Gameplay - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 267

Races and Time Pressure

In a race , the player attempts to accomplish something before someone else does,
whether that involves a physical race through space or a race to create a structure,
to accumulate something, or to do practically anything as long as the game can
distinguish which player finishes first. Normally we think of races as peaceful,
involving competition without conflict, but races can be combined with fighting
and many other kinds of challenges.

Time pressure discourages careful strategic thought and instead encourages direct,
brute-force solutions. With only 15 seconds to get through a host of enemies and
disarm a bomb, the player won't stop to pick off enemy units one by one with snip-
ing shots; he's going to mow them down and charge through the gap, even if that
means taking a lot of damage.

Time pressure increases the stress on a player and changes the feeling of the game-
play considerably, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. In something like
a car racing game, time pressure is an essential part of the experience, but use cau-
tion in adding time pressure to challenges that aren't ordinarily based on time
constraints. You will deter some players entirely and make the challenge more diffi-
cult in any case. To keep the absolute difficulty level constant, whenever you
increase the time pressure on a player, you should also reduce the amount of intrin-
sic skill required.

Factual Knowledge Challenges
Direct tests of the player's knowledge of factual information generally occur only in
trivia and quiz games. In any other type of game, you must either present all the
factual knowledge required to win the game somewhere in the game (or the man-
ual) or make it clear in the game's marketing materials that players will need some
factual knowledge. It's not fair to require the player to come up with some obscure
fact from the real world in order to make progress through the game; doing so also
detracts from full immersion.

Note the difference between factual knowledge challenges and conceptual reason-
ing challenges (discussed in the later section, “Conceptual Reasoning and Lateral
Thinking Puzzles”). If an adventure game features a puzzle the player can't solve
without knowing that helium balloons rise or that metal objects conduct electricity,
such a puzzle is a conceptual reasoning challenge, not a factual knowledge challenge.

NOTE Trivial Pursuit ,
the popular board
game that tests play-
ers' factual knowledge
in several different
domains, also runs
as a video game on a
variety of platforms.

Memory Challenges
Memory challenges test the player's ability to recall things that she has seen or heard
in the game. Adventure games and role-playing games often make use of memory