Designing with competitive vs NON-competitive play in mind
No catchy title this time, just wanted to talk about how we should design games that hold up to competitive play… AND to NON-competitive play.
I've said before that all things being equal, games are better if they hold up to competitive play. That is to say that they don't break down when a player "tries to win." For many games, that's not strictly necessary, for example, many party games are not really played "to win," but just to facilitate a fun time. That's well and good, but my point still stands: the game would only be better if it did not unravel when one or more players do play competitively.
I've stumbled across a new observation that is related to this, and may be even more important. Not only should a game strive to hold up to competitive play, but it must also hold up to NON-competitive play! By this I mean simply: if one, some, or (worst case) all of the players do not aggressively pursue the winning condition, the game must not stop working, and it must still progress toward an end.
Case Study: Apotheosis
The other day I had a test with 3 other players on Tabletop Simulator, and I decided to sit out and help facilitate instead of playing because TTS is kinda fiddly, and I thought it would go faster that way. This turned out to be fortuitous because it revealed what I'd consider a fatal flaw in the game: all three players went for even advancement to obtain the "consolation" level-ups I'd added, effectively spending too many turns building up rather than pressing to get to those tier-2 adventures and racing up a track. As a result, perhaps not unexpectedly, the game dragged on and ended up taking about 2 hours -- fully twice an acceptable duration!
Thinking about this problem is what turned me on to the axiom above: games must hold up to non-competitive play. First time players will not necessarily notice that you're intended to push up the tracks as fast as you can. In fact, the current incentives kind of suggest the opposite. And many players just play games to explore their systems, and don't try doggedly to achieve victory. Therefore, it is definitely appropriate to address this game-dragging problem in some way.
Brainstorming solutions
My next thought was to make some of the rewards on the tracks "1st come, 1st served" to encourage players to race for those. This might be good to do, but I'd also like to see players get those rewards more often, so limiting them might not be great after all.
Finally, the 3rd thing that came to mind was the biggest, and possibly best solution: add a game end condition that would trigger when players dilly-dally. Such a game timer would keep the game from dragging by definition, if players don't progress the game themselves, it will still come to an end. In general I'd say this is an obvious choice, except in Apotheosis, the win condition is reaching the end of a track. So what happens if the time runs out and nobody has achieved the win condition? How do you decide who wins? In some games it's easy to assess relative progress, and award the game to the player who's closest to winning. But here that is thematically odd because topping out a track is supposed to represent a big, momentous event.
Another option is to say that if time runs out, then nobody wins. This is an interesting thought, however it may be out of place in this type of game, and it's likely to make for a bad first play experience if players all lose in the first game.
Settling on a solution?
Tangentially related: game end dynamic
The game must communicate its dynamics to the players
For the new perspective alternate end game trigger in Apotheosis, this axiom would suggest that it's important to make clear the "most evenly advanced" win condition is a secondary condition, and that the primary and most common way to win will still be by reaching the end of a track. Without clearly communicating this, I can see how it'd be very easy for a player to assume both win conditions are equally viable to go after, and I can just see reviewers now complaining that "the game is not well balanced, not all win conditions have the same win rates" (duh, they're not supposed to!)
I'm not exactly sure how to go about that communication outside of explicitly stating it in the rulebook, which is not ideal by itself, because it is too easy to overlook or forget about.
2 comments:
I'm not convinced that "must" is always accurate; PR being the classic example of a game that falls apart if one player isn't trying (or isn't experienced). And then there are negotiation games where if one player isn't participating it kind of sucks the life out of the room. But I'd agree that generally it's usually good if one player's poor or disengaged play doesn't ruin the experience for everyone else, and yes absolute agreement that it's good if a game communicates to players how to play well!
@Jeff -- Puerto Rico is an example of a game that has what I refer to as a FRAGILITY with respect to turn order binding, and the oft-maligned dynamic of a new (or bad) player throwing the game to their left hand neighbor.
BUT, consider this: even in the case of a new (or bad) player, the game does not drag on interminably!
So I guess you could say that Apotheosis has a different kind of fragility. It may not have as bad a turn order binding problem as PR does, but it did have a different fragility in that the game would drag if players didn't "play right."
I have yet to test the new game end dynamics, and it may be difficult to really do so since I (and at least 1 of my players) always pursues victory, so we may never see the new dynamics in play. But I hope that a game timer will remove that particular fragility from the game.
Depending on how well I am able to tune the size of the Adventure deck (the game timer) for each player count, maybe reaching a win condition in time will not be trivial, and perhaps the secondary win condition could be a realistic strategy after all (though it would still require all other players failing to reach the win condition in time)!
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