Through the Lens: Video Games - Game Design Theory - page 114

Rare's R. C. Pro-Am and Blizzard's Rock n' Roll Racing . 1 But kart racers—
most notably, the Mario Kart series—were the first to award items with
extremely high levels of randomness. In the Mario Kart games, you're
practically guaranteed to get an item every time around with no extra
effort The items are placed right in the middle of the track, and it's much
more rare to not get an item than to get one (it's difficult to avoid getting
them!). The items are given randomly, so this adds a tremendous luck
factor to the game—some items are very powerful and take you straight
to first place, while other items are quite weak or situational. Of course,
this “fixes� the skill deficit, but at the expense of rewarding good play.
The other “solution� is rubberbanding—a feature that slows down
players near the front and gives players near the back extra speed. Rub-
berbanding is often exaggerated near the finish line to create a dramatic
last minute neck-and-neck win moment. What developers fail to realize,
though, is that that kind of a moment cannot be manufactured.
You can fool people a few times with these techniques, but when
players don't feel like they have earned their victories, that's a problem.
You're messing with absolutely the most fundamental part of games:
building skill. In a game that's very random or with strong rubberband-
ing, you excel whether you're good or bad—so what reason is there
to push yourself? What motivation is there to use imagination? What
would inspire someone to use creativity? Games have to be tough, and
they have to be internally consistent and fair, because without these con-
ditions human beings just won't care.
Then how do you solve this problem of players having different skill
levels? Well, there's an underlying attribute of racing games that makes
this somewhat unfixable
… Unless You Make a Game Out of It
As I mentioned before, the reason that the skill deficit issue is such a
problem in racing games is that racers tend to be closer to contests than
they are to games. Which is to say, they are (to a large degree) a simple
exercise in measuring which player has the better skills, whether that
skill is knowing exactly how to best handle the steering mechanism or
having the level memorized. In a pure racing game, if your opponent
knows these two things better than you, the only way you will win is if he
or she messes up. In a game you may be able to throw your opponents
a curveball and surprise them, but in a traditional racing contest there's
nothing you can do to win if you're losing.
1 A more recent release, New Star Games's Super Laser Racer , seems to carry on in an
older item tradition.