Tic Tac Toe Vs. Chess: How Mechanics with Depth Affect a Game

Everybody knows how to play Tic Tac Toe. It’s one of the first set of game mechanics that children learn. Get three in-a-row of your symbol and bam, you’ve won! Chess is another game with mostly simple rules, but we have a lot more Chess tournaments than Tic Tac Toe tournaments. Why is that? There are a huge variety of ways that you can play chess and win. In gaming, a similar phenomenon pops up. Anybody can pick up the basics of Candy Crush or Street Fighter II Turbo, but you’d be hard pressed to find a Candy Crush tournament anywhere.

Still waiting for chess pieces that murder each other though. I WAS SOLD A BILL OF GOODS, ROWLING.

But how does depth of mechanics affect a game?

For a bit of reference, in the same month this came out, Magic: The Gathering was first released. Go forth and feel old.

Foremost, deeper mechanics exponentially extend the lifespan of a game. With more room for exploration and refinement, the longer the game will last. People still play Street Fight II Turbo, which was released nearly twenty years ago in 1994, at this year’s Evolution Championship Series (EVO), the largest and longest running fighting game tournament in the world. The fact that people are still competing means that they’re still discovering new ways to use the characters.

Basically this but instead of drying laundry it'll prevent your Pokémon from taking 12.5% damage on entry.

Higher levels of play are only possible because of the variety of strategies that a player can experiment with and employ. After all, anybody can level up their favorite Pokémon to steamroll an opposing trainer, but a skilled player assembles their team specifically to counter threats before they’re fully realized. Using entry hazards like Spikes and Stealth Rock mean that a trainer could use a Pokémon with Rapid Spin to counter, or a Pokémon that’s immune to certain kinds of paralyzing attacks. These higher levels of play encourage the perception of progress through a game, by keeping the player more engaged with the mechanics than they were before they played strategically the player learns more about how the game works.

Spend years building a new engine, creating new mechanics, graphics, and people will still put the most effort into bringing back the one game you made they liked.

Deeper mechanics also tend to create passionate fanbases, a double-edged sword if there ever was one. With a passionate fanbase, people will be discussing, playing, and analyzing your game for years to come, but these same people are more attached to game than the studio that develops it. There’s a mod called Skywind for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that is centered entirely around bringing the world of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind into the modern age by porting the whole game into Skyrim. Changes in the formula can have very negative reactions, like the large change in gameplay that players found in Fallout 3 compared to the earlier games in the series. Imagine that you’ve picked up a particularly mouthy barnacle and you’ll get a good idea about what it feels like to develop a “masterpiece.”

Deeper mechanics do not necessarily mean “complicated” or “nonsensical,” so when players must exit the game to understand how it works, something went wrong. Dark Souls, though a deep and enjoyable game, feature some unexplainable mechanics that don’t make sense within the game itself. Figuring out that Resistance is a garbage stat or that humanity is required to summon help (but also opens you up to invasion) is tough without a friend or the internet. Games like Dwarf Fortress are renowned and perhaps even loved for their complexity, but then true popularity will always be slightly out of DF’s reach. If you make a game too simple, it won’t hold enough interest to form a fanbase, so developers must introduce deeper mechanics to keep their company alive (usually in the form of sequel after sequel).

This is the flowchart of advice recommended to new players of Dwarf Fortress. Any game that needs a flowchart is clearly not looking to appeal to the average person.

Chess is almost 1500 years old. To put that in perspective, chess has been around longer than most empires on Earth. Yet, people still play chess and will probably continue to play it until the sun explodes. The more you study the game, the more ways you learn to play. At the same time, most children can pick up the basics after a game or two. Deep mechanics create long lasting and loved games. Next time you’re playing something ask yourself, “is this is a flash in the pan or the kind of fire that burns forever?”

Mobile games will take over the entire gaming ecosystem unless you share this article with everybody you know. Quickly now, they’re coming!

