FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Conflict
A conflict challenge is one requiring the direct opposition of forces, some of which are under player control. If one player must beat the others by opposing or impeding them directly, the challenge qualifies as conflict, even without combat or violence. Checkers has no bloodshed but still presents conflict challenges. Classic activities to overcome conflict challenges include taking away another player's resources and impeding another player's ability to act.
CONFLICT CHALLENGES VERSUS CONFLICT OF INTEREST
Formal game theory is a field of mathematics that studies situations that contain a conflict of interest. By that definition, any game in which players are rivals for victory contains conflict. However, in pole-vaulting, darts, and many other games, that opposition applies only at the top of the challenge hierarchy. At lower levels, the players do not (and sometimes are forbidden to) impede each other directly. Even in Monopoly, the rules provide no means by which players may choose to target each other for hostile action.
Such games may contain a conflict of interest but no conflict challenges. The players must achieve their top-level goal not through the direct opposition of forces but through vaulting over the higher bar, throwing darts more accurately, or whatever other atomic challenges the game specifies.
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The asymmetric board game Fox and Geese that Chapter 1 introduces gives the two players different conflict challenges. The fox tries to eat the geese by jumping over them on the board (taking away the other player's resources). The geese try to trap
the fox while moving in configurations that prevent the fox from jumping over them (preventing the enemy from acting).
Create interesting conflict challenges by varying such factors as these:
■ The scale of the action (from individuals to whole armies)
■ The speed at which the conflict takes place (from turn-based, allowing the players all the time they want, to frenetic activity as in action games)
■ The complexity of the victory conditions (from simple survival to complex missions with goals and subgoals)
Many action games focus on the immediate, visceral excitement of personal conflict. The player generally controls an avatar that battles directly against one or more opponents, often at high speeds.
Conflict challenges can be broken down into strategy, tactics, logistics, and other components.
Strategy means planning, including taking advantage of your situation and resources, anticipating your opponent's moves, and knowing and minimizing your weaknesses. A strategic challenge requires the player to carefully consider the game (a process called situational analysis) and devise a plan of action. In a turn-based game of perfect information (one that contains no element of chance or hidden information), players may use pure strategy to choose their moves by analyzing possible future states of the game. Chess is a classic game of perfect information. (In formal game theory, pure strategy has a special meaning, but we'll use the term in an informal sense to distinguish it from applied strategy.)
Succeeding in a game of pure strategy requires a talent for systematic reasoning that relatively few people possess in a high degree. Computer game developers usually aim to attract a broad audience, so few of them offer these kinds of challenges. Instead, they hide information from the player and include elements of chance, making situational analysis to some extent a matter of guesswork and of weighing probabilities rather than a matter of logic. Such games call for applied strategy. Real-time strategy (RTS) games normally require applied strategy and offer economic and exploration challenges as well, making RTS games accessible to players with less skill at logic and providing other ways to win besides strategy alone.
Tactics involve executing a plan, accomplishing the goals that strategy calls for. Tactics also require responding to unexpected events or conditions: new information or bad luck. A player might have a strategy for defeating his opponents in poker, but he uses tactics to decide how to play each particular hand.
You can design a purely tactical game with no strategy. A small-squad combat game in which the soldiers continually move into unknown territory contains no opportunities for strategy—a player can't plan if she doesn't know where she's going or what she's up against—but contains many opportunities for tactics, such as keeping soldiers covered, taking advantage of their particular skills, and so on.
The business of supporting troops in the field and bringing fresh troops to the front lines is called logistics. Most war games don't bother with logistical challenges such as transporting food and fuel to where the troops can use them; players tend to find combat entertaining but find logistics a boring distraction from the combat.
Modern RTS games routinely include one important logistical challenge: weapons production. Unlike war board games in which the players often start with a fixed number of troops, RTSs require the players to produce weapons and to research new types of weapons using a limited amount of raw material. The players must construct and defend the production facilities themselves. Adding this new logistical challenge to what was formerly a purely combat-oriented genre changed the face of war gaming. (See Chapter 14.)
In role-playing games, the limited size of the characters' inventories presents another logistical challenge, requiring players to decide what to carry and what to leave behind. Equipping and balancing a party of heterogeneous characters with all that they need to face a dangerous adventure occupies a significant amount of the player's time.
SURVIVAL AND REDUCTION OF ENEMY FORCES
The fundamental challenge in any game based on conflict is survival. The player must preserve the effective playing time—the lives—of his units, or he cannot achieve the victory condition. In a few games, survival itself constitutes the victory condition regardless of other achievements, but in most, survival is necessary, but not sufficient, to win.
The converse of the survival challenge is the challenge to reduce enemy forces. To design such a challenge, you must create rules that determine how a unit may be removed from the game. Chess and checkers provide examples of such rules: capture by replacement and capture by jumping, respectively. War games implement simulated combat using complex mathematical models and track the health of each unit, which may be reduced by repeated attacks until reduction to zero destroys the unit.
DEFENDING VULNERABLE ITEMS OR UNITS
The player may be called upon to defend other units or items, especially items that cannot defend themselves. In chess, all units protect the king. To meet such a
challenge requires that the player know not only the capabilities and vulnerabilities of her units but also those of the entity she must protect. She must be prepared to sacrifice some units to protect the vital one.
The ability to move undetected, an extremely valuable capacity in almost any kind of conflict, especially if the player takes the side of the underdog, can form a challenge in its own right. Games occasionally pose challenges in which the victory condition cannot be achieved through combat but must be achieved through stealth. Thief: The Dark Project was designed entirely around this premise. It required players to achieve their missions by stealth as much as possible and to avoid discovery or combat if they could.
Stealth poses a considerable problem in the design of artificial opponents for war games. In a game with no stealth, the AI-driven opponent has access to the complete state of the game world; to include stealth, you must restrict the opponent's knowledge, limit its attention, leave it ignorant of whole regions of the game world. You decide what the AI opponent does and doesn't know and define what steps it takes, if any, to gain further information.
