Decision-Based Gameplay Design

(This article was originally published in Gamasutra Online Magazine )

To develop a useful understanding of the system, you need to know how the system works from the inside, at the lowest level. Even the complete memorization of each input signal and the reaction to it associated with this system is nothing compared to understanding the basic elements that make the system react in one way or another. You need to understand very well the small elements that make up this system, to understand how they interact before you can fully predict the aforementioned system. This is why chemists are trying to understand how atoms interact, rather than simply listing what happens when you mix different chemicals. A video game designer must understand the game at the same level.

In this article, I will try to parse and reveal one of the key elements that exists at the very lowest level of most good video games. It is useful to reduce our understanding of video game entertainment to the most basic level, because if we can do this, we will get a simpler, more general understanding of video games that goes beyond genres or styles. The principles that apply at the lowest level are not limited to just one genre. Thus, what made Half-Life a cool game also brought popularity to Bejeweled and Starcraft. These games may seem completely different in style, complexity and themes, but all three games were popular and they are very similar in one of the most fundamental aspects of interactive games. That is, they all gave the player a continuous stream of complex and interesting solutions.

Decisions ultimately make up the game. The only thing that distinguishes games from books, films, plays and music is the decision-making element. None of these traditional forms of entertainment gives the participant the opportunity to make decisions about something. Books, plays, and films are still undeniably superior to games in their ability to tell complex, interesting stories. It can even be argued that several video games came close to a good film or book in terms of character development, plot and thematic development. In terms of visual appeal, movies still tear video games to smithereens due to the power of pre-rendering, manually optimized time-lapse composition and customizable viewing angles. The question is: if the games are so bad in terms of plot and visualization,

There are several answers to this question, but I am going to focus on one of them. Games have an ace up their sleeve, which means that games give the player the opportunity to make decisions and then watch the results without any consequences. This is why people play video games rather than watch movies. Almost all good games beat the decision making moment very well.

Often people mistakenly believe that the concept of a solution includes only large, branching plot variants of the development of events, similar to those that appear during the passage of the main quests. This is not true. Important decision making in video games is extremely common and is associated with relatively small changes in the gaming world. Decisions about whether to reload a weapon or wait another second to re-evaluate the situation are what game developers should care about.

An analysis of the best games with the decision-making function reveals some interesting connections between the pleasure that can be obtained from the game and the type of decisions presented to the player. These ratios are as follows:

1. More complex solutions are more fun.
2. The decisions that have the most significant and tangible impact are more fun.

Let's take a closer look at these two points.

Aspects of Good Gameplay Solutions

1. Difficult decisions



It is clear that decision making is not the only thing that makes the game fun. Games can have (and have) stories or decorative elements that provide an element of entertainment. To analyze the game decision-making process without the intervention of other sources of pleasure, we consider a group of games that include the least amount of other factors. Multiplayer competitive games usually have no history, and some of the most popular games of this genre are ugly enough to make a young child cry. Therefore, they are ideally suited to us in order to analyze the connection between decision-making and the pleasure that players receive from the game.

Real-time multiplayer strategies in particular are a great example. The player must constantly decide what his priorities are in spending, where to focus his attention, how much resources to spend on reconnaissance, defense, attack, economic development and so on. RTS games (real-time strategy) provide the player with a constant stream of complex and interesting decisions, ensuring that the player must constantly compromise. Each time the game offers at least two highly competitive options, which makes decision making difficult and therefore interesting. Many decision points provide a choice between more than two possible options, which makes the selection process even more difficult.

The most common case is a great decision making example that RTS players face a thousand times during the game: what should I look for now? Here are a few options:

1. For any group of players collecting resources
2. To any of its guard lines
3. For any of the battles that are currently underway
4. To any enemy base
5. To any part of its production line

Very often, many of these options require close attention, which makes this choice very difficult. The player can take control of the battle, but his economy will die from a lack of attention. However, if he leaves the battle, his troops will be disadvantaged and vulnerable, but, again, better economic management may enable him to better strengthen his army or take part in another battle on another day. Simple decisions as to whether to check your database depend on too many factors that I’m tired of listing here. At high levels of the game, good attention management becomes as much a basic skill as anything else. The wealth of choices and timelines presented to the player made RTS games so popular.

