Response to “Game Balance” Reading
This write-up is a short response to the following blog post as part of the curriculum of Designing Serious Games:
To summarize, “balancing” in the context of game design is a somewhat overloaded term; in single player games, balance refers to how well the game jungles challenge with the player’s skills. If a game is too easy, it’s boring; too challenging, and it’s too frustrating to continue. In contrast, balance in the context of a competitive multiplayer game refers to a few things around fairness:
- Fairness between players. This means that no player has an inherent advantage/disadvantage over others, whether it be because they went first, choose a certain starting position, etc. I think Settlers of Catan does an excellent job handling this because of the nuance in the set-up phase in the game. At the start of Catan, players roll a dice to see who places their first settlement. After that player has done so, players go around placing their first settlements sequentially. Then, one all players have placed one settlement, the process repeats in reverse order. This is particularly clever because it ensures that (in the case of playing with 3 players) one player gets the 1st and 6th best picks, one player gets the 2nd and 5th best picks, and one player gets the 3rd and 4th best pick.
- Fairness between strategies. If a dominant strategy (or strategies) exist in a game, there aren’t really any interesting choices or decisions to be made as a player; why would you not just pick the optimal strategy? It’s worth noting that this is a little more complicated (as if creating a game with no dominant strategy weren’t hard enough!). In fact, there probably can be a dominant strategy, but if it’s sufficiently complicated or challenging to achieve, it could still make for interesting gameplay. The author of the blog noted that some players may choose to follow a simpler strategy even if they know it is slightly worse just for convenience.
- Fairness between game components. Similar to the previous point, don’t make game components clearly overpowered or underpowered; as a player, it will always make sense to choose the more powerful item with all other things being equal.
To close, I’d also like to point out that equality is not the same as balance. As an extreme example, let’s say that in my new, modified version of chess, the black side gets an extra row of pawns. Because I said so, that’s why! And to determine who gets to be the black side, the start of the game is a coin toss. This way, both players have a 50% chance of getting the black side, so the game is fair, right?
Regrettably, the only interesting part of a game like that would probably be the coin toss itself. After that, things don’t really seem balanced at all.
