Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Suppose you build a road-racing game in which players vie to earn the most prize
money available over a series of races. You offer the player the chance to buy one of
three cars made by three different manufacturers, such as Ford, Dodge, and
Chevrolet. To make this a meaningful choice, you decide to create some variety
among the cars so that the Ford is faster than the Dodge, and the Dodge is faster
than the Chevrolet. If they all cost the same amount and their performance is iden-
tical in other ways, choosing the Ford constitutes a dominant strategy. However, if
you price each car in proportion to its advantage so that the Ford costs the most
and the Chevrolet costs the least, the game regains balance. Because the players'
goal is to earn money, not merely to win races, the financial disadvantage of the
faster car offsets its speed advantage if you set the costs correctly.
Setting up direct costs that exactly counter the advantages of certain choices does
balance the game, but such a clear and obvious balancing mechanism produces a
game that seems rather bland. The player can see that there's no real difference
among the choices. To create a more interesting choice for the player, you can
instead impose shadow costs
. Shadow cost
, a term from economic theory, refers to
secondary, or hidden, costs that lie behind the apparent costs of goods or services.
For our purposes, a shadow cost is one that the designer creates but doesn't warn
the player about explicitly. It serves to balance the game without being blatant
about the mechanisms. For instance, giving the Ford a smaller fuel tank that
requires the car to stop to refuel more often in the road race could counter its speed
advantage. The smaller fuel tank serves as a shadow cost that the player becomes
aware of through repeated play.
TIP
If you give a
player an option that
appears to be clearly
superior to his other
options, you can bal-
ance this by imposing
a higher direct (visible)
cost for choosing that
option, or a shadow
(hidden) cost.
You can hide a shadow cost completely by building it into the mechanics and not
documenting it in the game's manual—for instance, not telling the players how big
the fuel tanks in the cars are so they have to find it out through trial and error.
More often, a shadow cost is available to the player but not obvious. Continuing
the same example, the player might be able to learn the sizes of the fuel tanks by
comparing the numbers on the fuel gauges in each car, but the instructions for the
game don't draw attention to it. Another classic example is a weapon that does a
great deal of damage but has a slow rate of fire. The slow rate of fire is a shadow cost
that the player only discovers once she starts to use the weapon.
Players of PvE games often feel that entirely hidden shadow costs are unfair
because the player cannot know what costs lurk behind the scenes or learn to com-
pensate for them. For example, if a game reduces a character's accuracy at throwing
a javelin in proportion to the weight of the character's backpack (on the theory
that throwing a javelin while wearing a heavy backpack is bound to be rather
uncertain) but never explains this to the player in the manual or anywhere else,
the player can't learn to compensate for it. He finds that his accuracy worsens at
times, but he can't understand why. If he does figure it out, he will probably cry
foul and post a warning on an Internet gaming forum for the benefit of other play-
ers. A number of game publishers deliberately hide shadow costs from the players
