Review
Review
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The point of a game is not to win, and you shouldn't even pretend that it is
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1Sinclair Chen
New Comment
90% of games are designed to be fun. Meaning the point is to stimulate your brain to produce feel-good chemicals. No greater meaning, or secret goal. To do this, they have goals, rules, and other features, but the core loop is very simple:
- I want to get a dopamine hit, therefore
- I open up a game, and
- The game provides a structure that I follow, subordinating my "real life" to the artificial goals and laws of the game
- Profit!
When the brain generates good feelings, it usually has reasons for doing that, which a game designer has to be aware of. If you keep trying to make it generate good feelings without respecting the deeper purposes of the source of the feelings, afaik it generally stops working after a bit.
My aspiration is to make games that are compatible with living in real life. It's a large underserved market.
«When the brain generates good feelings, it usually has reasons for doing that» I think is probably true (though as far as the game designer, I suspect some designers are only subconsciously / on a gut-feeling-level aware, rather than consciously aware of all the reasons. Though good ones are probably consciously aware of some of the reasons)
«If you keep trying to make it generate good feelings without respecting the deeper purposes of the source of the feelings, afaik it generally stops working after a bit.» seems false to me.
Consider a scale that runs from "authentic real life" to "Lotus eater box" At any point along that scale, you can experience euphoria. At the Lotus Eater end, it is automatic. At the real life end, it is incidental. "Games" fall towards the Lotus Eater end of the spectrum, not as far as slot machines, but further from real life than Exercise or Eating Chocolate. Modern game design is about exploiting what is known about what brains like, to guide the players through the (mental) paths necessary to generate happy chems. They call it "being Fun" but that's just thier medium level Map.
Some respected designers (including Mark Rosewater) would say that being compatible with real life is disqualifying for a thing to be a "Game." You can apply game design principles to real life stuff (lessons/repetitive tasks/etc.) to make it more Fun. One thing that makes Games a particularly good source of Fun, however, is the safety provided by being independent of real life. With no "real" consequence to losing, brains are more relaxed. A similar effect is what makes horror movies Fun - the viewers brain is put through stimulus to generate chemicals, without overwhelming the system the way a real danger can.
1Okay, I'm not opposed to the project of inventing fun games with no one winner - I mean, I enjoy Dungeons & Dragons - but I think games with one winner are awesome. I like the discipline imposed by them.
I'm not sure I can put into words what I mean by discipline; it's related to the nameless virtue. But, for example, sometimes in a computer game I find myself thinking, "wow this game is badly designed; it'd be more fun and realistic if it rewarded a good balance of archers and spearmen and cavalry, but I'm pretty sure the archer unit is so cheap and high ground is so accessible that I can just spam the archer unit and win". I then have a choice; I can do the thing that seems fun and elegant to me and build a realistic army, or I can spam the archer unit and win. I can either complain, or I can win.
To the extent that I'm stretching a rationalist muscle in games at all - and often I'm not, I'm just having fun, not everything I do needs to be justified as rational and virtuous - I think it's that muscle: "ignore the temptation to adopt a really cool and fun map, and instead use a map that actually describes the territory". This requires a certain harshness; I can do stuff that makes me feel good and lose and keep losing until I change my strategy. I can complain, "The designers clearly intended this thing to be a powerful strategy, so it should work!" - and if it isn't actually the best strategy, I will lose. This teaches me to abandon what "should" be true, and pay attention to what actually is true.
The original designers' intent very rarely comes across in games without very extensive testing and rebalancing IME. Maybe the game is designed so that you need to do X to win, but the very best competitive players will often create a metagame where everyone ignores X and does Y to win. Preventing this from happening requires so much playtesting, and then if your game gets a big enough audience that there's a semipro or pro scene, it generally happens anyway. It's like trying to beat the market; you're just one game designer, and arrayed against you are the forces of thousands of smart people all trying to win your game. Unless you write "you can't win without doing X" into the rulebook, or unless your game is very very simple, someone will find a way to win without doing X. (Maybe this isn't true for board games, but I think it's pretty true about video games, which are more of my experience. Esports games are constantly patched to tune down the dominance of whatever the latest powerful strat is. Card games also often have the problem of a card needing to be changed because, in combination with some other card, it's being used in an unexpectedly powerful way. So I think it's probably applicable to board games that are played competitively.)
I think your project is cool, but I also like games with a winner and a loser; I don't think you need to explain why they're bad to explain why your thing is good!
