(Fair warning, this one’s pretty much just an angry rant)
So there’s a refrain I’ve heard a bit too often in game design spaces. “You’ve convinced me that it’s bad, but I’m still convinced that it’s fun.” Usually in regards to, like, “hey, this power gives the players a giant headache and screeches the game to a halt as they have to cross-reference several things and completely change how they approach the game”, or “hey, there is literally no way people have any impact on what happens here, so instead of supporting any interesting gameplay dynamics, you’ve essentially just made a gambling machine where the reward is how much you get to play the game”. So, y’know, serious, structural issues with the thing they built.
Thing is, the “fun” defense is… nebulous, at best. “Fun” pretty much means anything people can enjoy, ie, anything, and more specifically when making a game, it’s “the specific kind of enjoyment that this game is designed to induce in its players”. Now, the mechanical framework and flow of the game is how you induce that joy, so, a disruption to it is at baseline a disruption to that, but, you can’t really conclusively prove it won’t produce the brain chemicals, y’know? It might not enable any interesting player incentives, or it might enable actively perverse ones, but, what if that still feels good despite the structure of the game you’re making?
The trick is, that’s not really a useful response to feedback, nor does it actually help give a sense of where to go with a thing from there. If a thing doesn’t give much room for any interaction, or the interaction it incentivizes is fundamentally not good for the dynamic you’ve set up, even if that is fun for players, that means you’ve got a new headache of figuring out why. You’re trying to induce a certain experience in players, and the mechanical framework you’ve built up is supposed to do that – if you make a thing that doesn’t have interesting hooks in, and players enjoy that, that means you’ve gotta shift your framework so that this thing does hook in, and potentially change how the hooks work entirely, ’cause oh no, people aren’t enjoying that as much as this thing that’s a disruption to it! But, the thing is, I rarely ever hear this in response to genuine play feedback. This is from the ideation phase, when trying to think of ideas to fill out a content roster before giving them any testing. And usually, it’s said in resistance to the realization that an idea is not worth pursuing further.
(To be clear, this isn’t just the concept doing the defending. Designers are stubborn lots, and it always stings to have an idea that seems cool and then have it pointed out that it’s fundamentally not gonna work for the setup you’ve got. The impulse to reach for a defense is always gonna be there! The trouble is, it’s decidedly one of the easiest to reach, and it does bad things.)
“Fun” is, in game design terms, doing one of those linguistic tricks where it hides more specific and useful analysis. I’m a big proponent of analyzing player incentives with everything you make – including the incentives you’re relying on that drew players to your game in the first place. In a game where the pitch is being haunted by the ghosts of your past murder victims until you succumb to your guilt, it might sound “fun” to let you have a power that has a random chance to double-murder a ghost, eliminating it for good, but if players came for a story of clinging, eternal guilt, it’s not gonna be. And if it is fun for them, that means what “fun” is isn’t aligning with the original pitch, and you should reexamine that! If players do want the ability to fight back, then that’s now gotta be a part of the game concept, and one power with a random chance nobody has control over isn’t gonna cut it. Can you pivot the game to now being about managing to forgive oneself for one’s past misdeeds, and give the ghosts defeat conditions? Sure, if that would still fit what you want from the game! (Remember, sometimes the answer to players wanting something different like that is “that’s not what this game is going to be, it’s not what you’re looking for, you should go play something else for that”. Make a game to match a concept, but the players have to be willing to align with that concept, too, in order for them to play it right. Figuring out that concept and building for it is what this art is all about!)
What do they want, why do they want it, how can the framework be modified so that something like that can fit with it, should that be a thing they can get considering how it can change the gameplay and themes of what this game is. Those questions are very important to ask, and all are buried under the word “fun” in a most insidious way. When analyzing parts of a game, and when building them, you want as much perspective as you can, to see how the parts fit together and what can be discarded or turned. If you think a thing will be fun, but it doesn’t play well with the framework you’ve got, why will it be fun? That’s not a rhetorical question, it’s a serious one! Analyze and dissect the concept of fun until it’s splayed out in front of you on the anatomy table, and figure out what path of incentives and effects you want the thing you’re building to send your players on. If you conclude the worst, you can just set the thing aside and have it be the seed for a new project in future. Just ’cause you’re committed to the Silent Hill ghost-guilt here, doesn’t mean you can’t make a cool psychopomp-with-a-shotgun romp later down the line, if that still tickles your fancy! It’s just important to recognize that that should be a different thing.
One final note, which a friend brought up – the corollary to this, that because “fun” is a concept that’s more harmful than helpful to consider without elaboration, so is “not fun”, isn’t true. Much of the time, it can be – if you get feedback that an ability isn’t fun, your first step should be to examine what it incentivizes and how that plays with the framework at large, but, sometimes it isn’t that! Lancer, which is a D&D 4e-derived mech combat rpg, has one of the most elegant examples of this. There are two defensive ability types that come up I wanna analyze here – Resistance, which is just “whenever you take damage, halve the amount”, and Invisibility, which is “whenever you are attacked, there’s a 50% chance the attack misses”. There are many foibles and interactions that make these not quite analogous in expected result, damage that doesn’t come from attacks, attacks that deal damage even on a miss, attacks that don’t deal damage but do do nasty things on a hit, etcetera, but the short version is, hey, if you’re getting shot for X damage, the expectation value from having either of those effects is X/2 damage. Different dynamics, similar oomph. Sounds good, right?
Well, it turns out, no. Because everyone complains about Invisibility. Invisible enemies? Utter bastards, hate them every time. Invisibility-granting PC systems? Bane of every GM’s existence. Does Resistance have this same ire? No, of course not! The reason is very simply, if Invisibility does work on you, you lose everything you worked for. Did you unload a gun, or overheat yourself, or move out of position, to try to attack a target, only for Invisibility to mean the attack doesn’t happen? That’s all loss, no gain of any kind. You took a gamble, and you didn’t really have any control over that gamble, and you lost, and that just doesn’t feel good to people. If you’d gotten a half damage hit, that wouldn’t feel anywhere nearly as bad – because it means you get something. Brains like getting things when they try things, and get immensely upset when they don’t.
Now, is this a problem for Lancer? Not necessarily. Every attack has an attack roll alongside it, and while the math is intentionally shifted down so those hit more often than they miss, it still means every attack, Invisible or no, is something of a gamble where the loss condition is just “no forward advancement occurs from this action”. Having played Panic at the Dojo once, I have become infatuated with tactical rpgs where that isn’t a risk, and were I to make something like that myself, I would take cues from Panic in that regard, but Lancer isn’t doing that, and, that’s more than fair! It’s a game where that kind of gamble is part of how a lot of effects work, and that’s central to how it’s built to function. When you find out that something like that is getting consistent “this isn’t fun” responses from players, that can be your answer! But, if you’re making your own Lancer, and don’t know if misses actually add much to the game, and then get feedback like that? It’s something to consider!
Ru's Roleplay Rants 