adorable rockets

Long before I was ensnared by making my very own Visual Novel, I was a game designer by trade.

Doki-Doki Classmates!! One of my non-digital game projects

Recenty I’ve found myself only really playing four kinds of games:

1. Rock Band – Beatles, et al. Social cooperative games of skill and music played as part of regular parties.
2. PSP RPGS – Disgea mostly, but a handful of others. Games of strategy and grinding, perfect for travel.
3. Wargames – Simulation of tactical choices and historical outcomes are my turn ons. Oh and tanks. Lots of tanks.
4. Board and Card games – Battlestar Galactica, Race for the Galaxy, Dominion – typical Board Game Geek fare.

It was boardgames that once again lured me into the art and science of game design.

“Luck hads no place in games!” is a zealously defended opinion among some board game players. It’s easy to understand why. Candyland is a crappy game. It’s really all luck and the game plays itself. On the other hand Chess is awesome, and look… no dice!

The only problem with this point of view is that I can’t stand all the most popular brain burning games of no luck! Even many popular collectible card games turn me off. Why? And why did I continue to enjoy wargames of all stripes where buckets of dice capture the uncertainty and chaos of the battlefield?

Well it would be mostly an academic question were it not for the fact that I was trying to make a few games of my own. Like Doki-Doki Classmates!! The harem-building er.. friend-collecting moé anime card game. I need to understand games if I’m going to have a chance at making a good one myself. Unlike writing a visual novel there is no screenwriting authority to show me the way!

Thankfully I’ve gotten a second opinion about luck and games from Fortress Ameritrash. This fantastic article lays it all out. The more I thought about it the more it rang true. All of a sudden so many other aspects of what I enjoy in many games, from Rockband to Disgea to Conflict of Heroes, all made sense!

So of course I drew some diagrams…

Sagrilarus’s thesis is that luck in games (paradoxically) provides control. In his analysis, luck prevents any one player from completely controlling the game, due to their superior godly game analysis (or more commonly, useless mental arithmetic skills, combined with two dozen uber strategies from the web).

In other words, some luck gives everyone a fighting chance, gives you a reason to stay engaged, and a reason for the masters to stay on their toes. Against a superior player, luck increases the odds of you winning!

So let’s look at this question of odds. The following chart shows a typical curve of your chances of succeeding in any individual game challenge plotted against the relative skill levels between you and your opponent.

The chart is fairly self explanatory. If you dominate your opponent in skill, the odds are certain in your favor. Conversely the opposite is true. If your skill levels are close then the odds become closer. Now I drew this chart thinking of combat in Disgea (or any level based RPG) but you can immediately see that the concept of an RPG skill level can abstract itself to any game. This could be the chart of my odds at winning in chess if we could somehow distill a skill level number for chess playing. To the left is me against my 16 mo old daughter, to the right is my odds against Deep Blue.

For our next chart I’ve overlaid my purely personal perspective on the amount of fun I have when attempting a challenge.

Again, this chart was drawn with Disgea in mind. At the extreme left you’d see a me playing a 999 level Etna against a lowly zombie – boring. Whereas at the far right that’s me attempting to beat Lamington after just transmigrating Etna back to level 1 – futile. In the middle, where my odds of success are fairly mixed, is where I have the most fun.

In this third chart I’ve labeled those three areas.

The swath to the left, where success is guaranteed, is the dreaded realm of grinding. It’s where you go to level up. On the left is the realm of immediate and pointless fail. The middle is not only the area where I have fun, but also the area where the majority of story driven battles take place. Granted you can over-grind (though some games like Final Fantasy Tactics attempt to prevent this), but more importantly, why would you? Story driven battles are the most engaging of conflicts, and if you make them too easy it’s like you’re cheating yourself.

So what can we learn from this, and how does it relate to luck? Well for starters it’s pretty clear why grinding is such a pain. There is no challenge, no risk, and so the reward is diminished. You can also immediately see how this chart applies not just to an individual RPG encounter, but to any gameplay challenge in general. If it’s too easy, it’s a bore. If it’s impossible to win, why bother?

Luck is interesting here because it’s an element that changes the initial red graph of likelyhood of success / relative levels. Consider a game that is all luck.

As we can see there’s no opportunity for fun in the game itself. Maybe there’s a meta game. Maybe it’s Twister and it’s all about inappropriate accidental touching. The game though… no fun.

Now consider a game with no luck whatsoever.

Wow. The striking thing about this graph is not the fact that the area under “fun” is very small.

No, what shocked me was the realization that it was not symmetrically aligned around the cliff of equal levels. That’s right. If I’m honest with myself, I’m going to admit that I will enjoy consistently closely beating an opponent, more than consistently being closely beat. Id’ rather have a dozen narrow wins, than a dozen narrow loses.

If the game has no luck whatsoever, then it follows that I should optimize for an opponent slightly under my skill level (which is similar to my grinding strategy in RPGs). Games with no luck not only allow one player to literally dominate and control the other, they actually encourage it!

Assuming Disgea has a little bit of luck let’s think of a game with some more luck.

As that red graph flattens out, the green graph flattens out as well. To some degree it loses height (because it’s not fun if you roll poorly on every single combat), but it gains width at the same time. This may not be desirable in a single player RPG like Disgea which has strategy elements that verge on puzzle solving, but in a multiplayer competitive boardgame this is a worthwhile tradeoff.

Flattening the red curve by the introduction of luck lets more people have more fun at more disparate skill levels.

Too much luck however, and while your appeal is very broad, you quickly end up with something at gives you too little control. In this case it’s not your opponent stealing your fate, but the gods of chance.

Now I’ve been using ‘luck’ for most of this post because it’s a nice inflammatory word and I like stirring up the ire of the eurogame zealots, but really the issue is not pure luck, but rather control. Perfect control is born out of the combination of perfect information, and determanisticness (no luck). By removing either one you can start to keep any one player’s skill from completely dominating the others, all without the introduction of dice.

In my opinion this is part of what makes Dominion such a great game. Sure the deck shuffling introduces a bit of randomness, and the lack of information about what other players are holding both reduce control. However the same could be said for Race for the Galaxy a game in which it is much easier for some uber strategies to dominate. The genius of Dominion is that the typical analysis of optimal production strategies that make most economic development games prone to uber analysis is thwarted by the sheer number of possible deck combinations and the temporal uncertainty about the end game introduced by the need to dismantle your economic engine to convert it into victory points. It’s a brilliantly intrinsic catch up mechanic that magnifies the effect of randomness at the end in the same way that economic games normally magnify the randomness of the beginning.

So when you look for a game to play, don’t look for luck or lack thereof. Look for control and meaningful engagement. Look for a contest of control that can never be fully settled until the game has been played out!

And with that in mind, I really must get back to designing my game…

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under none. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.