The Purpose of Choice: Role versus Power

I define RPGs by two elements backed by one key mechanic:

Aesthetic Choices - choosing character background, hair color, race, gender, moral aptitude, clothing, skins, etc. These do not grant any sort of advantage over any other player/character, nor do they impact the game's mechanics. 

City of Heroes (R.I.P.) costumes come to mind. It matters not if my Scrapper is a 5 ft. skinny woman in heels or a hulking 9 ft. beefmass in his underwear.

Tactical Choices - talents, loadouts, stat allocation, class/skill choices, ice vs fire, sniper vs shotgun, etc. These do NOT (should not) grant Mechanical Power gains by comparison to other tactical choices of the same level. 

For example, equipping the 'Force of Nature' on TF2's Scout changes your playstyle, but does not grant you excess Mechanical Power compared to using the basic shotgun. In essence these choices are aesthetic in that they do not impact Mechanical Power, but they affect the game's mechanics instead of appearance. Of course, tactical choices are only effective if the game is properly balanced.

Gains of Mechanical Power - characters grow stronger over time as tasks are completed and/or experience is earned/battles are won. Increased stats, more talent points, cooler weapon attachments, gear, etc. This is defined by a character being literally stronger than another outside of skill. 

For example, regardless of skill/competency, a lvl 1 Rogue will never be able to beat a lvl 90 Paladin in a duel unless the lvl 90 just stands there dancing. Mechanical Power here is not from the duel being "Rogue v. Paladin", rather it's "Level 1 v. Level 90".

These are used together to give the illusion of growth. Growth is important for players. It establishes relevance for the game; makes us feel like we did something important, when all we are really doing is staring at a screen, hitting buttons, while possibly interacting with people.

But growth is also something you can do without these RPG elements. Growth is really intrinsic to every game out there; it is a staple of interaction. Moving from stage 1-1 to 1-2 in Super Mario Bros. is growth. Completing a quest hub in Guild Wars 2 is growth. I would actually define growth as any type of progress relevant to the victory conditions defined by a game.

However we can not argue against the effectiveness of RPG elements. They're downright addicting (read: fun) when done correctly. But why? What is their purpose? Now that we have definitions in place, I'd like to examine the impact of the "Role" in Role Playing Games.

Aesthetics versus Power

According to Raph Koster in his wonderful book A Theory of Fun, players will always go for the choices that they perceive to be the "best" to meet the specified goal or victory condition. While I do agree with this in many games, I think RPGs are an exception. RPGs place Aesthetics on the same level as Power, so many players will make choices based purely off of the Aesthetic side of the coin.

I am guilty of this myself: back in vanilla WoW I loved the mage fire tree so that's all I played, despite how my guild was attempting MC and then onto BWL. My character's Power suffered as a result of not choosing frost because I'd rather shoot big explosive fireballs than dinky little snowballs.

Broken down even further, WoW's classes are designed to fulfill either tanking, DPS or a healing role. They are then balanced around being able to fulfill one or more of these roles as well as the next class. In theory, a priest should be able to heal as well as a pally or druid; one is not better than the other. So why play priest? Assuming that they ONLY plan on healing and each class was properly 100% balanced, how do players conclude what they would like to play?

Aesthetic and Tactical choices are the key. Without them this decision would be very difficult. More so, without a certain quality of these choices, it would be impossible for players to decide because it is then completely irrelevant without Aesthetics and Tactics. For example, what if the decision was more polarized: instead of priest, pally, druid it was red, blue, green? Which would you choose?

Here's a real-world example of this. Remember the old X-Men arcade game? It came to XBLA a couple months ago so I HAD to pick it up to be faceslapped by nostalgia. The question is, which character did you play as? Each hero has the same moves and supers that accomplish the same thing in slightly different ways. Point is: there is no "best" choice. Despite this, I always played as Nightcrawler because he was (is) my fave X-Man. He was the "best" solely due to Aesthetics.

