Game Realm: Balance

Balance is an important concept in games. It gets talked about frequently, especially in any game with a competitive element. But what is balance? It turns out that that question can be surprisingly difficult to answer, in part, because it can refer to a lot of things. Conceptually, balance is the equivalence of two measures; that is, an even scale. It can also refer to stability; something that is well balanced won't fall down.

The concept of game balance is generally derived from that first definition; the equivalence of two measures. I call this Balance of Power (BoP) because the two measures are usually the power (strength, effectiveness, efficiency, etc.) of two "things", such as weapons or skills. The problem with determining the evenness of Balance of Power is that everyone has a different scale, and each scale is weighted differently. These scales are built from a person's perspective, and they are influenced by their skill, preferences, and prejudices. Effectively, there is nearly no such thing as an objective balance of power. Put another way, balance of power is almost entirely subjective.

Now, there is one clear instance where balance of power is objective, and that is when the only difference between two objects is one number – for example, a sword that deals 8 damage a hit versus a sword that deals 12 damage a hit. The sword that deals 8 damage is strictly worse than the one that deals 12, and thus, they are imbalanced. Of course, people generally don't complain about this sort of imbalance, because in the genres of games where this occurs, such imbalances are not only expected, but often desirable, as they allow for progression.

This concept leads straight into another definition of balance, and one that I think is far more useful: Balance of Environment (BoE). This balance refers to the environment in which a player plays, and can also be referred to as the balance of emotion or the balance of experience. It is this type of balance that asks the question, "Does this thing, or the relationship between these things, result in a desirable experience/emotional response/environment for the player?"

Too often we, players and game creators alike, get caught up in arguments about the balance of power; too much effort is put into trying to achievement a flat power curve – whatever that even looks like given that everyone has their own idea of its appearance. Far more time needs to go into evaluating that above question. There needs to be a responsiveness to the concerns of the community; though remember, complaints about balance of power are flavored by their perspectives. That said, if something prevents the community from having fun, enjoying, or engaging with the game, then I argue that it is imbalanced from a Balance of Environment perspective.

And so, I leave you, dear reader, with these thoughts: Remember that your concept of balance of power is influenced by your perspective, and seek to find solutions when you answer, “No,” to the question, “Does this thing, or the relationship between these things, result in a desirable experience/emotional response/environment for the player?" Also, remember that the balance of power is part of the balance of environment, and that in order to have a true feeling for what the balance of power most approximately is requires understanding the people who are making claims about its nature.

Game Realm: Introduction

 Welcome to Game Realm, the label I'm giving to game reviews and articles about game design. They'll release on Tuesdays, with one releasing the first Tuesday of the month. If I feel inspired, I'll release articles more frequently.

These articles are all going to be colored by my point of view, so I want to present what that is to give context to what I'll be writing. I also understand that my point of view isn't a be-all-end-all. That said, it is important to understand other people's points of view, because it can help increase our own scope of understanding.

So, what do I look for in games? I'm most concerned about core mechanics, with the things that will occupy the majority of my time or have the greatest impact on my play experience. I'm not always looking for fun, I'm looking for engagement. Something that grips me. I enjoy nice graphics, I love excellent music, a good story is wonderful, but none of those things are the primary focus for me. A game could have all of those in spades, and the combination of them might be enough to compel me to finish it, but they won't likely be able to keep me playing it if the core mechanics aren't engaging enough.

The following games, listed in chronological order, are ones that have had a particularly powerful impact on me:

• StarCraft: Brood War
• Guild Wars 1 (all four games, as they are pretty well connected)
• Dark Souls

While there are many other games I've quite enjoyed, these ones really stand out to me. I should also note that I'm a fan of Magic: The Gathering, and Mark Rosewater's articles have had a strong impact on me. However, I intend for these articles to focus on video games, and my experience with Magic has been mostly playing with the physical cards.

The question presents itself; why those three games? I'm not going to go too indepth here, as, aside from Starcraft, those games deserve their own articles. (I don't currently have much I want to say about the design of Starcraft.)

• StarCraft: Brood War: The main reason why this game is part of this list is because I got into the modding scene. I had a lot of fun modding it, back when Warboards.org was a website, and I prefer to play with one of my mods than play the standard game. I don't have much to say about why the design compelled me due to the nature of this engagement. While modding is a great way to enjoy a game, it generally has little to do with the original design.
• Guild Wars 1: This is probably the video game I have sunk the most hours into. The core design of the build system is largely responsible for that, as I had great fun experimenting with and exploring it. While I also enjoyed the social aspects of the game -- back when the community I was in was active -- they were always secondary to this enjoyment of the core build system, as demonstrated by the fact that I kept playing the game long after much of my guild had left.
• Dark Souls: This game has one of the best combat systems I have ever experienced, and, on top of that, FromSoft made other fantastic design decisions with it. There is also room for experimentation with builds – stats, weapon choice, etcetera. That said, the combat is really what keeps me engaged.

This article has, if successful, given you a glimpse into what to expect, and what sort of gamer I am. I'm looking forward to writing more articles; it's something I've been meaning to do for some time now. I hope that they give you something to think about and ponder. Thank you for reading.

Death and Experimentation in Games: Handling player failure

I just got done playing a short bit of Kingdoms of Amular, a game that I haven't really played enough to have a chance to get engrossed in it. I tried opening some sort of warded chest, I failed, and it killed me. That is how I learned how Kingdoms of Amular handles death: Reload the last save. The game autosaves; it autosaved right before the chest killed me, meaning that when I loaded the autosave, it would load it to kill me again.

I write that introductory paragraph, because how games handle death and failure matter. Kingdoms of Amular handles death in a very traditional way, but I think it's a terrible one. Death is not a part of the game, and dying breaks immersion. At least it has autosaves, though perhaps some more care could have been put into ensuring what just happened to me can't happen.

But let's contrast this to Dark Souls. What happens when you die in Dark Souls? You go back to the last bonfire you rested at. Death is a mechanic in that game. It's a mechanic in other games as well, for example, Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 both have ways of handling death via in-game systems.

Death should usually be punishing in games, but it needs to be the right type of punishing. It needs to not pull the player out of the game, and it needs to not feel like time was lost, progress was erased. That is the biggest problem with the "load the last save" method of handling death.

Here is the point I'm getting at: It is important to let the player know that they messed up in a friendly way. Game systems need to be designed to make the player feel comfortable with failure, with trial and error, and with learning via experimentation. I shouldn't feel paranoid that, if I mess up, I might potentially lose hours of play time. That pushes me away from games.

Dark Souls handles death extremely well. It is an important part of the game, and From Software put in great efforts to polish how that system works. The game makes death a natural part of playing it. It makes failure accepted. More games need to follow in this path. I'm not talking about difficulty here, but rather that there ought to be other mechanisms to handle player failure than simply reloading the last save. That's a design cop-out, and in the end, games are much worse for it.

In conclusion, I personally feel that making the player reload the last save is archaic and inelegant, and a poor way of handling player failure in games. There are better ways of going about it. Whenever I have to pull up a load menu involuntarily, the game has failed, not me.