Understanding Game Design 106 - Why Players Need Full Customization of Strategy
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ม.ค. 2025
- A real game is…
• A competition,
• With victory conditions,
• That is fair and balanced,
• Immersive,
• Requires strategy to win,
• Never takes away any player’s agency,
• Provides its players with full customization of strategy,
• Lacks real-world relevance //Example: Physical aptitude (sports), or being pay-to-win//
• Is neither a simulation nor solvable,
• And victory conditions cannot be random.
Some explanations of terms...
Competition: An activity where players utilize limited resources to achieve conflicting goals, i.e. victory conditions
Fair: Gameplay cannot favor any strategy over another
Balanced: The math of your game must be sound so gameplay is fair, not solvable or otherwise violating of player agency, victory is not random, and strategy is required
Immersion:
• Have strong flavor (reinforced and not distracted or deviated from in design)
Ex: Both “Cards Against Humanity” and “Magic: The Gathering” have strong flavor. The former explores wordplay while the latter explores high fantasy (although it has recently begun violating this, they got it right in the beginning, save for a few minor errors).
• Don't break your players out of either the flavor of your game (distraction or deviation) or the gameplay itself (violating agency)
• The game mechanics must fully explore the space of your game's flavor (refer to full customization of strategy and making your competitions fair and balanced)
Major Note: ‘Board games’ are entirely disqualified as a genre because they fundamentally violate formal game theory. This does not include all tabletop games, just ‘board games’. This does however include things like chess, go, poker, mahjong, etc., regardless of format.
My Ko-fi if you'd like to support my work:
ko-fi.com/gamesbymarcwolff
CORRECTION:
I'm pretty sure Vegeta's 'back+energy" attack is the "big bang attack"; not "final flash".
Apologies
I don't agree with this list (I'm a big fan of customization of strategy)
A game is not necessarily competitive and can still be a game. What you're describing is a contest of wits; or of luck (depending on variance of the game).
We'll talk about luck when I cover "Victory in a real game cannot be random", but yes, the foundation of a game is that it is a competition.
For more on this topic, check out the videos I've done so far in this series on the topic of competition.
"Gameplay cannot favor any strategy over another" That's just absurd, if every strategy is good, none of them are. You probably shouldn't know what the best strategy is, but their is going to be one and if all strategies were equal, you may as well not play the game at all.
Those are actually two different things, and it's important to understand why.
No, every strategy in a real game is not good. Like I've said in these videos, you can have a bad strategy - but you have the freedom to make that choice as a player.
Not favoring any strategy over another is decided by the designer, not the player. If they're telling you what strategy is the most competitive ahead of time because the game is unfair and/or unbalanced then their game is solvable and there's no reason for anyone to play. Their decisions won't matter; the designer has already decided the outcome before the players even got there.
THAT'S absurd.
And no, just because not all strategies are good, does not mean there is a best strategy. That would mean strategy was not required to play and the players had no agency. There would also be no customization of strategy and the design would be solvable. Very definitively a not-game.
Sure, If you min max a game, then yes there is only one optimal strategy. But if you factor in fun, then it all just depends on each individual player. A strategy that can hardly ever win the game might as well hardly ever be fun.
I.e. every Skyrim player will end up as a stealth archer with alchemy skills. But its more fun doing something where NPC's actually react to the player, eventhough the game becomes harder to play.
@cooperhill6054 Think about this:
You can't min-max in a real game. You can only be more skilled.
@@GamesbyMarcWolffLiterally every non-infinite game is solvable. I'm not sure why you bring that up as a point against something.
Dnd 4e flopped compared to other editions because it went too far down the road of giving everyone access to everything with slightly different flavor. Yes it's good to give players choices, but sometimes the choices need to restrict later available options. Players should still be able to pick or build their own strategy, but there needs to be tradeoffs in that process.
I never played 4e but I remember checking out the rules and thinking it was like someone tried to translate an MMO into a tabletop game.
I'd have to familiarize myself with 4e before I'd have anything more specific to say about it - however, I would guess that since it uses levels and is trying to emulate a video game, that 4e (again, if I had to guess) suffers from the issue of 'partial' customization of strategy.
What you're describing more specifically seems like what they did was the opposite of customization of strategy. If they made everyone the same then they decided everyone's strategy for them, and I'd have to agree that sounds like an especially boring "D&D" edition.
If I'm understanding what you're saying, then I think we basically agree. I'd have some more specific things I'd add to clarify exactly when what you're describing is good and when it's bad, but I think for the most part we agree.
