Combat as Sport
This post is a continuation on a previous combat design post . Sport can be used as a layer on top of your gunplay or melee. Perhaps as added fairness (a sense of “good balancing”) or as a focus on competition. It can also be the whole purpose of your project. A competitive game needs to have a space for players to git gud and to compare their results to that of other players. Or to be the first to figure out winning strategies that can give them an edge. If you want to tell me I’m wrong or contact me for other reasons, do so in comments or to [email protected] . Now let’s dive into competition and how you can approach designing a “sport.” When designing anything, I find it helpful to first set up the terminology. This doesn’t have to be the exactly right words that other people use, necessarily. They’re here to help with the game design, not to become some type of definition. Chess is an incredible game design. It’s symmetrical, it has no random elements, and each pawn has its own clearly defined rules. Rook moves this way, bishop moves that way, grid has 8×8 individual square spaces, etc. This is what makes its game design deterministic . Doing a specific move under certain circumstances will always yield the same resulting game state. Because of this, pitting two players against each other is a test of skill. Who can predict what the opponent will do, make the most compelling opening move, or think the farthest ahead. It becomes a contest of ability. “In order to improve your game,” said legendary Cuban chess master José Capablanca , “you must study the endgame before everything else. For whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and opening must be studied in relation to the end game.” Chess is a great example of a game that must be studied and practiced. Because of its determinism (no random or otherwise unknown elements), yet deeply complex state-space, it’s often considered a hard game to be good at, and if you’re not good you will simply not win. Poker, another highly competitive game, adds elements of player uncertainty and randomisation and is therefore not deterministic. The card combinations that form your playable hands are all known and their relative values are also known, but because players hide their cards from each other in their respective hands, and because of the luck of the draw, you can’t be entirely certain what another player is up to. They may be bluffing with their all-in, or they may indeed have a royal straight flush to give them confidence. As the game continues, more of the 52 cards from the deck will be revealed and you will have more “state” to consider, but you can’t be completely certain unless you already personally have the highest possible hand. This uncertainty and randomisation adds an additional layer to the competition. It doesn’t make poker a better game than chess, but it alters the required skillset. It’s not enough to master each hand, you must also play the bluffing game and start considering the myriad options based on limited information and mathematical probabilities. Chess and poker are incredibly mature games compared to most video games. They’ve been played for hundreds of years and countless kinks have been ironed out. Alternative ways of playing have come up that deal with common speed bumps and other issues. Video games, on the other hand, are released in the 100s every day, and because of this, some of them will come with unintended exploits. I’m personally not a very competitive player. I often play competitive games anyway to study them, but I very rarely win and pretty much never come up with any winning strategies. In 30-some years as a gamer, there’s just been the one exception: Battlefleet Gothic Armada . While playing the beta before launch, I realized that the Imperial ships with their heavily reinforced prows were almost immune to damage coming from the front. So I equipped some ships with weapons that didn’t require them to turn (many other weapons fire broadsides in the game), instructed them at the game’s start to only face forwards and to stay far away and fire these weapons near max range. They would sometimes move slowly towards their targets and then use a ramming action to deal the killing blow, but only against enemies that were already accelerating towards me. At first, I didn’t lose a single match with this setup! My ships took little to no damage and were able to destroy enemy ships consistently. For various reasons, I never really kept playing the game after launch, but this still serves as a decent example of exploitation. In game theory, a dominant strategy is a strategy that will always win, and that most players will eventually gravitate towards. It’s not clear whether my prow-forward approach was ultimately such a strategy, but consider it an example. The opposite of a dominant strategy is a dominated strategy , which is any strategy that is always inferior and that players will quickly abandon for other strategies. No one in a competitive first-person shooter would stick to only the knife, for example, unless there’s such a massive skill disparity that it can be done for laughs. It can be fine to have these strategies in a game, as long as you include them consciously and provide ways to mitigate them. Going for a knockout can be considered a dominant strategy in boxing, since it ends the match before the last round, but though it gives an edge to fighters that can consistently hit very hard it’s never guaranteed that they will end every match on a knockout, and hitting hard all the time may be more exhausting than playing a longer boxing game. If you are terrible at chess, you are terrible at chess. There’s no way to sugar-coat it. Other players are simply better than you. It’s the same if you play StarCraft and can’t peak out at the actions per minute (APM) of the pro players, that may span 180-1,000 APM. When games reach this level of competition, many players will bounce off. Psychologically, the knowledge that you are inferior and that there’s nothing you can do about it isn’t all that motivating. Some players will find motivation in this space anyway and push on. But another way to get around it is to let players blame the game. In competitive Magic: The Gathering , a common setup is to determine a winner by playing a best of three. This way, fewer players will feel that they lost because of a bad hand or lucky/unlucky draw. If they do end up losing anyway, they can still blame a bad hand or unlucky draw, however. If they had only played one more match , they may think. This is similar to the “just one more time” mentality that can come up when you play a fast-paced fighting game, or other high-paced game. Your opponent was just lucky; you will get them next time. It wasn’t your fault, it was chance, luck, poor balancing, the sun in your eye, etc. This is a good thing to have in a game design