FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Other Balance Considerations
This section addresses two undesirable qualities of unbalanced games, stagnation and triviality, that you should seek to avoid.
Stagnation occurs in a PvE game when the game leaves the player in a position in which he simply does not know what to do next; he believes that he is stuck. (Don't confuse this with a stalemate, a situation in which the players cannot go on no matter what.) Stagnation tends to be a result of a design that doesn't give the player enough information to proceed. First-person shooters that require a player to run all over the place trying to find the hidden switch that opens the level exit, after having killed all her opponents, stagnate. Once the player kills all the opponents, the level exit should be obvious.
Stagnation seldom occurs in PvP games because such games almost always put the competitors in direct conflict with one another and provide them with means to act against each other's forces. Stagnation occasionally happens when one player's forces are so reduced that there is little he can do. But because he usually loses the game soon afterward, this doesn't represent a serious stagnation problem. The most common complaint about stagnation in PvP games occurs in scenarios where the victory condition requires a player to destroy all enemy units, and one last enemy unit (often not even a combat unit) remains hidden in an obscure location. You can avoid this by setting a different victory condition, such as to destroy the enemy's headquarters instead of all his units.
Stagnation can be difficult to avoid in a sprawling action-adventure with so many different combinations and configurations that you can't reliably anticipate what the player may or may not try. However, you can still give the players information as they progress:
■ Tackle stagnation passively by hiding in plain sight clues about how to proceed.
■ Tackle stagnation actively by having the game detect when the player wanders around aimlessly; make the game provide a few gentle nudges to guide her in the right direction.
Never let the player feel bewildered. If he has to resort to outside assistance in order to proceed—whether by cheating, reading a strategy guide, or looking up the answers on the web—your game contains a design flaw.
Players don't want to be bogged down in minutiae when they can be directing the big decisions. Forcing the player to decide where to store the gold when she must try to build an army and plan a campaign strategy merely distracts her with
uninteresting details. It moves the player out of the flow state and into boredom. Likewise, any gameplay decision that has no real effect on the game world, or any decision that requires the player to pick from a slate of options that includes only one reasonable option, is trivial. Let the computer handle it. (This doesn't apply to non-gameplay decisions, such as self-expressive acts—choosing a team color may not affect the gameplay, but the player should still be allowed to do it.)
Triviality can add to the player's enjoyment when you use it well and not too often. Consider a cops and robbers game. The player's avatar, a police officer, patrols the city as usual, on the lookout for crime, when he spots a group of suspicious-looking characters on the corner. He stops the car, and they immediately run down an alleyway and vanish; the player won't meet these particular characters again, and they do not form part of the game's story. These characters provide local color rather than part of the gameplay. If you don't lead the player too far down the wrong path, you can use such trivial interaction to give the impression that there is more to the city than meets the eye.
