Elements of Strategy

The Role of Skill in Games

A good game is a series of interesting decisions. The success of decisions is a measure of player skill.

Good games cause players to exercise their skills frequently and reward them with immediate and obvious feedback.

By constantly making decisions, the player enters a psychological state called "flow."

It is an optimal play state and one designers work hard to achieve.

Types of Decisions

The extent that the player's actions affect the outcome of the game is broadly classified as skill, as opposed to factors outside of player influence, called "chance" or "luck".

• The player skill influence the outcome of a game depending on the decisions the game lets the players make.

• The player experience involves making decisions that influence the game state.

A game designer should consider what these decisions are, and why making them is fun or interesting or compelling.

Obvious Decisions

When the winning decision is obvious the choice is not compelling because there is no reason to make any other choice.

• When the decision is blindingly obvious, a designer can remove the choice and make it automatic.

• Or, to take an obvious decision and add time pressure, changing it from a strategic decision to a test of dexterity. .

Meaningless Decisions

The only thing more frustrating than an obvious choice is a choice with no right or wrong answers at all.

• The choice has no effect on the game's outcome.

• It's usually better to eliminate these from the game entirely.

• The exception is related with the player's perception:

  • Some games offer a narrative that doesn't affect the overall outcome.

  • But the player perceives that it does, due to the way the game responds to those choices.

• Only on replaying the game is obvious these choices had no effect.

Blind Decisions

Roulette has a real decision of what number to bet on:

• Not obvious: the answer if not known.
• Not meaningless: affects the outcome.
• But not interesting: no information to base the decision.

Only the hard cash reward makes the game compelling.

• Blind decisions can be turned into other kinds of decisions by giving the player enough information.

• Ongoing decisions can be quite interesting because they change as more information is revealed over time.

Tradeoffs

A tradeoff happens whenever a player doesn't have enough resources to accomplish all of his goals.

• No option is clearly "right" or "wrong" but each has advantages and disadvantages.

• All of a sudden this feels like a real, important, choice.

• If one option is clearly better it becomes an obvious choice.

• In a balanced choice the options are weighed so that there is no single best one that always "wins".

With several viable paths to victory, players must choose based on their personal styles and environmental factors in the game, the decisions made are quite interesting.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

Two prisoners are independently asked which committed a crime. Each can choose to cooperate (saying nothing) or defect (denouncing the other).

• If both cooperate: each pays a small penalty.

• If both defect: each pays a big penalty.

• If one cooperates but the other defects: the first pays the maximum penalty and the defector pays the minimum penalty.

• One (possible) payoff Matrix is $$\begin{array}{lcc}& \text{A cooperates}& \text{A defects}\\ \text{B cooperates}& -1,-1& 0,-5\\ \text{B defects}& -5,0& -2,-2\end{array}$$

• The optimal joint state is when both cooperate.

• But the optimal player option is defect, that avoids the maximum penalty.

So, each player will defect and the final state is not joint optimal — This holds for one-shot games. But for iterated games, the dynamic become quite different!

Dilemmas

A dilemma is a tradeoff where all options will harm the player.

• Variations of Prisoner's dilemma are common in turn based strategy games.

• If a game poses a series of these decisions the dynamics change greatly.

Adding multiple players also changes the dynamics, especially if players have the ability to seek retribution against those who defected.

• If players don't know who cooperated and who defected, that can likewise change things, bringing in feelings of paranoia.

Risk Versus Reward Tradeoffs

Risk versus Reward, happens in situations that have multiple outcomes, but whose level of risk is different.

• These kinds of tradeoffs are common in board games with dice, cards, or other random mechanics.

• Players often have the option of making a safer move with a smaller reward, or a risky move with a greater reward if it succeeds and a penalty if it fails.

In these games, typically, a player who is behind tends to take more risks in order to catch up, while a player in the lead prefers to play it safe in order to preserve his lead.

Frequency of Anticipation of Decisions

A designer's goal, at the physical level, is to keep the player's brain busy with possibilities.

• The frequency with which the players make decisions is paramount.

• There are some cases where decisions are not frequent...

  • ...but the anticipation of a known pending decision sustains the player with thoughts of what she may do when decision time rears its head.

Strategy and Tactics

A grand strategy is the overarching means to achieving an ultimate, long-term goal.

• A grand strategy consists of several supporting strategies, that must be performed in order to achieve the ultimate goal.

