Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
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Whether you're thinking about games in terms of flow, difficulty, or resistance, you
can shape the push and pull of your game's conversation in many ways: by pacing the
development of verbs as discussed in Chapter 3, or by opening up the pacing to player
input, such as by letting her select a difficulty setting.
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Game designers who strive for perfect flow sometimes use dynamic difficulty adjust-
ment (DDA), techniques that help a player who is struggling with frustration or make
things harder for a player who is getting bored. These techniques are tricky, however,
because it's hard to guess what a player's experiencing. Even if you can guess, DDA can
lead to the game feeling mushy, adjusting itself to everything the player does without
providing a firm structure that the player can push against to understand its rules and
challenges.
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When you let players have a hand in shaping the resistance of your game's conversa-
tion, they can be part of deciding how and when their experience gets more challeng-
ing. Games can let players choose how quickly to move to a more challenging space
within the game or whether they use the verbs that require more skill. Games with very
open spaces of resistance let players choose their own goals as well—or even make up
goals to accomplish within a system, as in sandbox games.
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Rewards are a way to shape resistance that pulls players forward, encouraging them
to pursue goals or repeat actions. Some rewards operate within the system of a game,
opening more opportunities for players to push. For example, rewards can unlock new
verbs to use or new areas of the game to push into. Other rewards don't feed back into
the system, such as story cutscenes or traditional achievements that exist on a console
platform. It's worth thinking about whether the lure of this kind of reward can eclipse
the pleasure of playing a game for its own sake.
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Resources are a kind of reward that enables other verbs. For example, ammunition is a
resource that lets the player use the verb “shoot.” Resources are flexible because they're
represented as a number that the player can manage through spending or saving. They
can be linked to goals or punishments. In many games, if you run out of a resource
called health, you experience a setback or have to start the game over.
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Punishments push hard against the player when they do something the game deems
wrong, often involving a penalty that increases resistance or a setback that requires
the player to repeat some or all of what she's done before. Repetition can be a useful
form of punishment, especially for games that try to maintain flow, where a resistance-
increasing penalty would make the game more frustrating. Repetition of a challenge
that hasn't been mastered can give the player a chance to practice, to experience the
same situation again, make different choices, and seek a different outcome that leads
to reward as opposed to punishment.
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Repetition of tasks the player has already mastered is often called grinding and is
sometimes used in a game for its own sake. Grinding over long periods of time cre-
ates a different kind of resistance that requires endurance and patience to overcome
