Name: How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves | Game Maker's Toolkit
Uploaded: 2018-01-10T07:32:40.000Z
Duration: 11 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

SID MEIER: One of the responsibilities I think
we have as designers is to protect the player…

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

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

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

And that's what exactly Firaxis did when
it decided to introduce turn-limits to standard

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

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.

Many people simply just enjoyed playing cautiously
in the first game, and expected to do so in

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

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.

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

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

This move instantly kills an enemy, it doesn't
use any ammunition, and it showers the player

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

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.

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