Gameplay - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 258

challenges explicitly includes the intermediate-level challenge of disrupt the enemy's
production system , and protecting his own production system doesn't destroy enemy
units at all. The player must figure out what he should do by observing and deduc-
ing and, by planning and experimenting, find ways to accomplish his goals. Obser-
ving, deducing, planning, and experimenting all add to the fun.

You constr uct these implicit, intermediate challenges for the player to fig ure out.
The conventions of the genre you choose guide you, but keep in mind that the
most interesting games offer multiple ways to win. To give your player a richer
experience, design your game so that he can win in a variety of ways—so that
meeting different intermediate challenges will still get him to victory. Different
strategies may be better or worse, but if you only permit one right way to win, you
don't reward the player's lateral thinking skills. The game becomes an exercise in
reading the designer's mind.

Figure 9.2 illustrates the idea of offering multiple ways to win a war game. The vic-
tory condition is to capture the flag. The hierarchy is organized as before, except
that the dotted lines indicate a choice of possible approaches rather than a sequence of
required sub-missions as in Figure 9.1. The gray boxes indicate the challenges in the
player's mind at one particular moment—in this case, we assume that he chose to
use a stealth approach and sent units out to scout.

FIGURE 9.2
A hierarchy of
challenges with
multiple options

CAPTURE ENEMY FLAG

DEFENSIVE APPROACH AGGRESSIVE APPROACH STEALTH APPROACH

Defend Own
Production

Destroy Enemy
Production

Divert Enemy
Attention

Scout Unguarded
Route to Flag

Win Fights Win Fights

Capture Flag Capture Flag Capture Flag

Simultaneous Atomic Challenges
Although the player simultaneously faces several challenges in the hierarchy, she
pays less attention, on a moment-by-moment basis, to those challenges that are far-
ther up in the hierarchy. But games can also present several atomic challenges at
once. These divide the player's attention. If she can deal with them one at a time