This brings me to League of Legends. In LoL we see a monetization of Aesthetics and Tactics through selling Skins and new Characters. It's not the only game to do this (it's what makes F2P to begin with), but in LoL I found something interesting. Whenever Riot decides to revamp a character's portrait art or in-game model, that character gets used much more often by players than before. I'd like to see numbers on it since I'm just going off of what I see other people do in games.

This begs the question: if Ezreal looked completely different and had different lore (but played exactly the same), would he be as popular as he is? Imagine if Ezreal was actually "Ezmerelda: The Burger Queen" who was a morbidly obese woman wielding bottles of condiments for weapons. Would the pros pick him as often despite how his Mechanical Power was exactly the same? Does the undisputed fact that Ryze looks totally badass (especially with the new art) factor into how much I play him? In the end it is important that designers factor in Aesthetics into their balance charts.

Successful Balance of Design

So game designers have a very tricky balancing act to do in order to pull off RPG elements. They must balance each Tactical and Aesthetic choice with how much Power is gained through play. But when you add in the element of player skill, balancing goes out the window. For example, I think people can agree that Cassiopeia is harder to play than Ryze. Her abilities simply require more practice than smartcast spam Ryze. As a result, Cass will always have a little bit more Mechanical Power than Ryze since there's is a higher margin for error while playing her. It looks unfair on paper, but is balanced in reality (again...arguably).

People argue that LoL has a very "washed out" roster compared to DotA 2 or Heroes of Newerth. The Power differences between characters is much slimmer because that's how Riot chose to balance them, whereas DotA is balanced around having EVERY character be absurdly overpowered. Which is more effective? Or what about how Team Fortress 2 balances their elements? They enact self-limiting choices that contain advantages and disadvantages in one. Choose option B where you gain X but lose Y.

It seems that there are 3 ways to balance this trio of RPG elements:

Homogenization - Balance the game by making the differences between how Tactical choices mesh with Power gains very small. The problem with this method is that the Tactical choices become more and more irrelevant since the choices differ less and less between themselves.

While this tactic is employed by Riot and Blizzard quite a bit in their game(s), ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2 is the epitome of homogenization. Each class can do everything to the same effect (more or less). While this does make the game extremely well balanced and fair (which is good for competitive titles), it reduces the amount of emergent gameplay; the holy grail of good game design.

Anomalization - Balance the game by making each choice contain one huge anomaly that defies other balancing conventions within the game. Yes, I made this word up. This is the "everyone is overpowered so no-one is overpowered" approach.

DotA 2 uses this to great effect. The problem with this method of balancing is that it can be very difficult to achieve perfect Starcraft-like balance. In the case of DotA 2, it can also limit gameplay choices for each character (why would you build Ursa as a support?). The good thing about it is that its sets the stage for some serious emergent gameplay. It also takes the focus away from balance-between-characters and focuses on balance-between-teams.

Self-limitization -  Balance your game by making the choices within contain disadvantages equal to the advantages. 

Team Fortress 2 is the most polarized example of this method, although it's found in every game mentioned in this article to some extent. This method is based around the basic concept of Tactical choices mentioned above: achieve different gameplay while retaining equal Mechanical Power across all choices.

Koster said it's difficult to critique game design since fun is so subjective and unique to each person. But I think we can instead look at what we know is fun and go from there. We know emergent gameplay is always fun. It's fun when a game develops a meta-game within itself. Developing strategies is fun. I spend hours (days) pouring over talent trees and character builds. All of these things are contingent on incorporating the elements list above. Having fun is dependent on having choices. Choices do not mean anything if they are not relevant. Relevance is established through Aesthetics; the "Role" in Role Playing Games.

A Player's Time vs. Their Money: The Sequel Problem

Which of these two is worth more to you: a player's time or a player's money?

The answer may seem obvious: money, of course! If I obtain a player's money, who cares how much/often they play my game? If I can convince them to drop $10-60 bucks, I win; it doesn't matter afterwards since sales are sales. I can reinvest that money into my team, pump out new products, and stay in business.

