Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
structure
Participants
n
Multiple
players
who have the same (or similar) mechanics and options.
n
A
strength
resource. A player who loses all his strength is eliminated from the
game.
n
A special
attack
action that drains or steals the other player's strength.
collaborations
By performing attack actions, players can drain each other's strength. Attacking
may, or may not, cost strength to perform. If attacking doesn't cost strength, it
should require time to perform or involve some measure of skill or randomness.
The balance between the attack costs, its effectiveness, and how beneficial the other
actions in the game are determine the effectiveness of the attack and the dominance
of the attrition pattern.
consequences
Attrition introduces a lot of dynamism into a system because players directly control
the measure of the destructive force applied to each other. Often, this introduces
destructive feedback because the current state of a player will cause reactions by
other players. Depending on the nature of the winning conditions and the current
state of the game, this feedback might be negative when it stimulates players to act
and conspire against the leader, but it also might cause positive feedback when play-
ers are stimulated to attack and eliminate weaker players.
NOTE
remember that
the terms
constructive
and
destructive
describing feedback
are not the same as
positive
and
negative.
see the section
“seven Feedback
characteristics” in
chapter 6, “common
mechanisms,” for an
explanation of the
distinction.
implementation
For attrition to work well, players should be required to invest some sort of resource
in attacking that could also be spent otherwise. If they don't have to make this
investment, in a two-player game attrition simply becomes a race to destroy the
opponent with few or no strategic choices. In a multiplayer game that facilitates
social interaction between the players, attacking without investment works a little
better because the players need to choose whom to attack.
