Finding our Way to the Perfect Game

<Back

Starting with three of my favorite games, I will attempt to find common elements and distil what makes a game truly 'perfect'.

Diplomacy, Civilization and the Settlers of Catan - what do these games have in common?  They are all fun; they can all form such an obession in my mind as to prevent the cogitation of little else; they all have small but obsessed, cultish followings.  They are all the same game –or two overlapping games perhaps– but we’ll get to this...

An immediate comparison of their collective play-experience reveals that all three games require plotting, scheming, gathering intelligence and predicting opponent’s moves.  But Civilization is a computer game and the Settlers of Catan and Diplomacy are board games.  How is Civilization different?  Civilization is uniquely brilliant because it is against a computer – or perhaps it is uniquely limited because its underlying mechanics are simple enough to allow artificial adversaries.  Civilization is able to feel random because it randomly generates the vastly detailed maps it is played on - this provides the complex AI with every opportunity to create a unique game experience. Diplomacy relies solely on human player interaction to provide unique game-play and Settlers is a synthesis of random board generation and player interaction.  What we see is that all 3 games offer a unique challenge each time they are played – there are enough ‘random’ variables that the player continues to feel challenged on subsequent plays.

Now let’s take a deeper look at the nature of these games.  Delving into the actual game mechanics, we see that Civilization is a contest for resources and a challenge of their management.  The successful player must expand, expand, expand then build, build, build – there is always urgency and always something to do – always a crucial decision to be made.  ‘Settlers’ is Civilization on a smaller scale – it is still a game of limited resources tied to a geographic field.  What it adds is an element of barter – a necessarily human interaction between factions – seemingly simple but synthetically complex.  Settlers’ ability to be played amongst human players is both a cause and effect of its simpler structure – Civilization is simply too big and complex not to be adjudicated by a computer and Settlers is too small and simple to be interesting without the element of free-form negotiation.  This barter element is what gives Settlers perfect balance – as one player surpasses all others in power, the others band together and enact trade embargos that even the field.  But, like Civ, the most important feature of Settlers is that it is constantly engaging - there is always a crucial decision to be made, always distinct routes to victory and always an ‘arms race’ of development.

Then we have Diplomacy – the map is always the same and the pieces are even more limited than Settlers, but it is still a game of geographically positioned resources, even if there is only one kind of resource and only two tools to get it.  Perhaps it is this simplicity that makes this the most intense of the three games – the most reliant on bargaining, plotting, second-guessing and outsmarting.  The human interaction in Diplomacy is constant and the swinging support of allies is obsessively engagning and immediately impactfull.

 

What all these games literally have in common are dispersed, unique resources – the acquisitions of which strengthen the acquiring player.

 

There are a number of reasons why the above statement describes a situation of appealing game-play:

 

The collection instinct.  We as humans have an instinct to collect and form complete sets – whether it be the final Turkish supply center or the complete set of resources necessary to upgrade your towns to cities.  Gathering and growing a collection is very satisfying and builds to a sense of completion – each collection is a smaller goal met on the path to a larger victory.

The affirmation of doing well.  As a player secures new resources he is rewarded, often in new and unique ways – the trade bonus of Copernicus’ Observatory, the advantage of a new fleet or the gift of a Sheep Port that turns a nearly useless resource into a powerful tool.

A deterministic, chain-reaction play pattern.  Each time these games are played, the player becomes more experienced.  Further experience with a game solves a little more of the mystery or puzzle of the game and allows the player to further trace victory through the decisions made to achieve it. With experience, veteran players can trace the decision tree all the way to the first move of the game – providing an even deeper and more rewarding game as they carefully track and manipulate the ebb and flow of victory.  With experience, players are encouraged to play again and again by the promise of increased chance of success.

The building instinct.  The desire to bring order out of chaos – to harness untapped resources and unite a balkanized rabble under a single government – your government – is very compelling.  The winner, at game end, will have created something – a product testament to his hard work and ability.

 

The listed mechanics and their supportive psychology are not limited to the three mentioned games and you have probably realized that they are present in other successful games… such as Monopoly and Risk.  Monopoly and Risk are much less the niche hits that the previous games are and, with their addition, our growing list of similar games now ranges greatly in respect to popularity and it is worthwhile to now investigate the factors responsible for the ultimate popularity of a game.

 

The Payoff Schedule:  How long it takes for someone to win – the shorter the cycle of a complete game session, the more potential fans it will have.  Diplomacy’s greatest fault is that it can not be completed in under 7 hours (is there any wonder RISK is more popular).  A patient person can enjoy a game requiring less patience than he has but an impatient person can not enjoy a game requiring more patience than he has.

End Game Dynamics:  How close to the end of the game is the winner uncertain?  In a typical game of Settlers the uncertainty lasts right up to the game end.  This keeps more of the players, and not just the ultimate winner, interested in the course of the game and ‘near-misses’ are more rewarding (encouraging repeat play) than bitter defeats.  It is apt to observe that most games of Monopoly end once a clear leader has been determined, long before the formal conclusion – an informal fix to an acceptable design flaw.

Logistical Requirements:  Is this game fun with 7 people?  How about 3? How about just 1?  The single player, although the most difficult to satisfy, is the most important for the future of these kind of games.  All of the games mentioned in this article hinge on interaction with adversaries – they are all essentially multiplayer games.  Civilization, alone, has the distinction of originating as a single-player experience.  For some of the others, AI has been developed, but always it is inferior to human competitors.  Diplomacy suffers the worst when it comes to participant requirements, with a sub-par game experience occurring with any number of players other than 7.  The factor of logistical requirements has the greatest opportunity in computer support – with clever AI and supportive design, the multiplayer challenge can be delivered to a single-player market.

 

A story about RISK

Some time shortly after I learned of the existence of free online games in such formats as shockwave and java applets I sought to find the perfect RISK simulation.  I don’t know how I knew it was out there.  I had the professionally composed, thoroughly unenjoyable $35 Hasbro Interactive version but I went looking anyway.  The miracle is that I found it.  Some thankless java programmer somewhere with an eye for functionality over flash had answered my prayers.  It was perfect – it played exactly as it would with human friends.  I won often but not always and I could finish a game in 15 minutes.  It was amazing, it was life-changing, lunch breaks would never be the same, at least until I lost the website a week later.  The beauty of this little java applet was that here was a nicely packaged game experience I could fit into a short amount of time but with all of the benefits of the full game.  This game was potentially mobile – I could be pulled from my pocket and played whenever I have 15 minutes to kill.  Even though it was free it was probably the best damn game to have this potential and it was RISK!  RISK – an asinine game based on incessant dice rolling.  But it had all of the addictive feedback and repetition of a puzzle game with the collecting, affirmation, determinism and building of a perfect game and I could play it alone with all the excitement of uncertain success!

 

So where does all of this get us?  Hopefully, it helps us understand the nature of a pure ‘game’ – something that can be incorporated into any video or computer game.  It seems that today the ‘Halo’ faction of gamers dictate the public perception of video games and too many people feel that accessible games end with Hearts and Poker.  But it does not have to be this way – games can be for everyone and the growth of casual games is evidence of this.  I think that if only there were more people focused on making the next ‘RISK’ the way it needs to be played and not the way the Halo faction thinks it should be played, we might be able to elevate the prevailing national concept of ‘game’ from off of the card table and out of the death match and into something much more universal.