Balance and Meritocracies - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 144

In response to this notion of a meritocracy, “ MUD had a fascinating con-
text: Two angry young men, feeling oppressed, creating an escape with
their own two hands; a place where the laws were fairer, where the expe-
rience was not so unkind.” 8 Ef ectively, this is the foregrounding of the
perceived 'need' for balance in online worlds. Creating the perception of
a meritocracy requires a setting that is balanced, one where skill, rather
than birthright, will enable players to succeed.
Focusing on balance stretches well beyond MUD and the MMOGs that
descended from it. Balance is a key aspect of game design discussions and
statements about properly balancing a game are frequently tied to making
the game good or fun. One game designer, who works predominantly on
fi ghting games, argues that proper game balance requires both a variety of
viable options and an overarching fairness in the game that allows “players
of equal skill [to] have an equal chance at winning even though they might
start the game with dif erent sets of options/moves/characters/resources/
etc.” 9 The overriding perception of this kind of design is that, much like
Trubshaw and Bartle's MUD , games should be set up in a way that skill is
showcased and those that are of the greatest talent can rise to the top of the
meritocracy. One could choose to balance, or not balance, a game in many
dif erent ways, but the dominant means by which to balance video games
is to make them appear fairer. Interestingly enough, for some designers,
proper balance is more often found in the realm of intuition, rather than
through complex statistical testing. 10 Intuition, which is more likely to be
the product of experience and repeated practice than a complicated set of
mathematical calculations, is particularly noteworthy when centered in the
proper balancing of games. The only way to develop the intuition needed to
understand 'proper' balance is to make and play games and the only ones
who can assess balance are those who are making and playing games. By
extension, if balance is a key component of gaming, having the skills neces-
sary to produce or recognize whether or not a game is balanced requires
participating actively in the discourse of gaming. In so doing, players and
designers buy into the ideograph of balance, recognizing it as important
and then expecting it in future games, and potentially rejecting games
because they are not properly balanced. 11 By placing balance and intuition
at the center of game design, the ideograph of balance is reinforced and
perpetuated within the community of those playing games.
Balance within game design is also discussed in two other meaningful
ways. First, there are occasional ef orts by designers to rearticulate what
balance means in the design of games. One designer articulates an interest
in shifting the focus of balance from making the game perfectly even to
making the game 'awesome. ' 12 The traditional approach for system design-
ers is to ensure that dif erent choices result in similar kinds of power for
the player, much as the position outlined above. However, in striving for
perfection in balance, one could lose sight of what makes the game fun,
forcing changes in an ef ort to make the game even, rather than focusing