Tactics are the lowest-level micro-decisions made when carrying out a strategy.

• Players make strategic decisions when planning for the long term, and tactical decisions when achieving short-term goals.

Tradeoffs make for interesting strategic or tactical decision-making.

• Fast decisions ("twitch" mechanics) are limited to tactics.

• So, "more strategic" games do better to focus on tradeoff decisions.

• "More tactical" games can use tradeoffs or fast decisions, with very different gameplay.

Completely Skill-Based Games

Pure skill games have no chance elements thus can be "solved".

• Games that focus on strategy and tradeoffs tend to have at least some elements of chance.

• In pure skill games, decisions once interesting can become known and therefore obvious.

• Designing a pure-skill game requires that there be enough depth of choices in the game that it cannot easily be solved.

Many pure skill games are physically based action games.

• Unlike tradeoff decisions, it is not about getting the right answer but getting it quickly.

• Human reaction time can continue improving over time forever, especially in games where humans play against each other.

Mechanics of Skill

Auctions

Players bid some resource in order to earn an item. The winner of the auction pays his bid and takes the item.

• Open auction: players call out bids at any time, each one being higher than the last, until everyone is silent.

• Sequential auction: players make a bid in turn order.

• Silent or Closed auction: players make their bids simultaneously and in secret.

• Fixed-price auction: the item is offered at a named price; the first player to accept the price gets the item.

• Dutch auction: offer the item at an initial high price, that falls over time until a player accepts the current value.

• Reverse auction: the item is a disadvantage and players bid to avoid it.

Designers can vary auction mechanics. For example:

• Items can be grouped into lots.
• Multiple auctions at once lead players to resource management.
• All players can loose their bids.
• The second-highest bidder gets a lesser item.
• The auction winner pays to some or all the losers.

Purchases

Players have the ability to purchase items, abilities, or actions at fixed prices. The choices come from which stuff and when to purchase.

• The players will be limited in the currency used to make the purchases.

• The resource is limited.

• The item may not be available later in the game.

Limited-Use Special Abilities

Special abilities give players the ability to break the standard rules of the game in specific ways.

• Players can gain advantages only once (or twice, or n times).

• The choice of when to use that ability becomes a compelling decision.

• Use it now or will there be a better use later?

The strategic nature of the decision is amplified by varying the strength of special abilities based on space, time, location, or some other factor.

• Using it now or saving it until later presents the player with an interesting decision.

• Weighing the immediate benefit against larger future rewards isn't always an obvious decision.

Explicit Choices

Simple, immediate, choice between clear options.

• A game gives a choice to a player, making clear the effects of each option.

• The player must then weight the relative values of the options.

Limited Actions

Managing allocation of resources.

• Having only one "avatar" all actions are taken by that character.

• When the player controls many avatars, choosing which one takes which action becomes a difficult decision.

• For example, in board games.

Trading and Negotiation

Whenever multiple players are working together toward mutual goals, a whole host of social choices come into play. There's the mix of cooperation versus competition.

• Alliances can be forged and broken.

• Promises of future considerations in exchange for help at present can be made: formally binding; non-binding; or else with a penalty when the contract is broken.

• There are even the metagame considerations of the social relationships of the players outside of the game itself.

• one plays a board game differently with close friends than with total strangers.

Strategic Evaluation

How do game designers assess the success of the strategy and tactics they hoped to create?

• A designer can gather a lot of information by interviewing players or watching them play.

• The level of strategy in your game should fit the audience's desire for the same.

Do players care when other players are taking their turn?

A strategic game requires players to care about the outcomes of each player's move, because those moves will, in turn, affect their move.

• In a game with a high degree of strategy, players are reluctant to leave the table, let alone the room.

• They are constantly reassessing the play state as each player takes his or her turn.

Are players making long-term plans?

Strategic games invite the player to form strategies that can be carried out over multiple turns.

• If players are stifled by the existing mechanics of the game or allowed too much latitude, they may be unable to see how their strategy could be sustained or achieved over multiple turns.

• When playing a game, ask the players what they plan to do or how they think they will win the game.

• These answers usually reveal a strategy or lack thereof.

Are there multiple strategies for multiple games?

The more rich the strategic opportunities are, the more diverse the answers will be.

• At the beginning of any given game, the player should have an idea of how he will approach the play of the game.

• A player may have literally dozens of different strategies to play against different players or to compensate for different starting states.