I see. I think when there's socially oriented fairly ambiguous outcomes it could be much easier for a player group to get lost in a false social reality and miss a lot of the hard lessons of the game. That's probably true.
I think the skill of collectively maintaining contact with base reality under the influence of politics is so obviously important that acknowledging the difficulty of it only makes me more eager to develop these sorts of games.
I think Peacewagers absolutely shouldn't make single-winner outcomes impossible, so I think this effect will often be moderated when wily spot ways of completely stealing themselves a hegemony from under the noses of a hyper-narratized community. Situations where public beliefs will tend to point in one direction, away from noticing that there is this unilateralist monopolization threat laying around, that the most knavish character is very likely to pick up on, seize, and humble everyone with. Ah, I actually think the misaligned AI character, Miracle Machine, would do this. Everyone finds MM useful, no one wants to extinct them. When they're small, it's easy to pretend it's not going to escape containment, but groups who follow individual incentives, overuse MM, lie about it, conspire in their lies to deny the tail risk, will always be humbled in the end :} however many times it takes to learn the lesson.
Hmm. I expect that if peacewagers tend to break under advanced play, players in this mindset will make a version of the game for advanced players and stop playing the variant that they broke. It's common for a game to have enough depth that advanced players wont want to move on after domming it, they'll linger, to show off, but if we follow this mindset (growth over all), somehow, we will strive to learn when to move on.
I think growthists will tend to be more proactive about exploring the space of possible games. The way to design games for them may be less about finding the fun and more about providing tools for the community to find it and chart it themselves. (tools like level editors, wikis, recommender systems)
Does your argument also apply to physical sports? If not, what makes table tennis different from monopoly?
I think you're missing an important point of games: fun.
I think that's the biggest reason people play games.
All of the things you've mentioned can be fun. And sometimes people play games to understand each other better, or to learn. But they largely do it because those things are fun, too.
We're wired to like fun because it causes us to practice, and to win. But we genuinely like fun.
(winning is usually a lot of fun; the problem is that others have to lose, so less total fun is produced in a one-winner game).
That's mostly why people play games, and you've got to take that into account in your game design.
I don't know if I explained this but I pretty much believe that fun simply is the visceral feeling of learning. You can have learning without fun (for instance, if the difficulty is so evenly balanced so that it feels constant over time so that the player can't feel themselves improving, or where your learning feels incomplete and not valuable, this can be actually terrible and cause burnout), but I don't think you can have fun without learning something, even if it's just learning to click on heads really fast.
So I just talk a lot about learning here. That's all fun.
Learning is fun, but it's not the only thing that's fun. Anyway, when you pitch your peacewagers game, I strongly suggest you talk about fun ;)
Plenty of people find fun in very different ways. Some will be happy to play the same simple Magic deck over and over 100 times, not learning anything after the first few plays, and if they win 60 of those they'll have fun. There's a pretty good online survey called the Gamer Motivation Survey by Quantic Foundry which asks you a bunch of questions about what motivates you to keep playing. For example, I get the highest score for Mastery (broken down into Challenge and Strategy), closely followed by Creativity (Discovery and Design). But other gamers will get very little fulfilment from Creativity and much more from Immersion (Story or Escapism) or Social (Community or Competition).
Have you ever seen non-gamers playing a game like Apples to Apples? They're not learning anything or challenging anyone, they've forgotten the score system if they ever knew it, they're just enjoying watching their friends try to work out whether Whipped Cream or Spam is more Cuddly.
They're not learning anything or challenging anyone, they've forgotten the score system if they ever knew it, they're just enjoying watching their friends try to work out whether Whipped Cream or Spam is more Cuddly.
If nothing is being learned, why does that question sound fascinating to me.
Does playing one deck not have any depth?
This might be incidental, but in both of these cases it sounds like someone is ignoring an overarching game for the sub-games. TCGs for instance consist of a core game (using the deck) and a metagame (building the deck). (I personally kinda don't like deckbuilding, so I don't play most of TCGs. I'm the audience for Keyforge). This individual comparison between whipped cream and spam is a small game. And it's quite common for party games to have overarching games that aren't really necessary. IIRC, Aella's "game", Askhole just dispenses completely with an overarching game, each card presents its own discrete ordeal.
