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Using Anti-slippery slope measures for increased Mass Appeal. Slippery slopes and their counter measures: A slippery slope is something that helps a winning player. Someone sliding down a slippery slope slides faster and faster, forming an increasing cycle. An example slippery slope would be in a RTS, where a player who wins a battle has more units left alive than the enemy, which makes it easier to win the next battle. The game is over when the player eventually has enough units left to overwhelm the enemy's base defences and destroy the enemy's base before the enemy can rebuild his army. This is a good example of a game based on a slippery slope, where the first few seconds of the game are very importent, and the first few minutes can determine the whole outcome of the game. The tactic of 'rushing', of attacking the other player as soon as possible, normally within the first 120 seconds of the game, is just a player trying to start a slippery slope. If he can do this, he can gain a precious few seconds to build more units as the enemy is forced to defend and repair his base. The player hopes to turn those few seconds, gained at the very start of the game, into a game-winning advantage. Once someone loses the edge in a slippery slope game, they cannot win on their own from that point on. Their only chance of victory is if their opponent makes a mistake. The natural inclination of the game is to tilt further and further in favor of the person who won the initial advantage. This brings us to 'Anti-slippery slope' measures, which are systems in a game designed to counter slippery slopes, to allow a losing player hope. A game with a strong anti-slippery slope measure(s), can be played to the very end, as even the worst player has enough of a chance of winning, enough to want to keep playing. An example is in the racing game, Mario Kart Wii, where there are "random" powerup boxes. A player in 10th to 12th place of the race will have a much higher chance of getting a powerful powerup, and a player in 1st to 3rd place has a lower chance of getting a powerful powerup. Another example is in the board game, Power Grid. The player who is doing the worst (owns the least houses) gets to pick first when choosing new power plants. This means that the player who is doing the best gets whatever junk is left over. A valid tactic in this game is hanging back and do badly, at just the right time, so that you can then have two or three turns of picking the best power plants. This boosts you ahead to win the game in the last few turns. Power Grid turns anti-slippery slope measures into a full type of gameplay. Mass Appeal: As games require more and more content to be equal or better than their competitors, game companies grow in size (and increase in labor to counter the increased amount of content that must be made). As game companies grow in size, games need to make more and more money to turn a profit. This is causing games to shift from targeting nitche markets to making more mass appeal games. The problem is that competitive people are becoming too small of a nitche market. Most people enjoy winning, far fewer enjoy fighting tooth and claw to get that feeling of winning. Casual games, a new front runner genre of games, is filled with single player games that make the player feel good by allowing him to win. Peggle, a game from PopCap, actually has no player skill, and is harder to lose than to win. It has tactics stolen from slot machines, using music and flashing lights to make the player's subconscious think he is winning, even when nothing special is happening. The problem with this, is that people learn. A person who enjoys such a game at first, will become bored of it later when the amount that he is winning does not change (as it was not based on his skill in the first place, thus he is not rewarded for increasing his "skill"). Casual games in general already have a reputation for being bland and boring after the first twenty minutes of gameplay. There are some people who will play a game, even when nothing new is introduced, for a very long time. But the problem is that most people will get bored of a game if not rewarded with new challanges. We are a culture that gets bored quickly, and they will instead just move on to the next game on the top 10 download list. Rewarding the player by rigging the game to allow him to win is a good thing. Games need to move forward, and appealing to a larger market is a way of doing that. But doing so at the expense of losing customers who enjoy a challange or by not gaining customers from word of mouth (which is not generated because the game has a very low replay value), is just not a great tactic and could certainly be improved. Many of the old gameplay types (FPS, RTS, Arcade) are designed to be intrinsically challanging. They are based around concepts like rewarding only the very best player in a group, or forcing one team to lose, so that the other can win. Unlocking new types of gameplay for the casual market by overcompensating with anti-slippery slope measures: Anti-slippery slope measures can be used to open up the older "hardcore" genres, to newer, more casual markets. One advantage of this is that we (as designers) know a lot more about these older genres, and can use this larger amount of knowledge to help us in creating interesting "casual" games. Most types of gameplay invented for casual games don't have the future in mind. They are immediately fun, but only hold the players for short periods of time. This is fine for them, as they tend to be used in flash games or on cell phones, where people only