How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves

SID MEIER: One of the responsibilities I think we have as designers is to protect the player… from themselves Whenever a designer makes a game, they‘ll have certain ideas for what would be the most enjoyable or interesting way for a player to approach things. For example, Jake Solomon reckons that XCOM is at its best when the player is taking risks. He told Rock Paper Shotgun: “Risks are what lead to loss and what lead to triumph".

But players will often have other ideas, because many will simply gravitate towards strategies that will most likely lead to success - regardless of how enjoyable those strategies might actually be - so they grind, they use repetitive tactics, and they play slowly and cautiously. As Civilization 4 designer Soren Johnson puts it, “given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game”. He was talking more about exploits, but I think the quote still works.

And this is kinda what happened in XCOM: players rarely took risks, because why would you? Instead, they found much more success when they moved slowly, played cautiously, and overused the overwatch ability - meaning they often ended up playing each mission in largely the same, risk-averse way. But the awesome thing about design is that the game’s developers can tweak things, to make sure players approach the game in the way they think would be most interesting.

The question is - what’s the best way to do this?

The most obvious answer would be to add some kind of system that will stop the unwanted behaviour from occurring. And that’s what exactly Firaxis did when it decided to introduce turn-limits to standard missions in XCOM 2. Many of the game’s missions will have some kind of time limit - hack the network in 8 turns, destroy the relay in 6 turns, extract the VIP in 12 turns. And if you don’t finish that objective within the turn limit, the mission is failed.

And this means that inching slowly across the map like in XCOM 1 is now massively discouraged, and the player is forced to move more quickly and take more risks. A very similar thing happened in the making of Spelunky. Creator Derek Yu says “I never intended Spelunky players to collect every piece of treasure, get every item, or explore every room each time they play. Instead, I wanted to force them to make difficult decisions and experience both the satisfaction of choosing correctly and the regret of choosing poorly.”

So, he added the deadly ghost enemy which appears at about two and a half minutes into every level to put pressure on the player and discourage them from dawdling around. Now both of these decisions had the intended effect - but they were also both met with some amount of controversy. Spelunky less so - that’s a long time to spend in one level. Besides, the ghost doesn’t actually kill you. You can still run away and finish the stage.

But many XCOM 2 players hated the turn limits, and even made mods to rip them out of the game. “I didn't expect people to have such a strong reaction to the timers,” says Solomon. And turn limits were greatly reduced in the game’s expansion, War of the Chosen. So, what went wrong? Well, there’s a bunch of things. Many people simply just enjoyed playing cautiously in the first game, and expected to do so in the sequel.

And Solomon suggests that “maybe there’s a clumsy thematic wrapper on the turn-timer”. But one thing is clear: some players will always react negatively to punishment. And, in XCOM 2, the fact that refusing to speed up and take risks will see you fail the mission at hand, means that these players felt that the game was punishing them for playing in a certain way.

And there’s a famous story about World of Warcraft - which I’ve never played so excuse me if I screw this up - but in the story, Blizzard didn’t want people to play the game for too long - so they introduced a system in the beta where the longer you played, the fewer experience points you’d get for killing monsters and whatnot. But players hated it. They hated seeing the numbers going down. It felt like a punishment for playing the game.

So Blizzard did something pretty clever: they flipped the system on its head. Now, players can build up a rest bonus whenever they’re not playing the game, and then get an experience points boost when they next log in. It’s essentially the same numbers, says Blizzard, but making it a reward rather than a penalty made it much more agreeable to fans. So, it’s often better to encourage the behaviour you want, than discourage the behaviour you don’t.

Instead of punishing a player who is too slow, reward a player who finishes the level quickly. And there are loads of good ways to encourage player behaviour.

It starts with the fundamental, moment-to-moment gameplay, where designers can tweak the game’s most basic mechanics to push players towards a certain style of play. Take the latest DOOM, where the designers wanted to promote an aggressive sort of “push forward combat”. One way id Software achieved this was through the glory kill mechanic which provided plenty of compelling reasons to close in on your foes, instead of running away and firing from a safe distance.

This move instantly kills an enemy, it doesn’t use any ammunition, and it showers the player with useful health pick-ups. And so, despite years of FPS games training players to run away and hide behind cover, in DOOM, players spend much of the game racing headfirst towards demons. Likewise, Bloodborne encouraged players to be more aggressive than they were in Dark Souls by adding the rally mechanic which lets you recover health if you strike an enemy within a few seconds of taking damage.

Players are less likely to back off and wait for an opening if they have a chance to win back some health with a quick, aggressive attack. Other examples of this sort of immediate encouragement might include the Burnout games, where you gather much-needed boost by doing all sorts of fun things like driving close to other cars and racing into oncoming traffic. You’ve gotta drive dangerously to win. And Hyper Light Drifter, where the only way to recharge your gun is to slash bad guys with your sword, encouraging you to get up close and personal with enemies.