And indeed there's an important tenet of game design, which I think is found in one of the essays in The Kobold Guide To Game Design: Make the most fun things to do also the things that will help you win. One key thing to do in playtesting is find the strategies equivalent to your "archer spam" example and rebalance so they're not so powerful. It's interesting as a designer to see what players find fun, and vital to test enough that you can empathize those parts.
(Relatedly, one of the pieces of feedback I kept getting on my game Steam Works is that people have lots of fun even if they don't win. That's also a great trait for a game to have but it's rather harder to consistently achieve.)
I have had a similar mindset in games for a long time. This exploration you describe in my experience felt like the fastest way to improve in games (and in maths: when a teacher says that some method would not work to solve a problem, without telling me why, I am likely to try and see myself, how the edge cases invalidate the method). Apart from giving a broader intuition about the subject I believe it enreaches the "toolkit".
There is a 1v4 computer game Dead by daylight. The thing that attracts me is the ability to make your own build - set of powers your character will enter the match with. There are more than 10^12 combinations, and that creates an optimisation problem. Community of the game has agreed on around 12 best builds, and a new player could just take one of them into the game without understanding why they are considered best. But I decided to do exploration and play with random builds. This opened to me a vast space of rare power synergies the community never agrees to discuss. They throw unconventional builds and playstyles into the bin.
If I had friends who play computer games, I would really want to convey an experiment. I would ask them to start learning the game, completing the same amount of matches per weekend. One group would be presented with classical introduction, materials and videos that explain the current meta ("best" builds and methods of winning, as community states), and they would only be limited to the professionals' recommendations. Another group would be allowed to play with only random builds and would not be presented with classical "how to win" materials, instead they'll see videos where gamers explore the space of possible builds, try to win by unconventional methods, experiment with setting weird winning criterias, playing with handicaps, or other things which are considered "inefficient" by the community majority.
My intuition says that the second group would improve at the game much faster and after 50 matches be on a higher level (even though they might have lost more matches during training). They will find the powers that fit them better. They will know more mechanics of the game, that they could apply in edge cases. They might play on a psychological level by surprising opponents with some weird strategy.
One of the reasons I did not start that little experiment is the absence of visible Elo in the game. The only way of testing which group is better currently is a face-to-face matches between them, but that might not be the correct evaluation of skill. Rock-paper-scissors problem: when one group is taught to only throw rock and another is taught to adapt, the outcome is trivial. True testing would need many matches against random opponents to make statistically significant conclusions. I have not yet found people with dedication for that. So, there is a strong belief that I have not found a way to test.
Hobbes: Our poster didn't win?
Calvin: I still can't believe it.
Calvin: What a miscarriage of justice! This contest was a joke! Obviously the judges were biased against us from the start!
Hobbes: Well, the important thing is that we tried our best.
Calvin: The important thing is that we lost!
Hobbes: (rolls eyes) Oops, I forgot that the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers.
Calvin: What's the point of trying if you can't be a winner?
I think this is pointing at something real. Have you looked at any of the research with the MDA Framework used in video game development?
There are lots of reasons a group (or individual) goes to play a game. This framework found the reasons clustering into these 8 categories:
- the tactile senses (enjoying the shiny coins, or the clacking of dice)
- Challenge (the usual "playing to win" but also things like speedrunners)
- Narratives (playing for the story, the characters and their actions)
- Fantasy (enjoyment of a make-believe world. Escapism)
- Fellowship (hanging out with your buds, insider jokes, etc.)
- Discovery (learning new things about the game, revealing a world and map, metroidvania-style games)
- Expression (spending 4 hours in the character creation menu)
- Abnegation (cookie cutter games, games to rest your mind and not think about things)
The categories are not mutually exclusive by any means, and I think this is pointing at the same thing this post is pointing at. Namely, where the emotional investment of the player is.
None of your other candidates are the point either. The point that can be named is not the true point.
It's an important observation that most, if not all, human activities have more than one benefit, often at different levels of abstraction and on different timeframes. "the point" is an ambiguious framing - you should think more like "one point of most boardgames is to win". Another point is to practice a specific mix of zero-sum and non-zero-sum subgames, to learn about optimization, cooperation, and competition. Another point is to have fun with people and grow your bonds. Another point is ...
There is no "real objective", there are only different weights (over time and across participants) put on the many reasons to do something.
