Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
There's no single correct way to shape the difficulty of a game into exactly the right kind of
resistance for every player. The right decision for your game depends on its goals and what it's
trying to say in a conversation with players: do you want a highly flexible push-and-pull game
that changes shape depending on how the player approaches it? Or will you establish a firm
structure, making a hard declaration of what your system requires, and let players figure out
how to handle it—even if it means some of them may leave the game before finishing it or miss
the perfect flow by a wide margin? Do you intend to involve players in deciding how the game's
resistance evolves? If games are conversations, they're ones where, as designers, we have to
choose what we say carefully and know what we're going to say in advance, even though we're
often unable to anticipate how all the unique players will react. When we create spaces for
players to make their own choices and determine their own approaches to a system, all sorts of
things can happen—but that may mean that our own ideas of how the conversation will unfold
have to play less of a role as well.
So far, our discussion of flow has revolved around the idea that games ought to try to adapt to
players, avoiding frustration or boredom for too long, and sometimes including players in deci-
sions about how the games' resistance evolves. Seeking flow states means “meeting players
where they are” and ceding some degree of authorial control to foster feelings of engagement
and, gradually, mastery through skill building.
Striving for a game with ideal flow that always moves perfectly between frustration and bore-
dom isn't the only way to make a game, however. It's possible to create interesting games that
don't seek out a perfect flow state. For example, what would happen if a game didn't start out
slow and easy and didn't get harder?
Three Body Problem
(2012) by Robin Burkinshaw doesn't change at all as the player continues to
interact with it (see Figure 6.8). The system starts off as hard as it's ever going to get, but with
simple rules: the player has to maneuver a square to collect points that appear, while two other
squares try to collide with and kill it. Just as with
Super Hexagon
, the first time you play
Three
Body Problem
you're likely to die very quickly, because the other squares are relentlessly chasing
you. It's not an impossibly frustrating problem, however; you can quickly learn to survive longer
by watching and learning how the other two squares move.
With practice, a player of
Three Body Problem
can close the gap between her abilities and the
challenge, making the game easier. This model puts
all
the responsibility for creating flow into
the player's hands: she has to accept that she's a long way from mastery and keep working at it
of her own accord. Once she can handle the challenge, the task becomes to survive as long as
possible to collect more points, challenging both endurance and skill. If we made a diagram of a
player's experience of flow in this game, it would look very different for each player depending
