Common sense is wonderful. It only ever gets applied in hindsight or the third person.
So when I tell you that games are at their most fun when your skills are in equilibrium with the Challenge you face you’ll scoff and claim that it’s just Common Sense.
Well that is the basics behind what is known as “Flow” in Psychology; the state of mind where you are no longer aware of your concious self and become entirely absorbed in what you are doing. Being aware of the concept alone changes how you think about Games Design.
Game Designers are ussually locked into a battle of trying to obtain “Balance” within their game. This is typically a game of tuning numbers, spreadsheets, damage-per-second, damage mitigation and long complex formulas.
Flow changes that. Being focussed on maximising a Players “Optimal Experience” (The other term for Flow) is about moment-to-moment interactions not just raw numbers. It’s all very good if your game is Balanced by the numbers but it doesn’t count for anything if your players are Bored or Frustrated.
Boredom and Frustration tend to occur when Challenge and Skill are greatly out of balance for a considerable period of time. From my own personal experience I find it takes longer to become bored than it does to become Frustrated. This is largely down to the fact that when your skill outweighs the challenge significantly you are being rewarded more frequently and these extrinsic rewards delay the on-set of boredom. However when the Challenge exceeds your Skill you are often only ever punished and as such lack the sugar coating.
One of the problems with trying to balance a Players experience is that it’s incredibly difficult to accurately and objectively grade player skill. It’s not something that is particularly easy to plot on a graph and is generally most useful for abstract thinking. It’s easy to sketch a Flow graph on a whiteboard but very difficult to quantify in a spreadsheet.
One of the things you can plot with at least a semblance of accuracy is how your game is modifying the Players skill.
Above we have an overly simplified example of an MMO’s challenge as the Player progresses through the levels. At each Level the players skill is artifically increased by receiving new abilities or increases in statistics. When you factor in how the Players Skill is increased over time relative to the change in the Challenges faced you might end up with a graph a little bit like the one below…
After each new Level is achieved the Difficulty faced by the Player is actually reduced. This is good for a few reasons:
- It gives the Player an opportunity to learn how to use their new abilities which is itself a Challenge.
- It gives the Player a rewarding period where they feel much more powerful.
- It gives the Player a break within which to reflect on their achievement.
All of these factors are not specifically related to theories on Flow but result from other elements of Psychology and are proven to all improve a Persons experience so it is worthwhile building these into your game.
As the Player progresses through the Level towards their next jump in Skill the Challenges are increased so the Player has to push themselves harder and they become more engaged and re-enter the Flow state.
The above example is drastically simplyfied compared to a real-mmo and is only intended to deomonstrate how Skill and Challenge relate.
Crowd Control in MMO’s is often the most frustrating experience to a Player. I commented on the effect of “Waiting to Die” last week in regard to the effects of The Sandman on Team Fortress 2. Lets look at how removing a Players ability to interact with your game looks on a Flow Graph.
The above graph represents 5 seconds of gameplay. The player is enjoying themselves and the difficulty is shifting around as the game changes. Then at 2 seconds in they get Disabled removing their ability to interact and artificially reducing their Skill to 0. The result? A massive difficulty spike and an associated increase in Frustration knocking the Player out of the Flow state and into reality (Where they throw their mouse accross the room).
Originally I had a theory that reducing the Players Skill to 0 effectively increases the Difficulty to Infinity as it is impossible for them to respond to the game. This sounded good in my head (it makes a good soundbite) but when I plotted the graph I realised that it’s not strictly true. A model that fits better with my own experiences is that if the Difficulty faced is very low (IE your skill exceeds the Challenge significantly) then being Disabled is not quite as frustrating. If however you are in a Flow State (IE The Challenge is roughly equal to your own Skill) the Frustration is significantly greater.
You may be wondering why I’ve taken the time to point out something that appears so obvious and Common Sense. I ask you this in return…
If it’s so Obvious why do Games Designers still do it?
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9 Comments
Great post, but in the second graph shouldn’t “Boredom” and “Frustration” switch places? Wouldn’t boredom happen when challenge stays the same and skill increases, say moving along the graph at y-axis 1 and frustration would happen when challenge is high and skill is low, like tracing along x-axis 1?
They still do it because it’s difficult to balance a game in such a way. Games are too chaotic for formal analysis most of the time and statistics require too many playetests for most developers, I guess. Not to mention the cost of fiddling with anything but just the numbers.