if you don’t want to cater it exclusively to potential hardcore players. It prevents beginners from bouncing off the game if they get to have a good run now and then, even without the skills the game would normally require. In the words of game designer and former competitive Street Fighter player David Sirlin, “Any decent competitive game needs to allow you to counter the opponent if you know what he will do. What happens, though, when your enemy knows that you know what he will do? He needs a way to counter you. He’s said to be on another level than you, or another ‘yomi layer.'” Yomi (読み, and not 黄泉; the latter is the underworld) means ‘reading’ in the sense that you can read your opponent. In Sirlin’s book, Playing to Win , he describes Yomi layers as levels of knowledge. You know what your opponent will do (layer 1), but they also know that you know (layer 2), and you know that they know that you know (layer 3). Each layer requires the game design to provide a counter action so that players can act on the information they have (or think they have). “[T]here need only be support up to yomi layer 3,” continues Sirlin, “as yomi layer 4 loops back around to layer 0.” Thinking in terms of yomi layers can help more areas than competition, however. If you look at a game enemy design in terms of yomi layers, you can design encounters that challenge players in more ways than the straightforward features they use and you can allow the player to feel clever about it along the way. The blue shell in the Mario Kart series has always been a bit contentious. It’s a knockout feature that specifically targets the leading kart and has ruined countless one-sided runs. According to interviews, the reason it was added was to keep races interesting up until the end, since it would often become a foregone conclusion who would finish first before its introduction. Especially in groups with high skill disparity, such as adults playing agaoinst young kids. When we talk about it in game design, it’s usually as a balancing factor against runaway victory. If a player is so much better than everyone else, it’s just not as much fun anymore, and the blue shell puts a spin on that situation that can make it more interesting for everyone to finish a race. One part of competitive gaming, as in real-life sports, is that competitors are directly incentivised to search for some kind of edge. Such an edge can be completely against the rules and disqualify the competitor who does them if they are caught doing it. Then we don’t call it a strategy anymore. We call it cheating . For professional sports, cheating and various forms of doping are illegal and enforcement of rules is continuous. Whole organizations are dedicated to assuring fairness. The bicycle race Tour de France, for example, has had instances of cyclists using electrical motors to give them a slight boost when cycling uphill. Muscle stimulants, growth hormones, anabolic steroids: professional sports have a long history of cheating. In esports, the expression “edoping” refers to manipulations of hardware and/or software that provide an invisible edge to a competitor. Things like aim bots or code that reveals client-side information a player is not supposed to have. Similarly, many exploits may be either patched out of a game or become part of a rule set dictating professional competitions. Take this lesson with you, if you want to make something competitive: players will cheat . Some because they want to win over other players, and others because they simply want to beat the system to prove that they can. A scrub is someone who “adamantly believes that their ‘house rules’ should apply to everyone to promote their view of ‘fair play.'” They are players who are quick to call foul or to call the way other players play boring or against the grain of a game. David Sirlin writes in his book that, “[a] common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which one tries to win at all costs is ‘boring’ or ‘not fun.'” But if you really want to win, you can’t have this type of “scrub mentality.” You need to play to your strengths and use every avenue of success that the game may provide. As a game designer, you must similarly be aware what the rules you introduce will lead to. In some competitive martial arts, for example, obstructing an opponent’s breathing by covering their mouth (called “smothering”) is legal according to the rules set out for the competition. Some will argue that it’s unethical, unfair, or makes for a dirtier sport: they would be the “scrubs.” Others make use of it where it fits, regardless of the scrub’s convictions. The key element of any sport is how to win . But before we can know how to win we need to know what we are doing. This is where you can make use of the same verbs and systemic rules as you would when designing a systemic game . Many sports revolve around activities that are easy to do but require a lot of practice to master. Kicking a ball isn’t all that hard in itself, but kicking it with accuracy and the right amount of force requires a lot of practice. This indicates that we want an activity with an analogue possibility space : it’s not enough with “success” or “failure.” Sometimes, as with game design, sports designers have been lazy and added a stopwatch on top of an activity to create this space. Sure, you can finish the race, but can you also do it in the shortest time? At other times, the analogue space is created by points scoring. It can be directly related to an activity in the game, such as kicking a soccer ball into a goal, or it can be indirect, such as the Technical Panel set out by the ISU Judging System used for figure skating. The use of an impartial judge or panel of judges is a common way to measure competitors against each other in individual sports. Another solution is to include a sudden death alternative. An occasion within the rules of the sport that immediately ends the competition and awards victory to the person who triggered the sudden death or their opponent. Most sports use the term “sudden death” specifically for match tiebreakers, but death can be sudden under other circumstances as well. Say, a knockout, or a racer’s car getting wrecked. There are also various forms of “no contest” conditions where a competition may end. If someone in a boxing match cannot defend themselves properly, for example. Some sports may also allow a competitor to voluntarily yield to their competition. Ragequitting fits in with this as well, since gamers can always decide to simply turn their game off. Team sports require group coordination and communication in ways that individual sports don’t. Whether you want teams or individuals compete affects a lot of things about your sport design. The combat reference here is the duel, which is fought one against one; the skirmish, which is smaller groups against each other; the battle, which pits whole