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Hit me one more time: Death and Punishment in Games

Dying is a big part of life, both in reality and in videogames. Since the first games, there has been a need for some kind of failure state. After all, what’s the fun in playing a game you can’t lose? Some games, like Atari’s Pong had “loss” as a failure state, but most games went with “death” of some kind. In any game, there needs to be some kind of factor that makes death unappealing (besides the fact that it’s an uncomfortable reminder of our own fragile mortality) so you avoid it. Different kinds of games have tried different things to make death unappealing, though some work better than others.

When arcades died, the continue screen died with them. IT's a real shame, considering how awesome some of them are.

What are some interesting methods of de-incentivizing death? Which of them are well designed?

In the Pokémon series “death” is not much of a hurdle, and that’s a good thing. You “lose” in Pokémon by making all of your Pokémon “faint.” You wake up at the last Pokémon center you visited after blacking out. Nurse Joy heals your Pokémon and tells you three or four lines about how the center is always here to help you.

No, I think I'd like my poor electric rat to just stay terribly poisoned, thanks. Is this free? Is there Pokémon healthcare? Do we have an HMO? Hold on, I need to call my mom.

If you just mash the A button to get through it quickly she’ll heal your Pokémon and you’ll have to listen to the whole spiel again. It might not seem like punishment, but having to read the same lines over and over again is just annoying enough to make “dying” a pain. This whole process incentives good item use and keeping an eye on your Pokémon’s health as you travel. If you let your Pokémon faint too often they start to dislike you which leads to your Pokémon disobeying you in the middle of battle.

I guess this is what I get for putting Caterpie first against that level 75 Charizard.

This system is well designed because it doesn’t interfere with your gameplay in a large way while also ensuring that you want to avoid dying, just so that you don’t have to hear Nurse Joy lecturing you again.

Death is such a part of the Souls series that the first DLC-included version of Dark Souls is called Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. You’d think that because death is so common in that game that there’s no way to de-incentivize it, right? When you die in Dark Souls, all the souls you’ve collected (used to level up, upgrade weapons, etc) are left where you died.

Welcome to the Souls series, where the enemies are relentless and the souls don't matter.

After death you respawn at the last bonfire (the game’s checkpoints) that you used. To get them back, you have to make it back to the spot where you bit the dust. What’s so clever about this method is how it changes based on how many souls you were carrying and where you died. If you only had a couple of thousand souls, you might not even care about them but if you had several hundred thousand, you would probably want to head back super carefully because losing all those souls means losing hours of game progress.

All your souls are right there in that little green light. You will die many times trying to get back to that light. You will resent that light.

If you just rolled off a cliff by accident, then picking up your souls is a simple as going back to the spot and grabbing them. If you died in the middle of a boss fight, you might have to dodge around a giant dragon while maneuvering towards your souls. It’s a multilayer form of punishment that really fits the tone of the game and incorporates directly into the gameplay nicely.

In Bethseda RPGs, death always results in the same thing: reloading your most recent save. Most modern games have an autosave system that will save your game every x minutes, but some older games require to manually save your progress. Bethesda RPGS are famous for their massive amounts of content, and each game just keeps adding to the pile.

This bear is actually a metaphor for how badly the massive amount of content (the bear) is going to crush you (you).

Every time you die, you can lose hours of progress depending on when the game saved, or when you did. This is unfair because it feels like saving should be a system that the game handles, rather than the player. It’s almost like you’re being punished for enjoying the game so much that you forgot to take yourself out of gameplay and go through a bunch of menus to save. This is a case where the game goes too far towards dis-incentivizing death, to the point where death results in you putting the controller/mouse down, maybe for the day. This can be mitigated, based on how often the game autosaves, but that’s more of a band aid than a cure.

Dying in The Legend of Zelda is a slap in the face that you see coming a mile away. You know that you shouldn’t have gone into that high leveled temple with one and a half hearts, but you did anyway.

This is not going to end well for me. What's that, Giant Dino-corn? You agree? Nice to have consensus.

