Challenges

I continue to wrangle with ways of thinking about designing games, looking for metaphors and perspectives that might shed light on which approaches are most promising. One perspective that has seemed promising is Challenges, that is, looking at designs in terms of the challenges they present to the player. Does the play have a way to translate their overall goal of winning into lower level strategic and tactical challenges? Ideally, a game has a variety of cycles of goal-setting, goal-pursuit and resolution.

For example, a game of Puerto Rico might involve a player who says "I'm going to pursue a factory strategy", "I need a coffeee roaster", "I need to get more money", "I need to get that last small market", "I need to sell my goods", "I need to make sure I sell my goods before Ted, who aslo has a sugar and would clog that market slot". Etc. There are challenges that have subchallenges, and a player can pursue them.

Challenges are good. They give the player something to strive for, and even feeling like you have chosen the right goal is itself satisfying. Plus, whenever you have a challenges, you have an opportunity for drama. Either you have victory or defeat, either you meet your challenge or fail.

So a challenge is:
- Setting a goal
- Making decisions in an effort to achieve that goal
- Resolution of the challenge, as success, failure, or a bit of both.

Challenge Establishing
It would seem that all games would have challenges, but some are surprisingly lacking, and suffer as a result. In a game like Fresh Fish, where results are largely emergent can defy challenge-making, at least the first couple of times you play. You have the challenge of "get your production facilities close to the delivery spots" but it can be hard to translate that into lower-level challenges. Strategies are not readily apparent, so you blithely throw down cubes. If you fail, you don't feel as if you're failed to meet a challenge, but rather just shrug at the situation.

An unexperienced Go player will see opportunities to surround enemy groups, and establish their capture as a Challenge. But more experienced players will know to look for sublte aspects of eyes, sente and aji, carefully choosing which battles to fight, setting up areas of power, and psychological ploys. Their challenges extend to higher and lower levels of abstraction, giving richer gameplay.

So its important that the gameplay provide opportunities for players to establish challenges in the first place. Ideally, this happens from the first play. For example, in Ticket to Ride, tickets suggest the challenge of completing them, and beneath that there are the challenges of finishing particular routes, and therefore challenges of gathering the necessary cards. The game is such a successful gateway game because it provides a rich challenge structure, right off the bat.

Challenge Pursuit
Once a challenge has been established by a player, they need to have the tools to satisfyingly pursue it. There should be uncertainty about whether you will succeed, but you should have some control over your fate. If you don't feel like your efforts affect your consequences, you're going to stop caring about the challenges before you.

A lot of well-known problems with games can be related to this idea. If a game is too luck-heavy, you can find yourself establishing challenges, trying to meet them, but being arbitrary thrwarted. Eventually, you're liable to lose interest. Similarly, there's the "runaway leader problem", where once a player gets ahead there's little other players can do to stop them (often in a racing game). This means that other players' challenge of "winning the game" might not have any subchallenges that could reasonably lead to success. Players end up disengaged from the game without challenging challenges.

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So this is a perspective on ways you engage the player, and provide them with opportunities to engage themselves in the gameplay. The encouraging thing is, I can look at a lot of my failed designs and see how they didn't present viable subchallenges. They gave the player win conditions, and choices, but not any interesting nuggets of intermediate goals, success and failure. Conversely, I can see how nearly any game I like has a good challenge structure. I hope that by seeing things this way, I can have a better concept of how to separate promising designs from unpromising ones earlier in the process.

One direct offshoot is that I think the current Monster City design has some real problems here. But the good news is that I have some ideas, albeit drastic ones, on how to fix it. More on that soon.