Value Chains: Designing Video Game Economies | Hacker News Reader

Value Chains: Designing Video Game Economies

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32 pointsmartialg11 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think that the term "fun" is pretty narrow and ultimately a poor descriptor of what makes a game interesting to play. It seems like a lot of discussions on the subject tend toward this realization. "Engaging" or "compelling" I think are potentially better words but both sound pretty sterile and corporate to me.

To me "compelling" hits the mark. It carries meaning that you are engaging with the game, sometimes against your better judgement. Most of gaming industry is perfecting the art of compelling players to spend time and money on their products. There are game studios though that give more of an honest vibe: Thatgamecompany, Media Molecule, Introversion Software, Mossmouth, Sokpop... It is still impossible to draw a line where the game starts to exploit the psyche addiction mechanisms.

It's funny to see some rando taking this patronizing tone to give game design advice to DAN COOK, a man who could design a twee trifle like A Short Hike in his sleep if it wasn't too far beneath him to bother

Nice appeal to authority. And I'm not the one going "you think you do, but you don't" - the playtesters told him his core gameplay loop wasn't fun, and he ignored them.

'A Short Hike' has a meta-critic score of 88 while 'Cozy Grove' has a 72, and while game reviews are generally fairly bad, that's a large margin. I'm not sure how beneath him Hike is.

Just to be clear, I have immense respect for A Short Hike. It is one of my favorite games. :-) A Short Hike also has source->sink value chains in it! If you look at how they are built, the lack of exploration and feather sinks in the late game is one of the reason it is a short hike vs a long hike. It was a smart decision to cut it off where he did.

And to the following comment, metacritic has sadly become a poor method of rating games these days. The whole game industry seems to have shifted to regular updates and metacritic remains stuck in the previous era of one-time boxed releases. Cozy Grove, for example started out around a 77% and after a year of updates is at about 94% on Steam right now. Still room to improve!

And just to be clear to you, the rest of the article was great. I think there was three or four points that I was going 'but ...' and then the next sentence you explicitly mentioned exactly that. Very well put together.

> Issue: Multiple undifferentiated inputs to node

Under this segment you say 'and it never is' implies that it's just really difficult, you can be even more forceful here - it's impossible. Sirlin's article on Viable Options[0] goes into depth here - while he's talking about best move to attack in a fighting game, and while your case is simpler in that the enemies don't have options for themselves, the mapping between the two arguments is there. For any given use-case there can only ever be two choices, the best choice, and the counter to the best choice. The counter to the counter just ends up being the best again so you can't have any more depth without creating a new use-case.

[0]: https://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-...

Most games are actually not fun because of individual actions. Most games are fun because it allows the player to overcome and master challenges. Feeling personal growth is highly rewarding.

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