@Eli Good catch on the picture. I’ve switched them around.
@Naurgul The reasons Designers still add Disables to games is that a Disable from a numerical point of view is damage mitigation and they balance it around this.
There is plenty of Crowd Control in games that isn’t as frustrating as a straight Disable. This might be because the Player being disabled has an opportunity to counter or nullify the Disables effects (IE Their own Skill matters as to whether and to what degree they get disabled) or because the Crowd Control is only reducing their effective skill a little not completely negating it.
Guild Wars handles Crowd Control quite well as there are a huge number of potential counters and blocks that are situational (The next attack will miss and cause damage back type powers).
You kind of lost me when you started talking about the game increasing the player’s skill by making their avatar more powerful. That’s not altering the player’s skill, that’s altering the challenge that the game is presenting to them.
And I don’t understand your progression vs level graph. What is progression there, and how is it different to level? What is challenge, and how is it different to difficulty?
@ roBurky
To me how Difficult a Task is depends on the Challenge the task poses minus your Skill at the Task.
The Challenge offered by climbing a Rock Face might be fixed as the Rock Face doesn’t change.
However as you increase in Rock Climbing Skill the Difficulty of Climbing that Rock is reduced. The Rock Face hasn’t changed but you have.
Following this same logic when a Player gains a Level in a videogame they are being made more powerful. The Enemies they face haven’t been changed at all so the Challenge remains the same. The Difficulty of overcoming that Challenge is however reduced because the Players Skill has been increased.
Challenge and Difficulty can be used interchangeably so Challenge may not be the best word but in this post Challenge is the Challenge offered by the game while Difficulty is relative to the Players Skill.
In the Progression vs Level Graph Progression is essentially “Time”. As you progress through the games content the Challenge is increased. When you gain a Level your Skill is increased reducing the Difficulty.
None of the graphs take genuine Player Skill into account as it is far too subjective. These are plotting the known artificial changes in Skill resulting from the Games Mechanics.
I think calling the relative strength/power of the player and the enemies ‘skill’ and ‘challenge’ in an article about Flow is a bad idea, because those things don’t match up with the ideas of skill and challenge in Flow.
If you’re always fighting enemies of the appropriate level in an MMO, with both you and the enemy’s power increasing at similar rates, then for the purposes of Flow, the background numbers of the power of that enemy are irrelevant. That stuff is all too far behind the scenes and removed from the player’s experience to be important to their Flow.
Look at City of Heroes, where a level 50 enemy isn’t intrinsically any more powerful than a level 1 enemy (or more challenging, by your terminology) – it’s damage and accuracy is only determined by the difference in level between it and the player. Other mmorpgs use different systems for this, but the effect is the same.
@ roBurky I think you just said exactly what I’ve been trying to explain.
During Flow the Challenge faced is equivalent to the Players Skill. Thus the difficulty of the encounter is approximately zero.
However when you remove the Players ability to interact with the game or reduce it in other ways their Skill is artificially reduced making the Difficulty of the encounter Greater even though the enemies haven’t gotten any more powerful.
EDIT: And a Level 50 Enemy is intrinsically more powerful than a level 1 because they are not Level 1. A Level 1 Player fighting a Level 50 Enemy is going to get owned. The Level of an enemy is itself an indicator of how Challenging it is overall. This is why Diku-style games have systems that show you the enemies difficulty relative to your level.
I think I just realised where you are coming from regarding the “Intrinsically more powerful” bit.
The fault of that misunderstanding is that in an MMO as you gain levels your passive abilities are increased (IE your hitpoints are in-line with your level).
These changes in passive ability mean that the zero-point is effectively being moved. When your skills are removed from the equation you can only fall so far (So the Level 50 Enemy vs a Level 50 Player who has been disabled is not the same as a Level 50 Enemy fighting a Level 1 Player).
However your Abilities and powers cannot be used during this time which is reducing your effective skill significantly below that of the enemy thus increasing the difficulty of the situation.
Great post, but in the second graph shouldn’t “Boredom” and “Frustration” switch places? Wouldn’t boredom happen when challenge stays the same and skill increases, say moving along the graph at y-axis 1 and frustration would happen when challenge is high and skill is low, like tracing along x-axis 1?