Cursed Game Design: How to make no-one happy

You’re embarking on developing a brand new title. You want it to be easy for new players to get into and have deep combat mechanics. You want it to be visually stunning and have high readability. You want balance between your playable characters and want them all to feel strong. But can you really have all of these things at once? As you start to add more depth to your combat, maybe playtesters say it’s not intuitive and hard to get to grips with. So you simplify it, taking out some move sets, but some other playtesters complain that now it’s not deep enough.

You’ve inadvertently fallen into the trap of cursed game design problems. Two ideas in your game clash, such that you can’t have more of one without subtracting from the other, or causing some other unintended consequences. For this game to work, you're going to need to find some compromises between your conflicting values. It’s nothing new and I’m sure it’s something you’ve considered in games before, but how deep does it go?

You might be shocked to learn that even the mighty Blizzard are not immune to cursed game design problems. Overwatch simultaneously promises balanced competitive gameplay with heroes that feel strong and fun to play. But of course, as a wise child named Dash once told me, "if everyone’s super, then no-one is". How can we balance making everyone feel strong and make a game that feels fair? The answer in this case is compromise, but not the kind where everyone walks away unhappy. No room is spared on making the game feel fair. This aspect is too important for competitive games, but Overwatch does supplement making people feel strong by tallying eliminations (kills) even when a player doesn’t deliver the final blow, boosting the number they see and making them feel more powerful. Clearly, one solution can be to leave behind one of your promises to a greater extent than the other. Overwatch does a good job of solving this by emphasising competitive fairness over strong heroes.

Perhaps one of the most intuitive cursed game design problems is the balance between realism and fun. Squad is a milsim, with competitive multiplayer that plays out over long matches on sprawling maps. One of the biggest selling points and draws for fans is the realism, where people get to try and deploy real world tactics in an authentic military simulation that makes them feel like a soldier. But, how true is that really? A lot of the winning strategy in Squad revolves around placing HABs (spawn points) in advantageous positions, close to objectives or in unexpected locations. Needless to say the very idea of spawn points is a big compromise on the realism aspect of Squad, but it does do a lot to serve the fun aspect. Running for half an hour to join back up with your team just as the match ends, isn’t fun. Even the players who demand realism, ultimately, whether they say it out loud or not, also want fun. Usually this trade off between realism and fun is much more simple. Games get to bend the rules to create new fantasies for players and no-one questions the realism.

Does every game hold fun as its highest value though? Some argue that the power of the Soulsborne games is in creating an aura of exclusivity around finishing any of their titles. It’s often debated whether or not it would damage the original value of Soulsborne games to add an easier difficulty setting or other accessibility options that might introduce a wider audience. In this case our value of exclusivity is in conflict with our value of accessibility. This conflict raises a question about subjectivity. Is my good game the same as yours? Two people can play the same game on different difficulty settings and both have a similar experience. 'I worked hard and overcame an obstacle that initially felt impossible to overcome'. Does someone else experiencing the same thing, with less skill required, cheapen your own experience of it? For some this feels very real and threatening, while for others, their experience of a game is more personal and isolated from any community. Soulsborne games choose exclusivity over accessibility, potentially alienating new players, but staying true to their vision of making games that players are proud to have beaten.

So what can we do? Maybe it sounds a bit hopeless that all games are doomed to compromise on their values in one way or another. Although that’s probably true, I’d suggest we can embrace this compromise. Some of the best games have come out of contradictions, where designers have slapped peanut butter and jelly together and gotten Portal 2. That’s not to say that contradiction always leads to a better game, but it also creates an opportunity. Designers can create something new by tackling these value contradictions in new and innovative ways, in the process creating new types of experience.