Many games come with the promise of letting
the player live out some kind of awesome, aspirational fantasy. Maybe that's to become a comic book
superhero. Perhaps it's the opportunity to wield a lightsaber. Or become the
member of a secretive assassin's guild. To be rock god, a samurai, a rally
car driver, or a no-nonsense yakuza. And from my experience of
playing this sort of game, it feels like there's two, distinctly
different ways of delivering this fantasy. The first way is to simply
give the fantasy
to the player. Easily and immediately. Which is something we see in a
number of recent super hero games: in the Batman Arkham games, the free-flow combat
system makes it effortless to beat up baddies. And in Spider-Man, we don't need a lengthy tutorial
to swing around the city with ease and grace. This is usually achieved by providing
the sensation of being powerful, which happens through simple inputs that
get translated into big, flashy animations. Cinematic set-pieces w
ith pop-up buttons.
Lenient systems that subtly fix your mistakes. Magnetic snapping towards enemies. Big,
obvious indicators that tell you when to counter. Dopey AI that waits
patiently to attack. And so on. These games work really hard
to make you feel awesome, by translating your simple intentions
into impressive feats on screen. Troy Skinner, producer at Batman-publisher WB
Games, explains it like this: TROY SKINNER: When people come in they
spam the punch-in-the-face button. In a lot
of games you get punished for that.
It makes you look bad. You fail. In this game you spam the
punch-in-the-face button and you look awesome! You are in fact Batman
effectively punching people in the face". The second way is to make
the player earn the fantasy. Through skill and mastery. Which is the
approach of this year's DOOM Eternal. That game has a very stiff learning curve with
all sorts of mechanics and systems to figure out - including resource management,
enemy weak points, weap
on switching, lighting-fast movement, the flame belch,
the chainsaw, the blood punch, and more. And until you master all of them, you're going to fail - and you certainly
won't feel like the bad-ass demon slayer in the game's marketing. Which means that
the opportunity to live out the power fantasy is withheld until you've proven that you have real
skill and mastery over a complex set of mechanics. Hugo Martin, is the creative director on
DOOM Eternal, and explains it like so: HUGO MARTIN:
"Hey man I'm dying to these characters because
I'm not doing certain things. I don't feel strong. It's like yeah: but you're gonna feel
strong when you master how to beat them". So we can give the fantasy to the player, or we can make them earn it. But why would
a developer choose one over the other? Well, Hugo Martin puts it
very succinctly when he says: HUGO MARTIN: "We wanna give you something to master.
Because the power fantasy that is earned is far more satisfying than
the one that i
s just handed to you". By making the player actually overcome challenge, failure, and frustration, the end result
will be way more rewarding. He compares the experience of mastering DOOM Eternal to that of
climbing a mountain - it's much more satisfying, he says, to climb it yourself than to
simply take an elevator to the top. It's a fair point. And many of these
superhero games do end up feeling shallow and patronising because they
give the fantasy away too easily. But - when designers tie
the attainment of a
power fantasy to a certain level of skill - they ultimately end up having to ask who gets to
live out the fantasy, and who gets left behind? As Troy Skinner explains... TROY SKINNER: "Because we are expert gamers,
we say that mastery should come from overcoming challenge. You earn it.
But remember everyone paid $60 and the majority of them aren't going to push
through those barriers to get to the mastery. And mastery is tied to motivation so if they're not
masterful, t
hey're demotivated, they walk away". He argues that there are plenty of players who
simply aren't willing to suffer through failure and frustration in order to experience
the game's core fantasy. For example, Troy points to the bro gamer - casual players who
have a very low threshold for suffering and want to feel competent immediately. And because they
make up 60% of the console market, you ignore them at a cost. More importantly, however, there are players
who simply aren't able to reach
that level. In the book Glued to Games, behavioural
scientist Scott Rigby talks about "control mastery" - which is the time and energy needed
to learn a game's inputs and be able to turn intention into action. He compares this to to
paying for admission to get into a theme park: both are necessary steps in order
to access the actual fun inside. But, Scott says, "when people are discouraged
by a game’s controls, they don’t have the chance to feel competent at gameplay, because they
can’t ev
en get to the real game. For them, the price of admission to the fun of games is
so high, they often stay outside the turnstile". And that's not even mentioning those with
disabilities who may be physically unable to reach that level of skill. Shouldn't they
get to experience the power fantasy, too? Ultimately, then, we end up with a conundrum.
If we make the power fantasy easily attainable, the game is accessible to all but can end
up feeling shallow to more seasoned players. And if we for
ce the player to earn
the fantasy, the experience might be significantly more satisfying - but we
lock out a considerable number of people. By making one type of player
feel awesome, we lose the other. But, maybe, it doesn't have to be a choice. And so, I'm going to explore a number of ways that
games can make both types of player feel awesome. The first solution is to provide options. But not the type you might
be thinking about. Because, yes, difficulty options will allow players
to tune
the game to their ability level. But they rarely fix the actual issue: the inherent
complexity of the game. Making DOOM Eternal easier will let you make a few more mistakes, but
it doesn't reduce the number of buttons you need to remember - and making Spider-Man harder
doesn't actually change the web-swinging at all. So more important are gameplay and
accessibility options. And for a strong example, take Forza Horizon 4. Here, you can enable
things like assisted brakes and steering, automa
ted gear shifting, and a racing line.
With these options turned on, the game helps players reach the fantasy of being a racing
driver - by reducing the need for precision, limiting the number of things you need to
juggle, and providing lots of information. With these options, you can essentially switch the
game from being a rather hardcore simulation racer to a fun and casual arcade romp. And best of all, this is all independent from the difficulty
level of your rival racers - so you can re
duce the complexity of controlling the car, but
without also dumbing down the competition. Other examples of gameplay options include the automatic
combo mode in Devil May Cry, the way Jedi Fallen Order makes parry timing windows bigger
on easy mode, and how some of the Arkham games
let you turn off those counter indicators so you have to pay attention to the enemy animations. A second solution is to reward
mastery - but not actually require it. For this one, let's look at Bayonetta.
