Mistakes in Game Design
Mark Rosewater has written up a great article about the common mistakes made by aspiring game designers in Magic: The Gathering (tip o' the hat to Damion Schubert at Zen of Design for pointing this one out).

The principles Mark lays out are 100% applicable to computer and video games. Here's my effort to convert these to the digital gaming medium:

Mistake #1: Making the Player Do Something They Don't Want to Do
Gameplay is all about risk and reward, and balancing the good with the bad --- then allowing the player to make the choice between choices, hedging their bet and trying to stack the odds in their favor. They may have a prime sniper position that gives them an awesome vanatage point to gain some easy kills, but it also allows them to be easily taken from behind.

That's all good.

But making the players engage in un-fun activities in order to get bonuses to make the game more fun later? Not cool.

Perhaps the most un-fun activity of all is... waiting. Not pausing for the best moment to act (which was lots of fun in the Thief and Rainbow Six games), but actually sitting waiting for something to happen or actually being able to do something.

The worst example I can think of is EverQuest --- the whole sitting in front of the spellbook thing to meditate. Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs have it tough - they have to prevent people from racing through the content faster than they can generate it. So much of the balance has to be focused on progression over time. But did they have to make it so overt? And stuck looking at a little 2D picture for minutes at a time in the middle of what was (for the time) a really cool 3D virtual world?

Granted, they whittled away at that later, and most games nowadays have learned their lesson from that embarassing little gameplay mechanic.


Mistake #2: Making the Player Do Unnecessary Work
Because computers are capable of automating so many of the player's book-keeping tasks, this one kinda blurs into the first mistake. But the evil comes when there are tasks the computer really should automate (or allow the option to automate) micromanagement tasks.

An example: Well, these are rare nowadays, but RPGs without automapping. Yeah, automapping takes out some of the tricks that you could pull off on the poor player (like the old teleporting squares and reverse-direction squares of the old Wizardry days), but those tricks were more of an irritation than a fun element anyway.

Another example, also from RPGs: The need for food and drink for character maintenance. Sure, a constant flow of gold for character upkeep is a fairly interesting mechanic, especially for low-level characters. Gotta keep 'em hungry so they keep hunting for gold, right? But keeping track of food stores (and their associated inventory slots or whatever) is usually a pain in the butt. I give an exception to the Ultima Underworld games... where actually trying to survive and find food was a part of the game.

I also recall the painful experience of putting task forces together in Master of Orion 3. Shamefully, they put one of the most entertaining elements of the original game... building fleets - and made it painful and frustrating with all sorts of limitations on what ships could go together in what sort of task force mission.


Mistake #3: Putting Things The Player Cares About Out of His/Her Control
Fortunately, in single-player games, control is rarely more than a "Load Game" menu option away. But that is a meta-game element, not a game mechanic, and ideally shouldn't be a key part of the player experience.

An example of this is old-school (non-LucasArts) adventure games, where you could die by making an unfortunate choice. Later graphical adventures did a pretty good job of easing the player's transition from (usually amusing) death scenes to restoring from a previously saved game. Many RPGs borrowed this trick, having the player character instantly resurrected upon death.

Excessive randomness in a game is also a mistake. Some randomness is okay - even desireable - but when it gets to the point where it gets out of the player's ability to manage, it's a problem.

Another thing to watch out for is a condition where certain combinations of actions are undefendable against. The game that comes to mind is the original Command & Conquer. I don't remember all the details (it's been HOW MANY YEARS since I've played it), but I seem to remember that your starting building was not something that could ever be rebuilt. Two opposing players could team up on you with the Light of Nod (or something like that) and destroy that building INSTANTLY, effectively ending the game for the victim. This wasn't too big of a problem, as this particular weapon took a while to build... so while the victim might not be able to defend or recover from it, it was still at least preventable.



Mistake #4: Forcing the Player's Hand Too Much
This mistake comes into play where one style of play or one strategy has a clear advantage of any others, rendering the entire gameplay a one-dimensional exercise in optimization. Much of the fun in games comes from the player making decisions that appear equally attractive, but the player may be able to nudge some factors to be more in their favor.

Some of the early (and lower-quality) RTS games had this problem, where the entire game became exercises in who could make the most effective early-game rush.


Mistake #5: Making The Gameplay Match the Wrong Audience
This is a pretty common one, and probably merges with mistake #1 a lot. This is frustrating as a game designer, because you are at once trying to add variety to the gameplay to keep it fresh, AND deal with the expectations of the audience. It CAN be done, but it takes a light touch, a skilled hand, and the proper presentation. But you always have to aske youself what your target audience wants to play, and why they are playing your game instead of a different one.

Perhaps the most common example of this mistake is the practically obligatory jumping puzzles in first-person shooters. Many FPS players hate them. Others tolerate them. A few players at grudgingly appreciate the change of pace and variety. But I don't know if anybody actually looks forward to the jumping puzzles. If they did, they'd be playing a different game. Probably on a Nintendo.


(Vaguely) related comments on other fun mistakes!
* How to Avoid Making Money Making Indie Games
* Rules of Game Design Part 1
* A Counter-Manifesto
* More Bad Game Design Decisions
* What Kind of Gamer Are You?
* How Do You Create "Fun"

Labels: Game Design

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