First-person multiplayer shooters like Counter-Strike are also great examples of gameplay for decision making. As in RTS games, they offer the player a continuous series of complex solutions, and each solution has many equal sides. Common solutions include the following:

1. Should I recharge now or later? What if the enemy comes around the corner while I recharge? But what if I run out of ammo while I fight the enemy?
2. Should I move forward, backward, sideways, or is it better not to move now? What if they shoot me while I'm undercover? But what if I lose because I don’t set a goal? But what if they kill me because I'm too far from my team? But what if teammates defending another entrance are killed and I get a shot in the back?
3. Should I buy a weapon now? What if I run out of money, and I need them later? But what if I die in this round because I am unarmed?

The specific circumstances of each individual match make each instance of these decisions unique. The uniqueness of each solution is what makes these games fun in the long run. Uniqueness is a property of complex decisions. For a solution to be difficult, it must be unique enough. Every decision could not be made earlier; otherwise it is no longer a decision. If you give the player the same situation over and over again, he will find out what is best to do, and therefore the choice becomes easy. An easy choice is not really a choice at all, just as giving the player FPS at the edge of a cliff is not a decisive moment. The decision not to jump is too obvious a decision and therefore a non-decision at all.

Solutions must be unique to be difficult. The beauty of multiplayer games is that they can represent millions of possible situations, because there are so many possible interactions and situations between players, and because each person has so many unique, individual features that make each opponent special, different from the others. Interactions between multiple players greatly complicate the situation.

Thus, for a solution to be entertaining, it must be difficult, and for it to be difficult, it must also be unique.

2. Tangible and obvious results.



The decision making process is not all that a designer needs. The consequences of decision making are also important. The player’s enjoyment of the game can be greatly enhanced by the number and type of reactions that they receive from the game as a result of their decisions. This is why the impressive effects of explosion, shooting, and blood are important in FPS games, or why good puzzle games often include vibrant effects to indicate important events. To see how spectacularly the enemy dies is a reward for a well-made decision, as well as to hear fanfare at the end of a well-passed puzzle.

Thus, each solution can be evaluated not only from the point of view of complexity and uniqueness, but also from the point of view of the feedback that flows from it. The same difficult, unique choice can be pleasant and interesting, or, on the contrary, unremarkable. This can be understood based on the strength and perceptibility of the feedback that the decision entails.

There are many ways of feedback with the player: visual, auditory, narrative, constructive, etc. Simple feedback examples are catchy effects that appear in puzzle games when a player earns points, splashes of blood in FPS games (although there are also strong element of a role-playing game), the accumulation of money or valuable items or the leveling of a character, promotion along the storyline or the formation of an alliance, etc. Feedback design is a well-developed and generally well understood area of ​​game design yna.

Interestingly, multiplayer games have an inherent advantage when it comes to rewarding a good player decision. When someone else is on the other end of the wire, winning a conflict will automatically entail positive feedback. Victory over a real living person in any kind of competition, even anonymously via the Internet, is itself a reward. Good feelings associated with a sense of superiority over people who are our opponents are a well-developed part of human nature. This, in addition to the uniqueness of real opponents, is one of the things that make multiplayer games so attractive.

Examples

The examples are always useful, so I'm going to give a few, just to find out how often you need to make decisions in a good game.

My first example would be a round of a game full of solutions that many are familiar with: Counter-Strike. Our player, Bob, plays the game 5 on 5 as a terrorist at de_aztec level.

Bob joins the game. He decides to join the terrorist team. At the end of the current round, he collects basic information about the game. The scoreboard shows which team wins, record of team wins and which players are the best. The terrorists were losing. He notes that an adversary of terrorists, a player named Charlie, dominates the central open area of ​​the map with a powerful AWP sniper rifle. Charlie has a lot of kills on his account, which means that he is a really good player and probably used AWP outdoors for some time with great success.