In case you meant to be critical though and thought I meant everyone should always have access to everyone else's strategy - then no, I do not at all mean that. What I mean is that everyone should always have full control over their strategy. This allows for that unfortunate scenario where everyone might choose the same strategy, but the difference between a real game doing this and 4e making every class too similar is that there is no freedom of whether or not to do this in 4e.
In a real game too, if players were cooperating as a group and chose that group strategy of all being the same then they're not doing so because the game gives them an advantage for that but because they're simply choosing to do so - necessarily avoiding group tactics. It's an odd sort of narcissistic strategy I suppose. If they were unskilled then they're probably going to lose to any team with even a moderately competitive group dynamic, or if they are indeed skilled then this would make the competition more difficult than if they incorporated group tactics.
Sorry, didn't mean to respond with an essay. You just caught me at a good reply time.
First: I think calling it “real game” is just a bad name. Imagine Portal, great game, by your definition is not a real game. I can give many examples but a better name would be a competitive game? Or skill based game?
Second: A theory should explain more than anything, what you probably mean is an ideal, games can break the rules in your ideals and become better, create new ideals that are fun in their own way. A theory would explain why these two ideals are fun and in what way.
The theorem does exactly what you say. It does explain what makes a game fun, with bullet points!
And riddle me this:
If Portal is such a good game, why aren't people still playing it? Why is it not something we all regularly do? Why exactly do you think it's a great game? Is it because you were so enthralled that you played the whole thing in a feverish frenzy you couldn't stop, or because that's what you think group-think is telling you? Is it because you read it in an article by a game journalist?
Is it because of the graphics and the fun song? Those have nothing to do with game mechanics.
Because it’s not replayable, and not every game needs to be replayable and mechanically deep and sort of a forever game.
I played Portal a few times over the years and I enjoyed it every time, I still remember the first time it ended and how much I missed every character, I still sometimes do co-op with my friends, it’s not dead, it’s just not that re-playable.
A forever game can be fun, I play Dota every day, 3000 hours on the clock, it’s mechanically deep, it has room for crazy strategies, but honestly for me a 20 hour game with a bunch of fun mechanics counts as a good experience, mechanical depth and problem solving isn’t the only path to being fun.
@@ahrzb I can't wait for you to play a real game. I think a number of lightbulbs will suddenly turn on.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I very much appreciate it, whether or not those comments agree with me.
This is an entirely open forum for discourse and I remain fully open to the possibility that someone could prove my theorem false.
If you or anyone can provide such evidence, then please do your due diligence but do not hesitate to share it.
Would you give me some examples of real games? I’ve played most of the examples you bring up in the video.
@@ahrzb So far the only example of a real game in all of history is my own game, Mage War. It's a terrible example to use in these videos though because it's still very unknown so no one would know what I was talking about.
I've said more about this in answers to other comments so I encourage you to read around and see (I may also have this on some of my Ko-fi bio), but that's kind of why I'm making this discovery public to everyone for free. There's never been a real game before, and the world needs real games. Once we get further into these topics we'll also start to see why not-games are such scams. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly inherent the replacing of game design with scam business models is to an ad-hoc industry that can't even answer the question, "What is a game?", and very much profits off this.
What'll really boggle their minds though is how much more lucrative a real game is than a scam masquerading as a game.
I don't understand how you can disqualify poker but not disqualify pokemon, you say that 'board games' like poker are disqualified because they violate formal game theory, what does this mean? Based on my (incredibly) breif reading on game theory, poker, a zero-sum game is under the preview of game theory. Furthermore you say that both chess and poker 'fundamentally violate formal game theory' but chess and poker are markedly different games. I haven't played much pokemon but from what I've seen of competitive play its very reminisant of e.g. poker where you use your understanding of the probabilities involved in each interaction to maximise profit. By violates formal game theory do you mean that for any strategy your opponent picks you always have a counter-stratagy ala rock-paper-scissors? And in liu of that would rock-paper-scissors be considered a game by your standards? (albeit a rudamentary one?)
Finally, is there really a need to consider these games 'real games'? Is there really a need to exclude other kinds of 'games' or 'sports' as you would call them? or is this just a matter of strong preference?
I have no idea what it means to fundamentally violate formal game theory as it relates to poker. All aspects of poker strategy are 100% based in game theory, so I don't even understand the argument.
I do disqualify Pokemon.
Pokemon is as much a not-game as Poker.
Rock-paper-scissors is also not a game.
To answer your final question, yes, and all of these videos explain why.
@@Ohrami Poker is solvable and victory is random. There's also no customization of strategy and it doesn't lack real-world relevance.