Game Balancing - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 339

either. Well-designed games don't let the player proceed without the item. Some
don't let players put items down once they have picked them up, just to help avoid
this problem. Study your mechanics carefully to see if the game can ever enter a
state that completely precludes victory but does not meet a loss condition. If it can,
you should either change that state to a loss condition or—preferably—redesign the
mechanics to prevent the game from ever getting into that state.
■ The game doesn't ask the player to make critical decisions without adequate
information. The ZX Spectrum game Monty on the Run by Gremlin Graphics
required the player to choose at the beginning of the game exactly five items to
take with her as she tried to escape her pursuers. Unfortunately, it gave her no clues
about which items she needed; she could find out only by trial and error. Give play-
ers the information they need.
■ All the factual knowledge required to win the game should be contained
within the game. Players should not have to do research outside the game world to
win a game, with the sole exception of trivia games. Chapter 9 discusses this at
greater length.
■ The game should not require the player to meet challenges not normally
presented in the game's genre (such as a formal logic puzzle in a flight simulator).
If the game belongs to a hybrid genre, you must make this clear before the player
starts to play.
Managing Difficulty
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi observed that people performing tasks enter
an enjoyable state of peak productivity, which he calls flow , when (among other
things) their abilities balance the difficulty of the tasks they face. If the challenges
are too difficult, people become anxious; if the challenges are too easy, people
become bored (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991). Csikszentmihalyi's observations apply to
games as well as to other tasks. Balancing a game, then, includes managing the dif-
ficulty of its challenges to try to keep the players within the flow state—the point at
which their abilities just match the problems they face. This provides another
example of the player-centric approach: Your goal is not simply to set a level of dif-
ficulty but to think about how to adjust that difficulty to maximize the player's
enjoyment. See Figure 11.2 for an illustration.
Chapter 9, in the section “Skill, Stress, and Difficulty” examined two factors, the
intrinsic skill required (ISR) to overcome a challenge and the stress placed on the
player by time pressure, that combine to form the absolute difficulty of the chal-
lenge. The remainder of this section extends the discussion of difficulty to take
into account two additional factors, ultimately arriving at the idea of perceived diffi-
culty —the type that matters to the player. As the preceding section explained, the
perceived difficulty of a well-balanced game must remain within a certain range
and not have sudden spikes or dips.