intend to play for short periods of time. Modern games need to appeal to a larger market and hold the interest of the player for as long as possible. A PC or Consule game must hold attention for longer than most casual games can. And too many games are trying to build on a foundation that is weak, taking these short-sighted gameplay designs, and adding to them. The reasoning being that X gameplay is found to be fun by the mass market, when played on their cell phone on the subway. Therefore, it is a good idea to use it for a larger type of game that is targeting the same casual market. People buy games to play at home for different reasons than they buy games for their cell phone. Also, larger games tend to cost more, and people are not willing to buy a gameplay type that they are starting to grow bored of playing on their cell phone, for a higher cost on their home consule. Thus, the secret seems to be to take larger, more long term gameplays and use supercharged anti-slippery slope systems to force the player to win. Because the gameplay is not just one basic layer, but two layers tugging against each other, this allows the game to scale back the bonus it gives to bad players as they desire it, allowing a much larger amount of replay. The major bonus of this system is that the player feels like he is only just winning, as he plays through the game, instead of feeling that the game is easy. The danger is real, because the player can be hurt. However, not to the point where he loses. This way the player feels like the action hero, running away from the fireball coming down the hallway, always staying just ahead of it. This would be boring if the hero was overtaken by the fireball, but it would also be boring if he got so far ahead of it that he did not feel in danger. The game feels like it is on the knife's edge, but with the player always slightly winning, rather then just the feeling of playing a game that is too easy for you. The normal casual game does give the reward of winning, but this type of game gives the reward of winning, and the feeling that you are skilled and powerful. One becomes boring after playing the game a couple of time, the other makes you boast about the game to your friends. An example of this is a RTS (maybe a bad example for casual gaming, but since I used an RTS in the slippery slope example, I will use one in this example). In this RTS, the danger feels real, because units do die, the AI enemies deal lots of damage, and can win the battles. But the player wins the war, and is always slightly winning the war. The player then slowly moves towards winning the game. However, skill is not useless, as it helps the player win more of the battles. Here are a few examples of ways the game forces the player to win, even though every second of the game, the player feels special because he keeps defeating what appears to be a dangerous enemy. - The player can always build another army to replace one lost in a battle. This is done by having resources come in faster if the player does not have many, and having units build much faster if the player does not have any, or very few. - The player's units do more damage when outnumbered. This means that the player feels like the enemy is dangerous, because he just killed 5 of his 7 units, but the remaining 2 make a brave last stand, and win the battle. - When units are ordered to go to within a certain dist of a battle or a point that is being captured, and they are not on screen, their speed doubles. This allows the player to feel as if he might lose, but reenforce that battle much faster than the AI can. The AI also helps, as it can attack, and fight back, but won't stop the player doing something he really wants to do. It will challange the player, but as soon as the player starts to give up, the AI loses the battle, and the player becomes more interested again. This means that the AI will let the player breach its base defenses if he attacks enough. One thing the AI won't do is walk away from winning a battle or not win battles at all. Otherwise the trick is revealed, and the player starts not having fun. However, it will decide to win or lose battles based on if the player needs these units, or is personally watching the fight, or has not lost in a while, or has not won in a while, etc. The goal is to have the player be ambushed, attacked, but have the player drive the attack off, losing a few guys in the process. Anytime the player has defenses, the AI will attack, with a force just strong enough to last as long as possible, but still lose. Anytime that the player has an army walking around, the AI will attack it, defend against it, but only rarely wipe it out. I am not always suggesting a smoothly scaling difficulty level either. The secret here is to lean towards letting the player win, and just have a system that switches the game up a difficulty level if the player is winning far too easily. So rather than having a smooth scale (which can work, but can also be a extra major feature, which then requires much more work to add), have a basic system at the end of each level. This system checks how much the player won by, and if it is over a certain amount, the game decreases the anti- slippery slope bonus for the next level. An RTS is easy to use as an example, because of the number of tiny
varibles that the player does not know about. However, since RTSs
tend to be too complex for casual gamers, these concepts can be
applied to other types of games. My game, Engine of War, has
no overall lives counter. This means that a player can die, and
lose a level, but cannot lose the game.
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