Building the Game: Fun and Easy

Though the article's title sounds like I’m going to talk about the bar hag I met last night, this article is about developing games, and the only bar hags I meet are usually online. When I talk about "fun and easy", I’m specifically talking about the elements in the game you're designing. Next week we’ll talk about what is fun (not sure how we’ll discuss that), but this week we’ll focus on what is easy (insert joke about mother here). No matter what aspect of your game you're designing, you should remember one simple rule: players will always do what is easiest, most efficient, or provide the greatest benefit.

They will not always do what is always fun, no matter how you try to convince them. This is always overlooked when creating a game because, in your head, you might think about how fun it would be for players to shoot a huge gigantic zombie sloth that takes every last bullet to kill, but once the game is finally completed, you find out that most players just run past the zombie and never even engage it. It would be great if you could sit next to them and tell them all about how long it took to program the zombie, how unique the graphic design is, and how innovative its attacks are but since you aren’t there, they are going to find the fastest, easiest, and most efficient way to complete the task, even if it means running away (cowards).

Just because something is fun doesn’t necessarily mean that players will gravitate to that play style. So how do you get players to play the game elements that you work so tirelessly to develop? I’ll explain how I did it in my own game. I added the ability to customize the avatar by purchasing new items from the marketplace. Through the years, purchasing items has become a staple of game design whether its adding spoilers to a car in Need for Speed or getting those hard sought-after gauntlets to complete your armor suit in World of Warcraft. A common misconception is that by simply adding this level of customization to the game, players will automatically be attracted to it. It might be fun to play dress-up with your character, but if the time spent on customization doesn’t translate into a benefit to the player, it will for the most part be left by the wayside. So my task was to find a way to make the customization fun, and essential to the gameplay.

I’m sure if you think for a second, you can think of a recent gaming moment where some long action felt like a complete waste of time. And after it happened once, I bet you never did it again, regardless of the fun factor. For me, I immediately think of my recent experiences playing Spore. While in the Creature Creation phase, I spent so much time tweaking my creature’s skills; making sure that I had level four in everything, going around and collecting all of the creature parts, just to have them all of them. I spent a few hours trudging through the planet, putting off evolution, just to have the best of the best, only to find out that none of it really matters as soon as you progress to the Tribal phase. In fact, I even captured an epic monster, only to have it confiscated in the Tribal phase. Guess what? That’s the last time I’ll ever play the creature creation stage unless it’s to create something I really want to make. It’s a shame that so much ingenuity goes to waste, but why would I spend so much time doing something when it provides no intrinsic value or measurable benefit in the rest of the game? Again, it is definitely fun to play, but it’s not efficient or beneficial.

So, how does this all translate into the game that I’ve been developing? Well, I knew that I wanted to add in a customization element of the game, but I didn’t want players to feel like it was a waste of time. Even more important, I wanted the players to realize that the time spent on customization actually provided an essential benefit to the rest of the game. So, what I did was take the purchasable items available, and make them have unique effects on the gameplay, and I’m not just talking about a little bonus, or some unusable trophies. I built the item’s to have positive effects in the actual gameplay environment, effectively making it more difficult for players that neglect to purchase items and customize. They simply won’t be able to keep up with players that do purchase new items. I realize that this is not a new gaming idea, and it might even seem intuitive to design it that way, but the point is to show a simple idea, and how “easy” plays into a game element. The point is to show that as a game designer, you have the ability to direct traffic in the game, and by doing so, you can predict what actions the player takes. Simply by penalizing players that don’t purchase new items, and by rewarding those that do, I have just made the fun customization part of the game an essential part of the game.

At first you might think I’m a control freak, but this is the truth, and the pros do it all the time, in fact, the biggest blockbuster games out today do it without flaw. I was recently playing the Left 4 Dead demo, and I loved seeing this idea in practice. It’s easy to play the game and not realize the psychology behind its implementation. Think about its most basic core element: sticking together. As you get use to the game, you start to move as a group, help each other out, wait for each other, but why? It’s not like you have an emotional attachment to these people, unless you and “VomitBullet69” are really hitting it off. The reason is that you realize early on that there are penalties for going off on your own, and those that stick together receive intrinsic rewards. Basically, sticking together is easier, it’s more efficient and it provides benefits like rescuing, healing, and more points of view. If it was easier to go alone, this game would simply be another first person shooter. Of course, the real beauty of Left 4 Dead is that sticking together, the easiest option for progressing through the game, is also endlessly fun.

Keep in mind that a great game designer understands how a gamer thinks, and realizes that gamers are smart. They want to be entertained but they also want to solve problems. When you design a game, you will inevitably come up with many “wouldn’t it be cool if…” game elements, but if you want the player to say “it was so cool when …” then you have to ensure that they will play the game the way you want them to, and that means you have to constantly push them in the right direction, and give them a little tough love when they go off course, otherwise they’ll have you saying, “I don’t understand, we designed it to be so much fun, why won’t they play it?”

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