Blog - Wonderful Imbalance
Tuesday, May 6, 2008Today our class discussion was on balance. In particular, it was on not making games so balanced to the point that they aren't fun.
(Someone in class provided the useful example of tic-tac-toe to explain how a game can be so balanced as to be boring.)
We were asked to experiment with a small game design challenge, expected to push past our desire to balance a game completely.
My team made a neat little pseudo-educational game about sub-atomic particles forming into atoms ("I use my protons to steal your electrons!") which could be interesting given more development time.
In any case, the gist of Brenda's point with the experiment was along the lines of the design tip I hijacked from her and wrote about in an earlier entry.
In brief: players want to have noticeably powerful effects over a game. It's fun to achieve godly powers in a game and completely obliterate everyone. Equally powerful are times when you overcome seemingly impossible odds stacked against you (beating the Dragonforce song on expert level, for example…)
Now, just a few minutes ago I was recounting to someone a gaming story I'm particularly proud of: the time I beat Fallout without ever entering combat or killing anything (as far as the game was concerned...)
This game session didn't have anything to do with balance issues.
However, it did have to do with how broken the game's combat system was: I achieved my feat of a perfect pacifist/stealth run through the game only thanks to heavy exploitation of flaws with the combat system.
I'm wondering, then, to what degree these two examples/phenomena are similar?
In the former example, a game is made more fun by being a little broken in the balance department (fun BECAUSE of its imbalances!)
In the latter example, I had a blast with a game that had a broken system (specifically having a blast with that system's very brokenness!)
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In a related note of both design challenges and big guns, I submitted an entry to this week's James Portnow's Game Design Challenge, which asks participants to design, well... a new gun.
Results will be made available in a week.
Labels: design
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:45 PM
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