacing. 

Consistency is the Enemy of Memorability

Next time, I’m going to talk about some common pacing problems and the challenges you face when detecting them. 

Negative Reinforcement

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The other side of satisfaction is dissatisfaction. It can be a useful tool.  “Now, Alex, why on earth would you ever want players to be dissatisfied with your game? Isn’t that defeating the whole point of a game? Games should make people happy!”

Actually, that’s completely wrong. Games that only make people happy have a short lifespan. Eventually, the amount of positive stimulus you have to give the player eventually exceeds the production capabilities of your game. Bayonetta is a wonderful example of this.

I greatly enjoyed Bayonetta. However, the game grew linearly in both difficulty and epicness. The reaction times required to beat each incoming boss also increased.  The result was that my hands were seized up in painful cramps that forced me to regularly put the game down. Furthermore, the story events that took place in the game keep accelerating into absurdity. Youtube “Bayonetta Final Boss” if you don’t care about spoilers.

Useful Uses for Negative Reinforcement

If you consider the pacing the macro level of a game, dungeon or encounter, you don’t want players to be going balls-to-the-wall nonstop for the entire experience. To cater to their human nature, you want luls, breaks and breathing periods between moments of intensity. Players, however will continue to naturally seek higher and higher levels of intensity until they breakdown from exhaustion. 
You need to give them a hint that pushing forward harder is wrong. 
The first use of negative reinforcement that came to mind for me was attacking the walls in Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Early into the game, you learn that bombs can destroy walls. 
Some walls have obvious cracks which indicate they can be destroyed. Other walls cannot.  To reinforce this, when you stab cracked walls with your sword, the wall makes a hollow noise. However, if you stab an indestructible wall, it makes a high pitched, unpleasant tinging noise. 
This generally discourages you from stabbing walls randomly to check for hollow spots but allows you to confirm you suspicions of a cracked wall without randomly spraying bombs everywhere.  
That unpleasant tinging sound carried over into other places.  When you fight bosses in the game, the same sound is used to indicate you are attacking him or her in the wrong way.  
This negatively reinforced sound thus shifted from an exploration tool to a boss fight feedback mechanic.  In general, Nintendo games are filled with these kinds of small polish point, which dramatically help players learn the boundaries of the game faster.
Dragon’s Dogma similarly uses cheap deflecting noises and not the deep, visceral sounding wound audio effects when you’re attacking a boss in a non-weak spot. 

Higher Level Uses for Negative Reinforcement

Early on in WoW’s development, the design team wanted to penalize players who spent a lot of time grinding in the game and ignored the story-based nature of the questing. Similarly, there was a strong desire for players to not play endlessly. 
This lead to several systems. The first, was the rested system, where players eventually got 50% of the experience they would normally gain through killing monsters.  The hope was that players would be encouraged to do quests (which were decoupled from the rest system) and stop the endless camping of Owlkin in Winterspring. (I am looking at you, Zaibach)
The next system was the introduction of durability. Early on, without a durability system, players would zerg difficult camps of monsters endlessly, exhausting themselves, frequently getting frustrated and eventually giving up out of rage instead of looking for a different objective.  Bosses in dungeons were regularly kited to the entrance of the dungeon, where players would zone in, suicide on the boss, then corpse run back repeatedly. 
Durability made that strategy expensive, added an upper limit to the effectiveness of that strategy and generally served to be a very cheap death penalty.  Keep in mind that in this era, death penalties frequently consisted of XP and level losses.
Over time, durability became an increasingly smaller penalty, as repair bots, vendor mounts and geeves became prolific. The psychological effect remains in place – with many players leaving groups and quitting after a long series of wipes.

Negative Reinforcement can Backfire

You need to be very careful where you  use negative reinforcement. In small, well-placed doses, it is highly effective.  Used too often, players feel like their freedom is restricted. Too harsh and players feel punished for honest mistakes.  Too visible and players will constantly rally for its removal. 
Players hated the original rested system, complaining it did all of the above.  Some design teams would have panicked and removed the system. However, resistance to an idea doesn’t always mean the idea is wrong. Instead, they rebuilt the system to give a 100% bonus while rested, rather than a 50% penalty while exhausted.  
This lead to the blizzard catch phrase “Make it a Bonus”.  Generally, the concept of taking a systemic penalty, baking it into the system, then periodically granting players the ability to bypass that penalty.  It’s a rather ingenious philosophy.

The LFG/LFR/LFD systems all use it – granting you a ton of rewards for the first completion of a dungeon, raid or battleground. Then far smaller rewards for continuing to play.