I've played a fair bit of 18xx ("train games", but more about stock-manipulation) games with a specific group of friends. These games contain zero external randomizers, beyond the initial selection of turn ordering (which then changes based on in-game effects). We played to win, and it would be un-fun if we didn't. That includes competitive aspects like blocking others' routes and "thushing" their stock. Optimizing one's outcomes in the absence of smart, motivated, adversaries does not excercise the same learning or enjoyment.
But we certainly did not play because each of us expected to win, and certainly saw good value in the game even when not winning (which sometimes could be known early, and certainly felt like it to all of us, even the winner, at various points in the course of a game). But the details, strategy, conversation, and experimentation toward winning was the driver for most of the other value.
I've also played a lot of cash and tournament poker, with friends and strangers. It's hard to claim that winning isn't the primary goal of the game, and my primary motivation for playing in public cardrooms (where I don't know the other players well enough for bonding and shared joy to be the motivator). But even then, there will be plenty of losing hands, too many losing sessions, and not enough immediate feedback to make "long-term profit" the only element of the game that matters. It matters on one level - if I lost consistently, I'd make the financial choice to stay away. On another level, the analytic and "what-if" optimization of individual sub-hand decisions, as they affect both later streets and later hands, are fascinating and fun, regardless of outcome of that hand.
Yeah, I guess by "the real objective" I mean "the real objectives you all share/mutually understand." Those tend to be pretty easy to learn.
Of course for an individual player, the true ultimate real objective will be inarticulably complex because it's just the human utilityfunction.
Optimizing one's outcomes in the absence of smart, motivated, adversaries does not excercise the same learning or enjoyment.
I'd be curious to hear more about that. I'd kinda expect there to be a semi-cooperative version of the game that could be rebalanced a bit so that just as many insights come out of it (some of which weren't accessible in the original), but it would require The Mindset.
Poker specifically seems like a situation where there might be a blend of people who genuinely wouldn't love the game without the financial incentive and are really there to Win Now, funded by gamblers, who're either doing a pathology or, perhaps, in some cases, getting something out of play itself.
I get the impression that Mahjong is the kind of game where the monetary incentive needs to be there for the game to function (it's a score game, not a binary win/lose game), but it's still enjoyable even if you're losing.
My friends enjoy co-op games as well - Pandemic (though more fun with the bioterrorist IMO ;) ), Forbidden {Island,Desert,Sky}, etc. They tend to suffer from the quarterback effect, as you say - one player often has stronger opinions and is telling others what to do (and often why), turning it into a group-consensus exercise rather than individual optimization.
I'd need to expand "The Mindset" to understand what you mean there, but for myself and the groups I game with, the risk/reward/learning-feedback elements are simply nowhere near as strong in pure cooperative games, as it is in competitive games with cooperative elements.
Have you read Playing To Win, by David Sirlin? It makes many of the points that you make here, but it doesn't shy away from winning as the ultimate goal, as you seem to be doing. Sirlin doesn't fall into the trap of lost purposes. He keeps in mind that the goal is to win. Yes, of course, by all means try new strategies and learn the mechanics of the game, but remember that the goal is victory.
It's foolish to accept a final goal someone else gives you, let alone a piece of paper in a box. If you're not thinking about why you want to win, you're being foolish. I'm sure Sirlin goes into why winning is a good goal, but you haven't given us any clues here.
Games, unlike many real life situations, are entered into by choice. If you are not playing to win, then one must ask why are you bothering to play? Or, more specifically, why are you playing this game and not some other?
That's what the whole post was about. You don't seem to be engaging with it, just contradicting it without addressing any of the arguments.
It's possible I would have encountered some of this when I used to read game design theory like a decade ago.
Here's one where he acknowledges a tradeoff between winning now and winning long term https://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/love-of-the-game-not-playing-to-win
That other character you were messing around with might be just the thing you need. Too bad you didn’t explore that, you were “playing to win.”
The Karmic justice of it all is that love of the game really does count for something. Those who love the game play it to play it. They mess around. They pick strange characters, try strange tactics, face others who do the same, and they learn the secret knowledge. Those who play only to win can’t be bothered with any of that. Every minute they spend playing goes toward climbing their current peak, attaining their local maximum.
This may be a healthy attitude to have as a player but it's a terrible attitude to have as a game designer
This post started out as a supporting point for another post about games. It developed into a bit of a practical philosophy post.
Why do boardgames generally end by declaring just one absolute winner? There are many reasons, most bad, I'd argue. One reason, probably a major factor in their spread, is that it seems to make it easier to teach the game. One-winner games are familiar, they also allow the game to proceed without confronting a somewhat counterintuitive, but foundational, insight about the purpose of play. We actually need that insight, even in one-winner games, so I'm going to articulate it here.
