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The Importance of Risk in Basic Game Design
So why is risk important? As game designers we are always looking for what makes a game enjoyable, one of those factors is risk. If a character can die a million times and we don’t care we lose the immersive experience of the game. If we feel as though we are “going through the motions”, that is if all we are doing is repeating some mindless action in order to get to the next plot point, then we resent that section of the game (anyone who’s played through a Final Fantasy or a Xenosaga or a .hack understands this feeling). We don’t find it “fun” or challenging, we find it tedious and time consuming. There is no epinephrine released during this time -- there is no excitement -- and when we complete such a section in a game we breathe a sigh of relief, inwardly saying “glad that’s done” rather than feeling the exaltation of victory. “Glad that’s done” is okay to say when you get off work, it’s not alright when talking about a game. So what’s the problem? The reward for playing a game has to be the game itself. We often overlook this fact, making the reward the ending or leveling up or getting to explore new areas. This causes us (perhaps rightly) to want the player to have access to the reward.
The Safe GameIn a game where the game-play isn’t the telos (raison d’etré) of the game the idea of preventing the player from achieving the real goal of the game becomes illogical, almost absurd. Think of it this way: under what circumstances would you want to do something that is both tedious and difficult only to find out that you wasted your time and have to start all over again? Correct, never. Thus we create the safe game. The safe game is any game where given X hours (with minor variance for skill) any player will beat the game and get the prize (as stated earlier this can be anything from hitting the level cap to getting to see the great CGI at the end). In the safe game, losing entails repeating some amount of the tedium in between starting the game up and getting that hungered for reward. The safe game fails in only one way…it isn’t a game. In many ways the safe game bears more resemblance to a movie or, at best, a theme park ride. It focuses on the non-interactive parts of the experience rather than on the interactive element that is the core of the ‘game’. So why do we make safe games? I’ll just say it…because it’s easy. We use the safe game to cover up a flaw in our design. It is very difficult to make a good game, it is much simpler to make a pretty movie and stick it on the end of forty hours of tedious trigger twiddling. And you want to know what? Sometimes the experience is worth it. Sometimes the reward at the end of the long bland tunnel of repetitious game-play is fulfilling enough to justify the time. My hat comes off to all the CGI wizards, creative writers, inventive level designers who can make me come away satisfied regardless of the game-play -- but that’s not our business, we are game designers, our job is to make games. |
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