Category: Game Design

Most grown-ups can learn to play a new game without too much difficulty, and when they play, losing is understood to be a perfectly expected occurrence. That is, if someone loses, it is entirely possible that person still had fun playing the game.

Young children being introduced to games, on the other hand, sometimes have difficulty with a loss. They may pout or throw tantrums. Some sessions might end with these sore losers tossing the board or cards so that no one can play.

Even before it gets to this point, you might encounter a child trying to win at all costs. You might notice the child being really obvious when slipping a specific card in the right position in a deck before dealing.

Or if you are winning a game, you might be accused of cheating yourself. This accusation is especially ridiculous when playing a video game in which you can’t cheat.

Do you let the child win? He or she might be obnoxious about it. If you thought trash talking was annoying online, play against a cocky kid.

Of course, an inconsolably upset and angry child isn’t a great way to end family game night.

But how do you teach a child that losing isn’t the end of the world, that you can always play another game, that there’s such a thing as sportsmanship and dignity in defeat?

While researching this issue for educational games I want to make, I came across the 2012 Psychology Today article Winning and Losing by Dr. Kenneth Barish. He argues for playing often together and letting the child win, but only sometimes.

It is also important for us to keep in mind that, from the point of view of child development, the philosophy of Vince Lombardi (“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”) is profoundly wrong and teaches exactly the wrong lesson.

By winning and losing constantly, the child gets to practice dealing with disappointment and learns about his or her own limitations.

Eventually, children should start to understand that games involve agreeing to rules and restrictions. If you start a game of checkers, you can’t just walk away before the game is finished, and you definitely don’t throw the board in the air after your opponent’s piece is kinged.

In the meantime, is it possible to design games so that learning how to play by the rules is less stressful? Where losing isn’t as prominent?

Or is it wrong-headed to try to make a game in which everyone is a winner and so overly-protected children never learn the lessons they need to interact with others when they get older?

Games have always been a safe place to learn life skills. Whether you are running and jumping on the playground or calculating an opponent’s potential moves in chess, you learned how to navigate complex social interactions through play.

Now, there are games that can be played that don’t feature victory or loss, and recreational sports tend not to keep score for very young children. Are these games hampering anyone’s learning? The good news is that “games without winners and losers will have little effect on the desire or ability of children to excel.”

So it seems that you can choose to design a game without the ability to lose and not worry about damaging anyone’s upbringing. The key seems to be to focus on helping players get better, which is something games with their feedback loops are great at anyway.

Remember when I said I’m playing Wind Waker for the first time? I still am.

Well, not still. I put it down for almost two months. My last save was in September. I finally played it again.

I’ve been busy.

But I was playing it again, and I was in Forsaken Fortress trying to sneak up to the top of the middle tower to find my sister.

That’s when I encountered the Miniblins again, and I have to remark on how amazing they are as enemies.

There are a variety of moblins in this game. Some sniff around and search with lanterns, and if they see you, they’ll throw the lantern and cause a fire hazard to appear before attacking. Smaller moblins might stand guard with menacing weapons, but they tend to fall asleep if you wait long enough.

But miniblins are obnoxious.

You can hear them before you see them. And you never hear just one, but you can’t be sure. It’s this cute sounding “deh dank, deh dank.”

And then you see them. There’s usually more than one. And they are small. You think, “Ok, these guys look adorable. I’m sure I can defeat them easily.”

And it’s true.

But then you find out one is walking on the wall above you, and one had walked up the wall below you, and suddenly you realize that you’re surrounded.

And when you swing your sword at one, another one hits you with its pitchfork, knocking you down to the ground.

And he laughs. As you lie there while the others “deh dank, deh dank” around you, he laughs at how he made you fall.

From a mechanics perspective, miniblins are simply weak enemies who are quick, capable of moving in places the player can’t, and tend to show up in groups.

They are dangerous because there is going to be more than one, and they knock you down rather than merely hurt you, and you tend to encounter them in places where being knocked down can mean falling to a lower level and needing to traverse the dungeon to get to the same area again. And again. And Again.

