Saturday 31 January 2015

Risk and reward in game design

We've all been there before; committing to choice. These are the moments we remember as being the big decisions we took. Whether its in real life or in a game, risk and reward is about gauging good and bad outcomes against one another, killing you with worry and excitement at the same time.

Judging from the emotional roller-coaster I've just described this phenomenon as, you can imagine how powerful a tool it is, to anyone working with game design. From the designer's perspective, it's all about understanding what's important to the user at each moment, then using that knowledge to present an opportunity:

  • Win and we'll reward you with important stuff. 
  • Fail and we'll hit you where it hurts - because we know what matters and we'll take that away from you.

Arnold knows so, too

What's important about risk/reward in this sense, is that taking the risk is optional. It is in having the choice, that the choice lies. It might sound silly, but if there is no choice to not partake in a risk/reward event, then it is not about risk anymore, but an inevitable, random event, that might have a negative outcome.

Doing anything like the above paragraph, is bad for the experience: In removing the choice to participate, we restrict the freedom of the users, which overshadows the value of a potential reward.

But as you can probably tell, knowing about risk and reward isn't worth much, if you don't know how to emulate value in your product. A reward as well as a failure, should have an impact on the experience. The bigger the positive impact, the more value and vice versa for failure. But what's valuable, per definition? 

Today's tune:
Before we get to that, here's the usual music that you can choose to have playing in the background as you read. I chose this one because it's still winter, but we've hardly gotten any snow where I live. That makes me a little sad, it's almost like I'm not living in a Nordic country. Had none during Christmas either. Oh well, there's always another year:


Risk and value:


As a rule of thumb, there are two factors that determine value in a fictive environment: Scarcity and usability. We commonly apply both of these factors when dealing with currencies, but mostly only usability if we're dealing with new mechanics, that changes how the users can interact with the environment. However, scarcity may also be applied to mechanics in a multiplayer environment. For example: In Elder Scrolls Online, vampirism and lycanthropy (two new skill-lines that the users can acquire), have a high usability, but thanks to the way you acquire them, also a measure of scarcity. They're not easy to attain, and so therefore that has some inherent value.

But what about risk? What's interesting about risk, is that the possible failure it implies, is the polar opposite of reward. Instead of gaining potential, you loose it. We can use our measurement of "what is valuable," to determine what we can impact as designers, to make the users feel it negatively.

For example; in a game where you don't heal automatically, it suddenly becomes a much higher risk if you loose health upon failure. This wouldn't have nearly the same impact in most modern games, where you simply recover after a short period of time.

Always remember to ingest your regenerative nanite-paste, kids!

What you should be really careful with, when dealing with loss, is the loss of mechanics. The reason for this, is that it moves the users into a mental space of disempowerment, which may lead to frustration: Taking away control, is bad. This can be accommodated for, by making it a recoverable loss. However, it's very important that the recovery depends on actions performed by the user, rather than time. Using time as a recovery factor, instead of actions, would make the loss as inconsequential as loss of health with auto-heal on.

Another big problem with time, is the pacing of the experience. If you make time a factor, you punish the users who have a faster progression rate, than the ones who wait. This adds a measure of artificial lengthening to the experience, which can be felt and will most likely put off the users. If you base recovery on actions - such as paying ingame currency for your recovery (very simple example, not a good go-to solution) - you accommodate for different paces of progression and skill.

The pitfall of imbalance:


While working with risk and reward, it is extremely important that your reward makes it worth to consider, in light of the risk you take to attain it. If your experience ends up being about "normal progression or failure" rather than "significant progression or failure", then the users get what I like to call the "every-god-damn-time"-syndrome.

If a tester makes this face after failing, back off two paces before asking questions.

This syndrome owes its existence to how our brains deal with memorability. We've dealt with novelty in user experience design before, but the memories that stick are not filtered for what's good and what's bad.

What that means, is that if your risk/reward scenario ever cooks down to "regular progression or failure", it's the failure that becomes the novelty in your design. If we don't fail in such an encounter, we won't pay any mind to it, because the result doesn't stick out. Unfortunately, the opposite is true if we fail. Which means that since we only notice the encounter when we fail, we'll feel like we fail it every god damn time, even if we've only failed a few times.

