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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Impossible vs. Cakewalk: Difficulty in Games

Difficulty can be a hard subject to talk about in games. Some people play a game religiously, so it all seems easier. Sometimes somebody has trouble with just navigating 3D space in games.

For instance, while some might consider it hard, I can speed-run Grey's Anatomy: The Video Game in 38 seconds.

 Difficulty is still worth discussing, though. Game designers and developers put so much work into how a game looks, feels, and plays that there’s no way they didn’t think about how hard to make it. Developers have betas and alphas to help narrow down how hard is too hard, or if a section is too easy, but sometimes the end result still feels off.

So, what makes a game hard without being frustrating? What can developers do to make an easy game still feel like a worthwhile experience?

Kirby Nightmare in Dreamland was the first Gameboy Advance game to feature the pink puffball we’ve all come to know and love since Kirby Superstar on the SNES. The gameplay follows the usual Kirby formula of “eat enemies and gain their power” and make your way through colorful and linear levels.

Look at him! So adorable. the Kirby series has always been more about the world than extreme gameplay.

From the moment you start playing Nightmare in Dreamland, it’s evident that this game is not going to frustrate you will difficulty. Instead, it’s going to take you an adorable journey filled with cute monsters, interesting bosses, and oddly named levels (Yoghurt Yard anybody?). The levels are filled with food to restore health, enemies are generally easy to beat, and if you do die, you’ll only be sent back a small bit in the level. This game is about making your way through the world and trying out new powers. Watching Kirby change as you go through the dozens of forms you can find is fun and cute. The game never tries to say that it’s going to be a harrowing journey so it never feels “too easy.” It falls into that Goldilocks zone of juuuuusstt right.

On the other hand, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim always feels a bit too easy. The second you start playing the game, you see the total destructive power that the Dragons have, and the thought of taking one of them down might fill you with fear. Then, you actually fight one and it feels like a total letdown.

Look at this thing! It's terrifying! It breathes fire, can cause meteors to rain from the sky, and is crazy evil. Yet you beat it by slapping it in the face with a club.

You just run around until they land, then wail on them. Before you know it, they’re dead and you’re absorbing their soul and everybody else is staring at you in awe, like it was hard. Two hours later, you’ll see a Dragon land in the middle of a little farming village and get torn apart by peasants. Skyrim fails to present you with danger in 99% of fights, though the Dragon Priests can be tough to take down, due to their powerful masks and staves. Skyrim starts you out with a full set of armor, weapons, and potions so there’s never a time when you feel like you’re just starting out in the world, or feel vulnerable. You can pause the game a second away from death to eat 50 raw potatoes and 5 health potions and bam, you’re all better. When a game is inconsistent like this, it removes a lot of the satisfaction you might get from overcoming its “challenges.”

That covers “easy”, but how do you make a game hard without going to fuck-you-that’s-bullshit-are-you-kidding-me territory? The trick is fairness, really. You have to make the player feel like any death they experience is a result of their choices and actions, and not the game suddenly deciding that’s how things are going to be. And while there’s some definite RNG rage, FTL: Faster than Light does a really good job of showing you how proper planning and decisions can beat even the hardest enemies.

Victory here will feel better than beating 10,000 Dragons in Skyrim.

By defeating enemies and acquiring scrap, you upgrade your ship and crew in any way you see fit. FTL makes it clear from the beginning that you are outmatched, outgunned, and that only a clever mind will help you survive. The game is hard because of the overwhelming force against you and because things can change in an instant. One missile aimed wrong and the enemy can repair their weapons engine subsystem and get away, leading the rebel fleet to overtake your position. FTL demands your attention and concentration, and though there are times when your defeat feels undeserved, it generally does a good job of respecting your choices.

If “fairness” makes difficulty feel okay, then “unfairness” must make it feel frustrating. Bioshock Infinite was generally a fairly easy game, but it featured a difficulty option called “1999 Mode” that went too far in the opposite direction.

All complaints aside, this game is absolutely gorgeous. Columbia, the floating city where most of the game takes place, is beautiful and very atmospheric.

For the most part, the rules of 1999 Mode are pretty well thought out. Enemies inflict greater damage on you, the navigation arrow is removed, and there’s no weapon auto aim. However, enemies also gain increased health, there’s less ammunition for your weapons, you have less health, and respawn points are reduced. What ends up happening here is that the enemies can take a huge amount of punishment and stay alive, whereas you take a hit and you’re down. Enemies also know where you are at all times, as soon as you fire on them once, even if you try to hide. Some of the bosses already have a lot of health, and in 1999 Mode most firefights become a war of attrition, rather than a thrilling and bombastic experience. You also have less ammo, and given that you can’t upgrade every weapon, you’ll end up fighting a lot of bosses with whatever you can find ammo for, which will take even longer.

Anybody who's played Bioshock Infinite can tell you how annoying this boss is on normal difficulty. It gets 50 times worse on 1999 Mode.

Increased difficulty modes are good, but they need to be implemented carefully. Increasing the amount of damage everybody does make sense because it makes combat deadlier. Increasing the enemies health while lowering the player’s makes it feel as if you’re hobbled before you even start the fight. It’s a really delicate balance and definitely hard to strike, but as long as things get harder on both sides of the equation, everything can still feel fair. You can give enemies more programming routines so they might try to flank the player,

Difficulty is tough to do well. It’s like trying to balance scales on a rope bridge in a very windy valley. There are a few things developers can do to make things easier on themselves, though. Start your game with a sense of where things are going, make player’s choices feel important to the outcome, and avoid making the enemies way more powerful while making the player weaker. Everybody has a different idea of what makes a game too hard or too easy, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about what makes for a good level of difficulty.