FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Making PvP Games Fair

Part of your job includes making sure that your game is fair and that players per­ceive it to be fair. Fairness means something different in PvP games than it does in PvE games, so we'll examine them separately. Players generally consider a PvP game to be fair if they believe (1) the rules give each player an equal chance of winning when play begins and (2) the rules do not give advantage or disadvantage to players unequally during the game in ways that they cannot influence or prevent apart from the operation of chance (in moderation).

Balancing Games with Symmetry

In designing a PvP game, you must decide early on if you want the game to be symmetric or asymmetric. Chapter 1 introduced the concept of symmetry; see the section "Symmetry and Asymmetry" there for a refresher if you need one. The concept doesn't apply to PvE games; all PvE games are asymmetric because there is only one player.

You will find it easiest to create a PvP game that players perceive as fair if you make the game symmetric. Each player begins with the same resources, has the same options available to her, faces the same challenges, and tries to achieve the same victory condition. The vast majority of traditional games (chess, backgammon, Othello, and so on) follow this pattern. So, too, does Monopoly, in which each player begins with $1,500 and all launch their tokens from the "Go" square. One player
gets to go first, but because a random roll of the dice controls who begins the game, players accept this as fair. (See the sidebar "Who Goes First"? in Chapter 1 for fur­ther discussion.)

So long as whatever you do for one player you do for all the others, your game will remain fair, and little else needs to be said. However, video game players generally consider symmetric games rather uninteresting. Symmetric games don't allow play­ers to control different forces and study their relative strengths and weaknesses the way asymmetric games do. Symmetric games also feel rather contrived, because lit­tle in the real world is symmetric.

In PvP games, dominant strategies most often occur under asymmetric rules (the next section addresses those issues), but a dominant strategy can also occur in sym­metric games. Because all players start with symmetric attributes and positions, they all may use this superior strategy, so it does not create an unfair advantage for one player. Nevertheless, such a strategy leaves the players with only one good option, so the game isn't as fun as it could be.