Risk and reward as a narrative tool:


Risk/reward is an extremely common element in any game that is aware of its users' basic psychological urges. A good roleplaying game is about being presented with choices, that aid to reinforce your feeling of being "in character" throughout the narrative. All users have some kind of ideal personae they want to enact in the game-world, and having choices that support the fundamental personality-traits of said personae, helps heighten the immersion.

Therefore, the best roleplaying games are riddled with choices. But a choice is basically a commitment and an exclusion: Pick this and you can't pick that. Anything that you can take apart and fit into those two boxes, can be twisted into some format of a risk/reward decision.

That means risk/reward is not always about statistics and difficulty. Sometimes it's just about making a decision in a narrative, and the risk lies in getting an undesired narrative outcome. The reward is, as follows, getting the desired narrative outcome. Of course, the biggest impact comes from when the user is the most immersed in your narrative. At that point, their heightened empathy means that they evaluate the choices as if they occurred in real life - making for some very tense moments, if done right. Which is why using story elements (if done right) is just as effective as tweaking numbers and mechanics as the outcome.

Rounding off:

Let's summarize:
  • Risk and reward gives weight to optional choices.
  • Reward only means something, if you can emulate value properly.
  • Value is a subjective measurement, it is not inherent in mechanics and coin, but can be about story too!
If you want some more hands-on examples, keep on reading!

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Risk and Reward in games today:

Now we know what risk/reward is. But how is it commonly applied in games today? Interestingly enough, it is mostly present in a genre that has been resurrected over the past few years, after being "dead" for ages: Roguelikes.

I'll summarize what a roguelike is, to those of you who don't already know it: A "roguelike" game, per its original definition, contains procedural level generation, permanent death, turn-based gameplay and tile-based graphics. Today, however, it's a bit broader than that, as modern roguelikes tend to be more about the "permadeath" in the context of modern mechanics, instead of only being tile- and/or turnbased.

Imagine a board game about punching each other.

The core of roguelikes is, when isolated, about the random elements and the permanence of failure. Typical in modern roguelikes, there is an element of persistence across each attempt. In other words; the more attempts you've made, even if failing, the further you've likely made it into the game. It rewards you with a permanent bonus, if you make it far enough, that persists even if you "die" and start over. This is done to appeal to a wider audience, who prefer to feel that their every attempt matters.

"FTL: Faster Than Light":

A roguelike that comes to mind when talking risk/reward, is a game called FTL. This game is so full of both choices and random elements, that the odds of you getting two identical playthroughs, is almost nothing. But the risk/reward choices are what's important here.


FTL is all about traversing an area; or travelling a branching path if you will. Along each segment of this path, lies an encounter. An encounter is essentially a small board on its own, that contains an event. Sometimes you are forced to fight, but you are often given a choice:

Something obviously risky is happening!

  • Partake for the potential benefit, facing the massive risk? 
  • Or skip out and let go of any rewards that could have been?

What's so brilliant about these choices, in the context of FTL, is that the game forces you to move forwards all the time. Unlike common roleplaying games where you can stay in an area until you feel powerful enough to move on, here you will be killed if you do not move forward.

This setup forces you to consider both the risk of partaking in the event, as well as the risk of not doing so, as not having the potential upgrades from a successful encounter, will make the game incredibly hard later on.

That causes the game to have an absolutely brutal difficulty spike, as the pacing of the user has to be fast enough to not fail. Yet the luck in the randomization is enough to keep most people going, as "maybe next time I'll get lucky!"

Even though I have no idea what I'm doing.

Homework:

This is something I'll start doing from now on, which is to give you - the readers - something to do, in order to try to apply some of the theory you've learned here. It's not something you'll have send, as it's for the sake of your own learning. But if you feel like you need some feedback on it, feel free to comment on the article that the question relates to.

The assignment this time:

It's quite simple. I want you to find a roguelike and try to analyze it: Identify when you are set in front of a risk/reward choice. The reason I want it to be a roguelike specifically, is because the risk/reward choices are often inherent to games in this genre. However, if you know of any games you know displays a similar nature in choices (believe me, there are many), by all means; go ahead and analyze that as well.

Here's a bit of inspiration, if you have no idea where to start (don't worry, they're not all ASCII-based:


Once you've found a few examples, and feel comfortable enough in remembering the theory from this article, try looking at games that are lacking a risk/reward choice system. Then think about how such a system could be implemented. I recommend you really take a close look at what elements of the game matters most to the players, then consider how said elements could be rearranged to create some risk/reward choices.

Have fun!

~ Dave

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