Charlie finally kills the last terrorist and the next round begins. Bob quickly analyzes the situation and must make a decision regarding his overall strategy and the chosen route for the next round. In making this decision, he takes into account the apparent lack of ability of his own team to counteract sniper shooting, his inability to afford a blinding grenade or powerful weapon. Bob also takes into account Charlie's likely future presence in the main open area, his own high level of melee skills, and many other factors. After a second, Bob decides to choose the rightmost route across the bridge, avoiding a collision with Charlie as a whole and placing him in an area that, we hope, allows him to use his close combat fighting skills. His hardest task is to get across the bridge alive, since he cannot afford long-range weapons. As soon as he passes through the bridge, he will be in the melee zone, where he will have an advantage. The risk of crossing the bridge is significant, but Bob's alternatives are probably even worse.

Bob will spawn. He can only afford basic armor and an MP5 submachine gun - a cheap and practical weapon that is useless over long distances. His team is moving, and he is moving with her. He is at the tail of the group. Three members of his team go through the door to the open central zone. Bob watches the notification of the death of his partner, when Charlie immediately kills him with the help of the OZP. Bob expects the other two to die. However, as soon as Bob is about to move to the bridge, Bob's teammate unexpectedly kills Charlie.

The circumstances have changed. Bob should immediately reevaluate the situation. He is accompanied by only one member of the team in his assault on the bridge; less than he expected, which would complicate his passage through the bridge towards his preferred melee territory. In addition, Charlie's sniper skills were excluded from the equation, which makes the open central zone a much more attractive route. There is also the possibility that Bob's dead teammate has dropped weapons that are superior to his own. Bob makes the choice to abandon the route on the bridge and join his teammates in an open area.

It passes through large double doors to an open area. His two teammates are 20 meters away in the open, like a dead teammate. Indeed, the murdered comrade dropped the AK-47, a much superior weapon compared to Bob MP5. Team mates fall under fire from an enemy position on the other side of the area.

Now Bob must decide whether he wants to try to get an AK-47 lying in the open. This is a difficult decision, and Bob will take it in less than a second. Bob must think ahead with his actions in order to consider the various possible consequences in both cases. If he does not receive the AK-47 and his teammates die without his support, he will be at a very disadvantage, as he will most likely fight 4 on 2 or 3 on 2, having only MP5. However, if his teammates win the battle, Bob can simply grab the AK-47 without any problems after the fight. He will be able to support the team when they plant a bomb in the open, and will receive more powerful weapons for free if he survives the next round.

I will give the reader an opportunity to think about what could also happen if one of the teammates dies and the other runs in the opposite direction, if either of them or both run to Bob, if his teammate approaches Bob and dies, leaving the weapon nearby with bob etc.

There are obviously many opportunities here, and Bob knows little about this situation. If Bob fought in a match with friends he knew well, the system would be much more complex, since his decisions would take into account the specific skills and behavior of each of his teammates, and if he studied the notes players of another team, perhaps it would be necessary to take into account his opponents. All Bob really knew about this match was that his team was losing and that Charlie was a good sniper. Imagine an exponential increase in difficulty if nine famous friends and opponents with predefined tactics and strategies participate in the match.

I hope this brief discussion of the first 15 seconds of a simple Counter-Strike match, not even including direct contact with the opponent, made you appreciate how complex and numerous the decisions are in a good game. Also note that the last two decisions, whether to change routes and whether to take the fallen AK47, are taken at intervals of 3 or 4 seconds and each decision is made within one second. Both solutions, which is already obvious, are rather complicated.

Counter-Strike is a very good game when it comes to decision making. Any Counter-Strike game, deeply analyzed, becomes a series of extremely complex decisions made at intervals, usually from half a second to five seconds.

Decision recognition, evaluation and design

Game developers must not only understand how solutions create the experience of using computer games, but also must be able to create an experience that includes many unique, complex solutions with strong feedback. Creating good decision-making games requires three skills: the ability to recognize a decision point, the ability to evaluate how entertaining a decision is, and the ability to develop an entertaining decision-making game without jeopardizing other aspects of the game (i.e., not requiring a lot of new resources and without making the game too complicated and difficult to learn).

1. Recognition

The first step is to recognize all decision points. It's not as easy as it sounds, especially in a well-designed game that often provides solutions. As you read the project document, try to imagine how you play the game. In fact, you imitate the gameplay very inaccurately using your brain. Think about what’s going on, what you know, what you don’t know, the problems you’ve encountered, and the rewards you’ve been looking for. Go through the gameplay step by step, instead of coming up with the gameplay abstractly or considering only the most interesting parts. Do not miss anything; what you miss is likely to be a boring decision. Feel how much overall it takes in real time. Finally, in this process, you must recognize decision points as how the project provides them. Develop an understanding of how often decision-making moments arise. If your game is based on the gameplay, but does not contain a large number of solutions, you have a problem and you need to review some aspects of your design.

