Phil Wallach

The Importance of Risk in Basic Game Design (James A Portnow) on Gamasutra discusses the use (and misuse) of risk and reward in game design.  I thought I would put my $0.02 in.

I think this article is coming form the hard-core gamer angle; where challenges must be “real”, not contrived.  I can sympathise with this viewpoint; I am a hard-core gamer myself.

Recently, however, I have had my opinions adjusted.  My sons, you see, both love cheats.  When they get a new game, the very first thing they do is head off to the Internet and download a list of cheats.  Then they stock up on ammo, weapons, whatever, and carve their way through the game.  And not once, either.  My eldest (15) has finished some games on his phone dozens of time.

For players like my sons, it is not about challenge.  It is about fun.  And yes, people find fun in different things.  We are not the same.

However, James would declare this to be not a game at all.  The game has become a “safe game” and is more like a “movie or … a theme park ride.”  In his analysis, a game without risk is not a game.  It is entertainment.  But here I disagree.  The key element that makes even playing in invulnerable mode a game is this – the player still controls the actions, and therefore the outcomes, in the game.  The player still interacts with the world.  Try that in “Die Hard”!

I can see a deeper problem with the argument.  James seems to debunk both FPS games as “tedious trigger twiddling” and RPG games that “use window dressing to make the player think they are doing something”.  The goal is to have a real challenge, not a contrived one.

I think this is a noble, but doomed, goal.

To me this is the core problem with most games, and computer games in particular.  Given that the games are programmed, and given the current state of programming models, there is no possibility of a player devising a truly innovative solution to a part of the game.  All in-game possibilities must have been contemplated; even where something unusual does happen, it is instantly labeled as a bug, hack or exploit.

We have yet to build a game that has emergent gameplay.