Way back in October 2010, a League of Legends designer that goes by 'Zileas' compiled a list of what he considered game design anti-patterns as executed by some MMORPGs and MOBAs.
As someone who's just turned my attention to designing a new game, I read this list again yesterday before my Game Dev Livestream. Today, I want to talk about what I've extracted from the list - while these 'negative rules' are useful for knowing what to, if you want to design a fun game, what should you do?
Rule #0 - These Aren't Rules
As Zileas put it in his introductory paragraphs, the point of game design is to ensure that the fun of playing a game outweighs the fun of the game playing against you (or, other people playing against you.) As a rule, it always feels at least a little good to win; it always feels at least a little bad to have something happen that hinders a player.
Game Design and Development is, among other things, an engineering discipline. We make tradeoffs in service of completing a product that is of use/enjoyment to people. Sometimes, an antipattern needs to be invoked to buy us some other advantage in our design.
Of course, this article isn't about antipatterns, it's about things we should do.
Guideline #1 - Power is Derived From Gameplay (The Cid Meyer Rule)
The legendary game designer Cid Meyer once defined a game as, 'A series of interesting choices'; others like Steve Rabin et al have defined a game further as, 'A series of interesting choices made in pursuit of a clear and compelling goal.'
Compelling goals are interesting things. They can be a long-term goal, like destroying an opponent's Nexus in League, or a short term thing like recovering from a Blue Shell strike in Mario Kart 8. These are things that you know why you want to do them, because they give you a clear advantage with intrinsic value.
When doing something, it's a given that you're creating a problem that the opposing agent is tasked with solving in some time scale. Generally, if you choose correctly, you are rewarded and the tables turned. This is A) the concept of counter-play in a nutshell, but also B) a core tennet of good game design.
Power by its definition is not your abliity to win the game, or your ability to do some situational thing like cast a stronger spell. Power is the ability to make choices that allow you to fulfill your goals, both in real life and in games. At the most fundamental level, as designers we should endeavor to make sure that the challenges our players face lead to the ability for the players to make some set of choices that lead to progress in the game, but also the ability to deal with new sets of challenges.
Guideline #2 - The Game Affords Play Easily
There's a saying in game development that I still struggle with implementing: "Easy to pick up, difficult to master." In Zileas' list, he talks about mechanics having an unusually high 'Burden of Knowledge' as an anti-pattern, either due to being extremely convoluted, poorly 'sold' in such a way that players know what is going on, or similar acts of mind-screwery.
What all of this suggests to this designer, is that we want to think about what our player finds as 'intuitive.' Extra Creditz calls this the concept 'affordances', but it's not purely their term - it's been in use long before anyone created the first video game; it's in every door handle, every keyboard, this website's design...it's everywhere. And, it needs to be in your games.
The benefits of this are A) it may be easier to implement a more intuitive mechanic, and B) you can engineer situations that are unintuitive. Remember that part about breaking a rule above? This is where it comes into play. If, as in my example, you're devising mechanics all about summoning objects, the first case you may be presented, is using the summoned object to move around. However, after you do that you may be faced with an enemy that spits projectiles! As it's something you can climb, chances are good you can deflect that projectile with your summoned object. Later on, you gain an ability that lets you weaponize this summoned object - the original setup didn't tell you you could do that! But, it makes sense that you can.
That's affordance. It makes sense that you can do something that the game didn't go out of its way to tell you that you can do. That's "easy to pick up, but difficult to master." I feel like I've had a truly worthwhile revelation in that.
Guideline #3 - Themes are Things
One of the cool things about the human brain is that it's a pattern-recognition engine. Most of our brain's workload is finding and interpreting patterns (not unlike the characters that your brain is parsing into words that have meaning, about game development, at this very instant!)
Thus, it's usually rather disruptive when something is thrown at us that willfully and blatantly violates this pattern; a suitable term might be 'cognitive dissonance', or as laymen might call it, 'a profound feeling of WTF!?'
Let's return to my next project's example. Sara the Shieldmage is a mage whose magic revolves around shields and barriers. She can summon blocks, shields, monoliths, and dispel the same. Given her theme of protection and influence of things that protect, this makes sense.