But that’s just the mechanics. The sounds they make and the giggling after they hit you?

So obnoxious.

And that piece of aesthetics make them one of my favorite enemies in this game. Without that taunting, miniblins could have been a boring new variety of moblin.

With it, they become bullies who seem to enjoy bothering you for sport.

When I start designing a game, I tend to try to avoid adding random elements. That is, I don’t want luck to enter into the course of events so that they can be repeatable. One thing follows from another, always. I like my game rules to be the physics of my world. I want the apple to fall from the tree at a constant rate. It shouldn’t be faster or slower on rare occasions, nor should it turn into an orange.

Also, I want the player to have as much agency as possible, and a die roll or draw of a random card seems to take it away. You might have been able to skillfully get yourself into a winning position, but because your opponent got a random boost this turn, your hard-earned advantage is completely lost. Sounds like frustration rather than entertainment.

On the other hand, not having random elements means more often than not that the game is solvable, which means that the benefit of the events being repeatable is also a problem. Once you figure out how to beat a challenge, you know how to ALWAYS beat that challenge. The game becomes boring very quickly.

It’s not impossible to make a non-random game that is relatively unsolvable. Chess fits the bill, but it has the advantage of being developed over thousands of years. I’ve only got months to make a game, or maybe hours if it is for Ludum Dare.

So, I turn to adding random numbers to my games eventually. It adds variety so that each play session isn’t boringly identical. And depending on how you implement random numbers, you control how much of an impact it has on the events of the game versus the actions of the players. For example, in Lemonade Stand, weather forecasts help inform the player. If it is likely to rain, you might not want to spend as much on advertising and supplies. Of course, the forecasts can be wrong. If it doesn’t rain, you lost an opportunity if you didn’t spend any money.

As another example, the dice rolled in Settlers of Catan dictate the flow of resources into and out of the game. Players might not get the resources they need from the random events, but they can still trade for them. And the robber getting invoked on the roll of a 7 encourages players to spend their resources while they have them.

There is a lot of variety in how luck can be applied. Poker, for instance, is a luck-based game. That is, for any given hand, it’s the luck of the draw that determines the winner. Yet the skill in poker isn’t in winning hands. It’s in knowing when to bet and when to fold. The real game is in managing your response to the luck over the course of many hands.

Luck in Games: Why RNG Isn’t the Answer by Elyot Grant breaks down the roles of luck in games and argues that it is possible, if difficult, to address those roles with non-random solutions.

His goal was to fix the problems with competitive games that randomness introduces. When you play a card game and draw a bad hand, your chances of winning are near zero. Similarly, getting a dominant hand almost guarantees the win. Skill and player agency are effectively nullified, and in a competition, it’s never a good feeling to know that you might still lose very badly despite being the best player.

I am not familiar with Hearthstone, which Grant mentions a lot by way of examples, but his analysis of it’s intrinsic problems related to the role of randomness led to the development of Prismata.

I do like how he breaks down the supposed benefits of randomness, arguing that each be obtained without luck. But then, I’m not sure if some of these arguments are applicable in all situations.

With modern online matchmaking and rating systems, any player of any game with a sufficiently large audience should be able to quickly find a match against an opponent that they can beat 50% of the time. There’s absolutely no reason to deliberately increase the role of luck in determining who wins.

But what happens when your game doesn’t have a “sufficiently large audience”? Or if you’re not interested in playing with strangers, which effectively shrinks this large audience?

Are luckless games necessarily competitive? That is, do skill levels need to be comparable between opponents to make a non-random game enjoyable, or can you have a non-random game that is cooperative or single player and still find it compelling?

Luck in games is a major topic. I’ve written about randomness in game design in the past, and there are plenty of books and articles centered on its role. Understanding it means you can leverage it better in your own designs.

I still enjoy challenging myself to design games with no random elements to see how far I can get before I encounter major systemic problems with the game. Grant’s article indicates it can be done. I’d be interested in hearing about other examples. If you know of any, let me know in the comments section below.