Before you know it, you hear that sad little sound effect and you wind up back where you started the game. Every time you die you respawn with three hearts, no matter the maximum amount of hearts you have. In the beginning of the game you only have three maximum hearts so you can shoot (maybe throw? It’s unclear) your sword no problem. However as you progress though the game you get more hearts, so death means that you start out hobbled. Now you have to start out every new life by either grinding for hearts, grinding for money to buy medicine to restore hearts, or you need to find a fairy pool to heal yourself. This feels poorly designed because the game is putting an artificial time sink between you and more progress. The only difference between starting like this or starting will full hearts is about ten to fifteen minutes of wasted time.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!” Videogames have to make sure that death is aggravating because they’re the only place where you can die every five minutes and still be doing what you’re doing. Exactly how to go about making death aggravating must be a hard concept to wrestle with, given how final it is in reality. Clever developers come up with systems that play into the game mechanics, but others go for the low hanging fruit of time based frustration and quicksaving. Next time you die in a videogame, think about what you have to do to progress again. Is the mechanic well designed? Is it annoying? Why so?

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The Agency of Controls

Anybody who has ever played a game has used good controls, bad controls, and everything in between. Controls can be designed to do more, however. Well-designed controls can give a certain feeling to you; a sense of fluidity or helplessness that changes the game completely.

So what makes controls well-designed?

Both the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series’ controls, although sometimes complex and uncoordinated, enhance the central horror themes in both games. In most of the Silent Hill games walking around requires you to turn the character based on a fixed camera. This is awkward and can take some getting used to. When combined with the slow-to-respond controls it makes reacting to and fighting enemies frustrating at best.

The forced camera angle featured in games like Silent Hill 2 allows developers to really control how the player experiences the game.

While these controls might seem unresponsive or just plain bad, they are actually taking cues from Japanese horror movies and stories. In Japanese horror, a large evil force tries to make the characters feel unwanted and uncomfortable. Japanese monsters do not jump out at you, but rather create a world of constant anxiety; you are not wanted in this place, you have no control in this place, and you will never feel safe here.

 Resident Evil, as well as Silent Hill 2, translates this (traditionally) cinematic feeling into games by making you into a fumbling mess. With Resident Evil’s “tank controls”, so named because of their 6 directional nature, you control the character based on the fixed camera that changes every time you enter a new room. Given that you cannot move and shoot at the same time, it makes for a surprisingly nervous cocktail. While Resident Evil is generally fairly amusing and campy, the controls do a lot to increase the tension and horror.

Moving through the mansion in Resident Evil wouldn't be nearly as anxiety inducing if it weren't for the cumbersome controls.

In the opposite manner to Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil, controls can empower you with almost total agency, like in Dark Souls. While Dark Souls has garnered fame (or infamy) for its difficulty, its control scheme deserves more praise. You choose from a very large number of weapons, most with their own unique move set. You can beat the game with each weapon, so it really comes down to preference. The control scheme might seem slow or heavy to newer players, this adds weight and consequence to movements. The controls force you to think more carefully about when an attack, or roll, or any other move..Once you get the hang of it, you'll  have near perfect control over the character’s walking, running, jumping, dodging, rolling, and parrying. The controls let you almost orchestrate combat, becoming less frenetic and more thoughtful.

The controls and hitboxes of Dark Souls are so precise, it's actually possible to dodge below enemy attacks, rather than just dodging back.

Similarly, Receiver’s tightly controlled gunplay makes you feel totally in control of the character and the game. To reload your handgun, you must eject the magazine, put the gun away (you only have two hands after all), fill the magazine with bullets one at a time, get the gun out again, insert the magazine, and pull back the slide to chamber the first round. To fire the weapon, you must turn the safety off. To check how many bullets you have left, you have to take the magazine out of the gun and count. Combat in Receiver can switch from slow to extremely fast in a split second, depending on how quickly you become overwhelmed. However, a quick hand and knowledge of the controls allows you to go through the full reload process in under a second, which feels smooth and imbues the player with a feeling of total agency.

Receiver uses complex controls to do something that's usually simple in games, which definitely changes the feeling of agency.

            Over time, controls have evolved into a bigger and bigger part of the experience. More than just an interface, controls complement the atmosphere of a game, increase your immersion, and make the game memorable far past its release. Well designed controls add to and improve the experience, which is definitely something to strive for.