Encouragement can also be baked into more abstract, overarching systems like scores. In most character action games, you can finish the stage even if you’re pretty sloppy and

rely on the same few tactics for the whole game. But you’ll end up with a crappy grade at the end of the level. To get a better grade, you need to play in the way that the designers intended. So, for a game like Devil May Cry which is all about being stylish, you’ll get better grades - plus, some handy items - if you use varied and more difficult attacks, and use your guns to keep the combo ticking along. Likewise, Tony Hawk’s makes you connect up different tricks to keep your combo going, and will give fewer points each time you repeat a move.

In all of these games, the only way to get a high score is to play in the most stylish and interesting way possible, and to use the full extent of the game’s mechanics. Rewards like experience points and achievements can also be used for this purpose, because the designer gets to choose exactly what sort of activities or challenges the player must do to earn those points, and can tailor this to reward players for taking actions that fit the game’s intended experience.

GRAYSON HUNT: Ooh, son of a mother. Tech is wild. This cocky leash is grading my performance.

Now, this is not to say that games should never discourage, punish, or penalise people. This will always have a place in games. But for those games that do focus on negative enforcement, they should be wary of pushing the slider from discouraging a playstyle, to practically forcing you not to use it. Not to beat a dead horse, but playing fast in XCOM 2’s timed missions is not just the best way to play - but, basically, the only way to play.

Because forcing a very specific playstyle is difficult to pull off. I’m sure we’ve all played stealth games where getting spotted by enemies leads to instant failure. And sure, this makes you play in a stealthy, ninja-like manner, and doesn’t allow you to just Rambo your way through the game with superior fire power, but it’s also annoying, and it gets rid of exciting moments like where you get spotted but manage to escape and go back into hiding.

So the goal is not necessarily to shut down tactics that can lead to uninteresting playstyles. For example, if players are spending too much time hiding safely behind cover in a shooter, when you’d prefer them to run around the battlefield, you don’t have to remove cover entirely. It’s more often about keeping this stuff as a valid tactic for certain situations - but tweaking them so the player will not abuse or completely rely on them.

So, you can discourage players from abusing cover by having enemies throw in grenades or having cover break over time. Or you could encourage players to stay out of cover by giving them points for fighting out in the open. And to go back to the stealth example, there are better ways to encourage stealthy play than just insta-failing players who get spotted. You could discourage direct attacks by making the player very weak.

In the Arkham games, Batman is useless against enemies with guns, so punching the crap out of guards during the stealth bits is a bad tactic, but you can stay alive long enough to grapple hook your way back to safety. Or you could encourage stealth by using the scoring systems mentioned earlier. In Hitman, the only way to get a high score, or finish many of the challenges like Silent Assassin, is to play in the most sneaky way possible.

Never get seen, hide the bodies, delete the camera recordings, and so on. Or, one less obvious way to tackle it, is to make players more aware that direct attacks are not the focus of the game. With Mark of the Ninja, lead designer Nels Anderson said that the game originally had an in-depth combat system with different stances and parries and whatnot, but this level of depth signalled to the player that direct combat was may more important than it actually was.

By reducing the combat to something much more simple, players now understood that direct attacks were not point. Anderson explained this on the podcast Designer Notes, NELS ANDERSON: People would try to sneak, they would fail, and then they’d just Rambo through the rest of the level. It’s like: okay, we just need to pair this down, get rid of as much of it as possible, make it really simple. And once we just kept pairing it down to, the amount of presence it had in the design was about proportional to how important we thought it should be, that’s when it sat about right.

So, designers should know how they want players to approach their game. Perhaps stylishly, or stealthily, or while taking risks, or using the full extent of the mechanics, or just feeling like a demon murdering machine. Whatever they think is most fun, or interesting, or thematically relevant. But if a player can reach their goals - from microscopic targets like “get health” or “defeat an enemy”, to longer-term goals like “reach the end of the level” or “earn a new skill point” - if players can reach those goals more easily through ways that don’t match that intention, and are actually pretty boring, then the game might have a problem.

Locking off that easier route is certainly one way of going about it, but forcing players to meet your vision and punishing them for playing otherwise, is fraught with difficulty. And so while I personally understand and even appreciate XCOM 2’s turn timers in the broad strokes, I’m not surprised that they were met with controversy. So, it’s often better to encourage and incentivise a player to see the game in the best possible light.

To allow for other playstyle, but give rewards, high scores, easy kills, and handy resources when the player is meeting that intended experience. Now, please, this is definitely not as easy as I’m making it sound. There are plenty of pitfalls to think about and some of the most controversial and disliked mechanics are those that were initially designed to encourage or discourage a certain way of playing. But when used really well, this type of design can subtly push a player towards having the best possible experience, and, like Sid says, protect players... from themselves.

Hey, thanks for watching! I hope you found this one interesting. I love seeing all the differnet ways that designers try to encourage and discourage different behaviours, and it’s fascinating to see how successful they end up being. I’d love to hear your examples from games you’ve played. Or games you’ve made, if you’re a designer. Leave ‘em in the comments below, if you like. Game Maker's Toolkit is funded on Patreon.com