So what if, we gave her a fireball? It'd be cool, I admit. It'd reinforce the 'mage' part of 'Shieldmage.' It'd give offensive potential which is nice. The cost would be, that the entire playstyle of the game would be undermined. The character is decidedly defensive in her magic use; giving her an offensive spell renders more than a few of her powers either obsolete, or way less useful than they should be, since fireball tends to beat horde of goblins armed with sharpened sticks.
When you violate this, you get what I call a 'Violated Theme.' For instance, for a long time in League, Master Yi was optimally built using the Ability Power stat, which is usually more commonly invested in by Support and Mage roles...despite Yi being a Fighter, possibly even a Melee Carry. The best build to use with Master Yi completely violated his archetype, and was a mindscrew, until you figured out that he had been built to scale better with AP than Attack Damage. Fortunately, Riot has since (partially) changed that.
Guideline #4 - Choices Need To Be Clear
Generally, I feel that choice in a game is about tuning. When faced with two+ choices (mutually exclusive options, if you will), you're willingly locking yourself into some path, for a given amount of time.
If a mechanic affects you in such a way that the results are too small to be immediately/easily measured, that's a sign that the design needs a change; players should quickly be able to consider the ramifications of choosing a particular path. The example I like is +1% damage vs. +1% attack speed. These are really small bonuses that, at low stat levels, don't even account to floating-point rounding criteria much of the time. Granted, at end game when your base stats are in excess of the 100s, that +1 can theoretically make a huge difference! But, it's not clear immediately, which leads to some problems.
Another problem exists in trope from: 'But Thou Must', as fashioned by Princess Gwaelin of Tantegel, in Dragon Warrior I. After rescuing her from a dragon (yes, this was an original plot at one time!) you're asked by her, "Dost thou love me?" You cannot continue the conversation unless you say 'Yes', which leads to her giving you a GPS that makes finding one of the key items to completing the game, Erdrick's Mark, much easier (though, it's strictly not necessary if you already know the coordinates.) This is a false choice, but the game is patient. It can wait for you to realize that saying 'No' will continue this conversation. This is rather anti-fun, because you lose a feeling of agency, or that your choices/ideas matter in the game world.
Finally, the way you do this right, is the way the Mass Effect series does it, albeit the Mass Effect series does it whole-hog, and remembers key decisions you made in previous games. You're always reminded if it was Ashley who sacrificed herself in ME1, or if you took the time to max out your companions' affections such that they chose to get their species to make peace in time to stand up against the Reaper invasion. A game that makes choices effective is a game that remembers those choices, and runs with them.
Guideline #5 - Reliable Mechanics Reliably Please
One of the last items on Zileas' list is about overuse of RNG in game mechanics. As many people have said in other games, particularly Magic: The Gathering, RNG is not good design. RNG adds uncertainty, which has uses. But, generally, the point of a game mechanic is to allow the player to make a choice based on their assumptions/knowledge, and have some insight as to what the result will be.
Having shades of uncertainty seems like a good way to keep a mechanic fresh, but can lead to irritating losses if the player 'somehow' manages to roll wrong (have I mentioned the RNG Gods hate you today? They still do.) It's much better for the game world to have some form of uncertainty (random encounters haven't quite gone out of style, based on Elder Scrolls Online and Skyrim), but most of the player's mechanics be solid and predictable, albeit with more interesting uses.
Conclusion
Zileas' list, and my own observations on things you want to do, are hardly scripture, they're guidelines. However, the gaming community, and high profile designers, have noticed trends that generally work, time and again.
Players' choices, and enemy choices, should lead to satisfying sequences of decisions. The game's mechanics and world should be consistent and make some form of sense. Themes for a character or location should be violated only sparingly, because breaking them shatters the consistency the game world needs to suspend our disbelief. Choices that are presented to the player need to be clear, to be enjoyable and empowering. Finally, mechanics need to be stable as they're tools for the player; there are places in a game to include uncertainty in pursuit of a more suspenseful game.
Writing this article made me think of things I can improve in my own titles, and I hope it sheds some light - or at least, leads to some interesting discussions - on game design principles that we who write games can use to make more cool experiences for our players. What do you think of these guidelines?
This is only Part I of the run. You can find part 2 here: youtube.com/watch/?v=KIHxDRMVtRc