This
is a game where you almost immediately feel empowered and awesome: thanks to
great animation, absurd finishing moves, a very forgiving dodge, and a reasonably low
level of challenge. You can basically just mash the controller against your face and
Bayonetta will pull off a huge variety of awesome-looking attacks. It's easy to feel
fluid, cool, and competent in this game. But there's so much hidden mastery in this game
for those who are willing to put in the work. Things like the dodge offse
t system, and the
huge number of possible moves - means that those who want to get combo mad can express
their skill and mastery. That ends up being the real power fantasy which is, indeed,
more satisfying… because it's earned. If we think about this by borrowing
terms from e-sports: there's skill floor, which describes the base-line level of skill
needed to be effective with that character. And skill ceiling, which describes the highest
level of skill you can potentially express. If Spide
r-Man has a low skill floor, but
low skill ceiling - and DOOM Eternal has a high skill ceiling and a high skill
floor to match, something like Bayonetta strikes a better balance by having a low
skill floor and a high skill ceiling. Solution three is to layer
on complexity over time. In a lot of Metroidvanias, such as the Ori
games, you start the game with a very simple set of controls. You can really just focus
on movement and jumping, so players who are unfamiliar with platformers only ne
ed to
wrestle with the absolute basics at this point. As you play on, the game gives you upgrades - like
additional jumps, new attacks, more complex moves, and so on. By the end of the game, Ori has
become a complex game with a huge moveset: but without overwhelming anyone in the process.
By stretching the learning curve out to encompass pretty much the entire game, players can gradually
get used to more and more complex gameplay. We do see some of this in DOOM Eternal,
with weapons and en
emy types being introduced throughout the campaign. And in
Spider-Man, where the skill tree lets you add new mechanics that let you swing faster - but
also increase the complexity of the controls. Solution four is to simply prime
players for failure and learning through the narrative and marketing. One of the issues with DOOM Eternal is that the
game suggests that you are the most powerful, demon slaying bad-ass in the universe. I mean,
you just ripped your way through hell in the previous
game. And now, you're falling at
the feet of the game's most basic demons? Ultimately, when games promise to
let you play as Batman or Spider-Man, or the Dragon of Dojima, or the God of War it's
priming us to be powerful and skilful: and so it does make sense that we immediately get to feel
awesome. Anything else would just be discordant. And so if a game wants to make us earn the
fantasy, it needs to explain that up front. A good example of this is Skate: a skateboard
simulation game with
a significant learning curve just to do a kickflip. But it doesn't
suggest that you'll immediately start playing as a pro skater - instead, you're just a
lowly amateur trying to get their photo on the 37th page of a magazine. The game's
narrative - which is about slowly becoming more successful as a skater, neatly mirrors
the game's challenging learning curve. And finally, solution five, is
to provide multiple ways to win. I've been playing a lot of Hades lately. And
in each run of this m
ythological roguelite, you pick a weapon - perhaps a
sword, or maybe a bow and arrow. Some of these weapons are far easier to use than
others: the shield, for example, lets you absorb enemy attacks and play in a very defensive
and reactionary manner. Whereas the fists force you to get up close and personal with your
enemies, which puts you at a significant risk. By having different ways to succeed,
players can gravitate towards the weapon, the character, or the build - that works for them.
Hades also lets you unlock additional power,
health, and help - so it's possible to succeed not by getting better - but by simply playing
the game for a long time. That's not my personal preference for how roguelikes should work:
but I can see the advantage in giving players a different way to succeed. Through time
and effort, rather than skill and mastery. Most of these solutions are
about the same exact thing: letting players find their
own way to feel powerful. That might mean using acc
essibility
options and tuning down the difficulty, or it might mean ramping the game up to hard, playing with the most challenging character,
and exploring the game's most complex rules. Both of those might be the optimum challenge
for two completely different people. And something else that a lot of
these solutions have in common is that they encourage players to
always be pushing themselves to be better. To be moving towards more
challenging and complex gameplay. In Forza, using those as
sist options
reduces the amount of XP you gain, so you're encouraged to eventually turn them
off as you get better at the game. In Bayonetta, scrappy play leads to rubbish trophies, so you're
motivated to be more thoughtful with your actions. In Hades, there are rewards for trying
out weapons you haven't used in a while. And in Ori, the game just naturally
gets more complex, the further you go. Because the power fantasy, it turns out, is
not one specific point on the learning curve: it's s
omething more dynamic, that can move
and grow as you do. You might feel the power fantasy immediately, and then feel it even more
strongly as you challenge yourself to do better, to explore more of the game's systems,
and to increase the challenge of the game. So ultimately, if the question is: who
gets to be powerful? My answer would be: everyone. Not just those who are skilful.
And not just those who want to feel immediate empowerment. But games should use design and
systems to ensure th
at at every skill level, the player feels powerful and masterful.
But always with room to grow and improve. Hey - don't click away just yet! I know, YouTube end screens are boring. I've seen the
stats. So I'm gonna make them more interesting by using this time to recommend
a different game at the end of each video. These will be recently-released indie games,
and entirely based on my own preferences - so, it's definitely not an ad spot. Are you ready?
Because I only get twenty seconds to do
this! Let's go. Disc Room is a juicy arcade romp about
dodging a bullet-hell spread of deadly saw blades. The masterstroke is the way it
entices you to keep playing with bitesize goals and challenges, surprising abilities, and best of all - Fez-like puzzles and
mysteries. It's out now on Steam and Switch.
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