The same process can even more easily be applied to a game that actually functions, since you just need to play the game, keeping track of the choices you make. Designers dedicated to their work will pause the game whenever a solution is needed and mark this point on paper. Pay attention to how often you stop the game. You must do this very often.

2. Assessment



Once you understand how many decisions a player makes and what they are, you can begin to evaluate these decisions. Review each decision point separately and determine how difficult each decision is and how likely it is to repeat. If the solution is simple, it costs little. If it is repeated many times, it becomes easy and, therefore, also costs nothing.

Each decision should also be evaluated in terms of implementation costs. Implementing a decision system requires a certain amount of time spent by members of the development team. Many decision systems also absorb processor cycles. Another very important aspect that may be related to the decision-making system is the complexity that a particular decision adds to the game. A game element that requires the player to know something, skill, or, in the worst case, to bind to a certain key or virtual button and remember them, is a game element that is worth something.

One example of a bad system in this regard is a system that, fortunately, has not entered the game. During the development of Half-Life, the player had the opportunity to put on or take off the HEV helmet. The decision about whether to change the helmet was usually not very difficult, so it was not particularly valuable. This system required programming, maintaining the code, as well as binding and remembering keys. Half-Life designers competently evaluated the helmet system and abandoned it because it did not pay for itself based on cost-benefit analysis.

An example of a cost-effective system that can be found in any FPS game: the ability to shoot from a weapon. Players must press different keyboard shortcuts to select weapons, launch one or more fire modes, possibly reload weapons or change something in them. They also need to learn how to shoot. Designers must model and animate weapons from the first and third parties, program them, test, balance and so on. This is a very expensive system. However, it's worth it, as designers can (and realize) the player’s ability to shoot weapons in numerous ways to create decision points.

Designers should carefully evaluate the costs of decision-making and have the courage to remove game elements that cost more than they can bring in terms of creating interesting decisions.

3. Design

Decision making is the hardest part of the process, because the very nature of good decisions is that they cannot be directly defined. Decisions placed directly into the game will be repeated too often and become non-decisions, or only a small number of times will be noticed. An example of a direct solution is a situation where a player is provided with two separate attack routes, both of which have been explicitly developed. One route will inevitably be more beneficial for any player’s playing style. Once a player tries both routes, he will find out which route is better. Thus, if the same routes are presented to him again, this becomes a non-solution, and the player’s brain turns off. All explicitly designed decision points have this static problem. The solution, of course, is to create a gaming system,

The goal of the new solutions is to avoid explicitly defined decisions and instead create a set of rules, characters, elements and rules of interaction for a specific purpose, so that interesting solutions appear in the system. Let me clarify once and for all: game developers rarely need to develop solutions directly . The game designer’s job is to develop gameplay systems that provide emerging solutions. Only emerging solutions can be unique over a long period of time . Static decisions cannot be relied upon when you are trying to ensure gaming interest, although it should be noted that they cannot be removed at all.

Developing a dynamic decision making system is the biggest challenge for a game designer. I will leave this topic for another article.

Final thoughts

Making decisions is not the only thing that defines a game. While a game that depends primarily on the interesting decisions it provides can be fun, good mainstream titles should also include role-playing, socialization, the pleasure of creating something, or any of the many other aspects that define good games. Gamers want to make decisions and see results, but they also want to communicate, introduce themselves as fighter pilots, build brilliant cities or create powerful people known throughout the country.

What is unique in decision making among all these elements is that it is one of the very small sets of elements that is unique to all games. Only forms of entertainment that contain solutions are called “games,” including sports games, board games, video games, or even sport hunting. Then we can say that the ability for the player to make decisions is what distinguishes the game from non-interactive forms of entertainment. The ability to give the player the ability to make decisions is what game designers have, and what Stephen Spielberg and Tom Clancy want them to have. Understand this opportunity and take full advantage of it. If decisions are not part of your game, you should make a movie.