The problem with this is that it is a front-loaded system. The money is made up front in huge initial bursts and then all the talk/support/community falls out over time as people play the game, get tired of it, and move on. Most games are, from their core design, meant to be played this way. Most "little black book" ideas that designers have are constructed to be a linear experience that ends at some point. But what if you look at the most (critically and/or financially) successful games in the past 5 years? How many of them actually have an end? According to Metacritic (I know, I know "ugh...Metacritic") these are the best games ever:

I know that chart really speaks to Metacritic's lack of credibility (no Shadow of the Collosus or MGS 1?) But to my point: out of all of those games, how many had or are a sequel? Every single one, with one exception. And most of them were designed to "end". No shit, who cares: good games make money, so we should create more content from successful IPs so we can make more money and buy corvettes and private jets, right? You know how those game developers love their private jets.

Stay with me now. From a design standpoint, what is a sequel? It's an addition to something that originally was planned to end at some point. When initially designing a game, designers have to build the game with the possibility of the game having one or more sequels. It must end, but not end. Through this development method (publishing method?) a game's core narrative and mechanics are limited by how much money it can generate.  In a way, games are really only designed to make money; they cannot exist if they do not make money or convince stakeholders that there is money to be made. For example, if Half Life 1 didn't sell we would have never seen Half Life 2. While this isn't an ironclad rule, and it also applies to other industries, it's nice to imagine a world where the creative process isn't affected at ALL by the financial success of the creation.

Books, for example, are mostly free of this constraint. Their development costs are so low that a writer can just write for funsies while the potential for revenue be damned! Imagine what types of games would come about if they were not designed to make money.

Back to my point: what about the games that are not designed to end? Games that hearken back to their more primal roots of competition? With a game designed from the beginning to never end, you remove the sequel problem entirely. This changes how designers approach them, setting these endless games down a completely different design path from their colleagues. Not having to worry about a potential sequel bestows this sense of freedom to the designer, a sense of finality to the mechanics and narrative.

While this concept is associated mainly to F2P/Freemium titles, the concept of trying to attain a player's time rather than have them buy your product extends into ALL games. For example, what would the Call of Duty IP be like without it's Multiplayer component?

The main problem with trying to attain players' time is that their time is much more limited than their wallets. Any competitive title worth it's weight in in-game currency requires many months to years of practice to become "good" or even competent at it. This requires your players to actually want to devote hours upon hours of playtime to develop such proficiency. I have quite a few F2P titles on my desktop that I no longer play, but keep them installed "just in case". I log about 10-20 hours in one, then move on to the next. Sometimes I'm in the mood for Tribes Ascend, other times I want to tear it up in LoL or Awesomenauts. In fact, I only really "play" 1-3 F2P titles from each genre. I doubt I am the only one in the world who does this.

When developers focus on trying to make my time-investment more worthwhile, I am more willing to spend more time (and eventually more money) on their game. I quit playing Smite because I didn't feel that learning the nitty gritty paid off at all compared to perfecting LoL. I quit playing Bloodline Champions (BLC) because despite how I LOVE it, having to play on European servers makes me tear my hair out. I know that, in the long run, I won't be able to "go pro" with BLC because of this reason.

We are seeing a big shift in the industry towards never ending games. I can attest that they're way more fun to design as probably 80% of my black book ideas are designed to be played forever. Gamers are maturing (might not be the right word) into wanting more from the games they spend so much time on, they want to be rewarded for developing insane APM in Starcraft II. They want to go down in history for having the fastest run in Dustforce (which has a great soundtrack by the way).

Time actually translates into money because of this. Let's say I decide to dedicate my time to becoming a beast in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1. What are the chances I will buy the next sequel(s)? I personally only started buying LoL skins when I hit level 30 and really started taking the game seriously. I decided that LoL was relevant to my life, and started investing money into it. People naturally have no qualms investing in things they seem important; relevance = importance.

The bottom line is: players seek to establish relevance for their colossal wastes of time and effort. Give your players relevance and you will win their time (and their money).

SIDENOTE: I recently was laid off from my sweet producer gig, so I will be updating this thing twice monthly from here on out. I decided I am going to stay home for a couple years while my wife finishes school, raise my son, develop my programming skills and collaborate on a few games. I'll add them to the portfolio page as they crop up, so stay tuned!