[HN Gopher] Value Chains: Designing Video Game Economies
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Value Chains: Designing Video Game Economies
Author : martialg
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-06-07 14:09 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lostgarden.home.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (lostgarden.home.blog)
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Disagree strongly with the early argument in the article. If a
| gameplay element in your game is not fun, it should not be in the
| game. Games are about fun. If that gameplay element gate-keeps a
| fun element, then players will do it, but they won't like it, and
| will quit your game earlier than if your game was just the fun
| element. Cut the fat, keep the fun. Mobile 'pay-to-skip-the-
| boring' is the pinnacle of this, and is not a good practice. That
| said, there are reasons to have these sorts of tasks.
|
| 1. Your core gameplay is complex, for example in Factorio it
| starts with chopping trees, but it does so as a tutorial so that
| you manually learn what your later automations are doing. If you
| can create timing mini-games when you chop the tree at a certain
| rhythm to do extra damage, and those timings later work against
| bosses, players will understand what is really going on here.
| It's an un-punishing tutorial.
|
| 2. You want a good mix between extremely intense and more calming
| gameplay. If your core gameplay is intense then having these
| sorts of breaks in between the intensity will improve the
| experience. Without the intensity, your play-testers might not
| understand the point. Drinking to regain mana in WoW is not fun
| in itself, but if it gives an opportunity to regain composure and
| communicate during the run to meet new people, it actually is.
|
| 3. These elements tend to be in multiplayer titles, and you can
| get results that are better than the sum of their parts because
| of the community bonding aspect. If one player chopping 10 trees
| and another collects 10 rocks, and then they trade so that each
| have 5 of each - which because of specialization allows them to
| have more than they could get alone, then this boring gameplay
| just facilitated a trade. In fact, I suspect the author would
| agree with me here, as his earlier blog article on RotMG has this
| line: 'The rule of thumb for everything is "Does this mechanic
| make the game better to play together?"'. The entire point of
| economies in games is to get people to coordinate because
| coordination is fun.
|
| Checking the Steam reviews for the game mentioned, all of the
| negative reviews mention gate-keeping and boring repetitive
| gameplay. It still has a 'Very Positive' rating, but there are a
| lot of low-hanging fruit that could improve the game. 'A Short
| Hike' is the perfect example that you should attempt to emulate,
| and is among the top mentioned games when 'under-rated games' are
| brought up.
| endominus wrote:
| I disagree with the implicit belief that every game should be
| fun. There are other metrics to judge games by. Though it might
| be needed in this particular game, it's not true of all games
| as a whole, nor of every mechanic in games.
|
| The Beginner's Guide did not need fun to keep me, at least,
| engaged. Dwarf Fortress's fun must be made almost entirely by
| the player. Boring or downright hostile mechanics - such as
| long travel times in X3, or the long slog of rebuilding an army
| after a disastrous war in Mount and Blade, or permadeath in
| Darkest Dungeon and roguelikes - are not fun, yet I contend
| that without them the rest of the game would feel boring, even
| weightless. The unfun parts don't just "pad out" the game, they
| give meaning to the player's decisions and make choices matter.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| I accept this criticism. I misspoke slightly when I said fun.
| Entertaining is closer. A game should know what it wants to
| invoke in the player, and the entire game should be built
| around that.
|
| In a game like Paper's Please, your moment to moment gameplay
| might not be fun, but the tedium is deliberate and a part of
| the experience.
|
| Cutting down trees for a half an hour straight so that you
| can later be creative and decorate your house, much less so.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Regarding fun vs. not-fun gameplay elements, there's a lot of
| flexibility here.
|
| Sure, chopping down a tree may not be particularly fun. But if
| as the game progresses you can work to build/unlock better and
| better tools for doing it, you can see and feel the
| satisfaction that your hard work has provided - making this
| task easier allowing you to more quickly go on to greater
| things. If time is limited in the game, that's another layer.
| The activity hasn't gotten any more fun in itself, but it makes
| _other_ things more fun. (the gear progression)
|
| I think it's also OK for a game to have some activities that
| aren't as fun, if they are needed for a system that _is_ very
| fun. I 'd rather have a game that's focusing on what it does
| well than try to make every single activity good. Sure,
| Skyrim's lockpicking is pretty dull. But if time was invested
| there instead of into the core loop of explore->kill->retrieve,
| I'm not sure it would be a better game.
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