You have a play objective within the game, and somehow, pursuing that objective is supposed to attain some other real objective that exists outside of the game, in real life.
Usually a game wont articulate the real objective, preferring to convey a sense of it through play, through art and theme. Other games deliberately addle you into forgetting your real objective, hoisting the play objective up as if it were the real, as if we pursue it for its own sake, but try as we may, we can never truly escape our real objectives, and the distinction will impose itself upon us.
Sometimes the distinction between play and real objectives is clear, though. When you deliver a package in Death Stranding, you're not doing it because you actually believe you're delivering vital resources to remote communities. Death Stranding is a weird, messy, artsy game so voicing the real objective is going to be difficult but I'll give it a shot: Your real objective is to better know The Global Industrial Machine. You're here to experience the way the machine realizes good or bad outcomes through humans, to reckon with both the vitality and catastrophe it generates, its human and inhuman parts. You're here to find the empowerment in it. The game doesn't tell you that explicitly. (I wonder why. I guess it's probably mostly because every artful and convincing work, is a work of apologia, to explain its purpose would require wholely translating it into an essay, the author, expert in one medium, may not know how to translate it, and its translation would always be weaker.)
So, play and real objectives are obviously very different here. You can't really confuse them. In contrast:
In a one-winner boardgame, Winning happens to be a simple play objective that is not obviously distinct from your real objective. Most players actually do pretty directly enjoy being found best. Even if nothing else happens that night, beating everybody will make you feel pretty good about yourself. That spares the game leader from having to acknowledge or explain the distinction between play and real objectives and explain both of them separately, and it spares players from having to practice this tricky frame of mind where we keep our subgoals and supergoals in mind at the same time to avoid getting lost in stale subgoals. We can just say "The point is to win", and that will seem true enough.
But we should go deeper than that. For most games, the real objective is learning about each other, or about the game, or about some other real or abstract thing the game is evoking. That is a different goal and sometimes gives different instructions. An important thing that we must learn about games (or classes, or jobs, or conversations) is that monofocally trying to win this round, focusing entirely and exclusively on this subtask, is usually not best. If you understand that subtask's role in the broader objective, you can usually do better. The real objective and the play objective sometimes come into conflict. Consider; experimenting with wild new strategies, or sharing your understanding of the game with other players. Both of those activities would undermine your chances of winning this game now, while strongly helping the real objective of learning and improving at the game (or winning later).
Set your competitive impulses aside, save them for the war. In the dojo, they're a distraction. Your real goal is not to win. Your real goal is to grow.
It never could have really been all about winning: We often play games where we lose most of the time and where we know we'll never be number one. We could win more if we played against less skilled players, but we don't seek out weaker players. We move towards our zone of incompetence instead of away from it. Wins are not what most of us seek.
I should emphasize, the tragically elegant thing about "the point is to win" is that winning now is a real world goal that abased hearts do sometimes actually harbor, but it's perilous as a monogoal, because if you feed that impulse, it leads you to diminish your friends and to avoid making friends of people who intimidate you. Better advice is "try to be the dumbest person in the room," which is a paraphrasing of fristonian learning process (avoid darkrooming, maximize knowledge by entering the domains where you least have it), and it is the better way to live.
I wouldn't have been able to find joy in Chess (where I'd usually be the worst player in the room) or in Pandemic (same, plus quarterbacking problem) if I had not learned when to let the real objective supersede the play objective.
In Chess I will ask the opponent how they see the game and tell them how I see it too. I'll tell them when they make silly moves and welcome them to retract if they want to explore the other more interesting branches our game could have gone down. Our intention is just to explore chess. We have more fun and we learn more.
And in Pandemic, a purely cooperative game, I will try to learn from better players' (the quarterbacks') suggestions. If their lessons do not come easily to me — if I do not immediately understand the reasoning underlying their commands — I will not obey! :3 I will turn to whatever teacher is best, and if you fail me, oh quarterback, I will instead turn to the game itself, and I will just do whatever makes sense to me and face the consequences, and learn in the most natural way, even if that means we lose this time. (Your challenge, as a more experienced player, includes communication.)
So remember, the play objective is not the point of play, and while you should bear it in mind, the real objective sometimes requires you to diverge from it.