FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
The Hierarchy of Challenges
When you're up to your in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original objective
was to drain the swamp.
—Unattributed
In all but the smallest games, the player faces several challenges at a time, organized in a hierarchy of challenges. Ultimately, he wants to complete the game. To accomplish that, he must complete the current mission. Completing the mission requires completing a sub-mission, of which the current mission probably has several. At the lowest level, he wants to deal with the challenge that immediately faces him: the enemies threatening him at the moment, perhaps, or the locked door for which he needs the right spell. These lowest-level challenges are called atomic challenges (atomic in the sense of indivisible). Atomic challenges make up sub-missions;
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FIGURE 9.1 A hierarchy of challenges for a small action-adventure game |
sub-missions make up missions; and missions make up the ultimate goal: completing the game.
Figure 9.1 illustrates this idea. It displays the hierarchy of challenges for a (very) small action-adventure game. The entire game consists of three missions or game levels; each level consists of three sub-missions, the last of which pits the player against a level boss. Each sub-mission consists of three atomic challenges, of which the final one (in bold text) completes the sub-mission. The gray boxes indicate the challenges the player faces simultaneously at one particular moment in the middle of level 2. At the atomic level, you find him trying to solve a puzzle; doing so will help him to—or allow him to proceed to—destroy the critical object, all of which contributes to succeeding in the Destroy Object sub-mission, which itself makes up a part of winning level 2. Ultimately, he hopes to win the entire game.
To design your game, you create this hierarchy and decide what challenges the player will face. During play, the player focuses most of her attention on the atomic challenges immediately facing her, but the other, higher-level challenges will always be in the back of her mind. Her awareness of the higher-level challenges creates anticipation that plays an important role both in entertaining her and in guiding her to victory. The remainder of this section discusses how the hierarchy affects the player's experience and what that means for game design.