armies against each other; and finally a whole war. Online gaming has generated its own blend of team and solo sport: coopetition. It’s cooperative, because you are completing objectives together and won’t be successful if you don’t. But it’s also competitive, because each of you will want to get the points and rewards individually. This becomes very clear in games inspired by Left 4 Dead and other games designed around LAN dynamics. Because the dynamic changes drastically when players are playing “alone together” and cannot simply lean over and yell for their friend to help them out. Throughout history, particularly in combat sports of different kinds, symmetry hasn’t always been relevant. Gladiators pitted against wild animals, or one with a trident and net pitted against another with a sword and shield, has been a recurring phenomenon. Usually either because someone has wanted to prove their ability under special circumstances, or because the competitors had no say in the matter to begin with. Conceptually, it’s a lot easier to design something for symmetrical opponents that are all expected to do the same things during a competition. Symmetry means that all sides of a competition are following the same rules. This is what generates the many layers of matchmaking regulation that sports may have. Weight classes, for example. Some sports require costly equipment, creating a high barrier of entry. Though some can afford to field their own race cars in scrappy “ folkrace ” competitions, for example, motor sports like NASCAR and Formula 1 are prohibitively expensive. The rules in place for such sports mean that it’s reserved for competitors with large financial backing. You may wonder how this ties into game design at all, much less combat. But it’s enough to think about games with items and character builds to see some parallells. In one particular Destiny raid, if you couldn’t show everyone that you packed an Ice Breaker and/or Gjallarhorn , you could be kicked out . What equipment your sports design will require depends on many things, of course, but it can be well worth thinking about. From the quirky golden snitch of quidditch (probably set up to poke fun at real-world sports) to things like the lacrosse stick basket handle, the equipment used to perform a sport can both dictate how it’s played and serve as excellent icons representing the whole activity. Though many sports may claim to be individual, they still allow competitors a crew to help them with all manner of things. This is of course similar to any form of stable, camp, or club, where the sum of the parts will affect how good your training is. But some sports allow this during a competition as well. Someone to patch you up between boxing rounds, or to check your tire pressure during pit stop. Maybe you can even look at the remote operator in Robot Wars as crew , and the robot itself as the competitor . Since we can’t really trust competitors to judge each other fairly or even to concede victory in cases where it’s a bit unclear who won, we may need a third party. Someone to call no context, to say when a goal scored or not, and to make sure we end our match on time. In digital games, computers can usually carry this burden, but in sports we use referees. If you want someone to be the referee, you need to figure out what they know and what they do. Which powers they have. In the eras of game design post , the idea of an umpire was discussed. But an umpire or a Dungeon Master is usually present to make the game world fair and not to adjudicate competitive results. Before you launch your design, you should consider how you want people to talk about the activities involved. Many sports have their own vernacular that tie the activities to what is happening in the sport. Inning, yardline, takedown; in digital games, deathmatch, kill, headshot, loot, powerup, zerg rush. Some of these expressions you can’t really invent. They’ll come naturally from how players interact with and talk about your game while playing or strategising. But it’s a great exercise to try to simplify terms, mash them together, and consider all the different strategies that players may use and how they’ll describe them. Even to invent a silly expression and then use it to make sure that you remember the concept it represents. Related to this is also the narrative of the game. Even if soccer is simply people chasing a ball across a field (if you are cynical about it) the story is one of a fight team against team where the winner takes all. The teams represent cities or clubs, and they are serving their fans; fighting for their fans. Not to mention that each player on each team may have their own fans and life struggles hyping up the competition. The words you use and the story you tell should be easy say and unique to your game. It should also be relatable. Sports have the advantage here, since it’s much easier to identify with kicking a ball against a garage door just like your childhood hero did, than it is to imagine yourself shooting zerg on a distant planet. This post took me a long time to research and write. Part of that is that balancing is a form of authorship . Just as with a linear story, if you want a balanced competitive experience, you must use a heavy hand to make it so. Often against the grain of your community, who will be enjoying the exploits they find and quickly get used to the dominant strategies presented. They will therefore loudly voice their dissent when you change the things they have been exploiting. Ultimately, though games like The Finals are trying, competitive games and a high degree of dynamics is very tricky to combine. The tools we use to balance our games are not very conducive of the right side of the master scale . This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, however. Systems at a gameplay level, where they can be balanced against each other, can still be very useful. Just be prepared to iterate a lot before the play experience is tuned right. Add time . Pushing for the shortest time has the added benefit of providing better entertainment for spectators. Add score . Define an activity that scores, then award victory to the competitor with the highest score at the end of a game. Add points . Award points based on an impartial panel and the ability of competitors to match specified expectations. Add limits . A competitor can only use a limited number of attempts or resources (such as the number of arrows for a bow) and must perform as well as possible within those limits. Add ladders . An additional way to generate results is to have more than one competition to determine the full outcome. This can be an elimination-style tournament where only one out of a roster of competitors will claim the prize, for example. Sudden death. Rather than using time, or in addition to time, add a condition where the game ends in immediate victory for a competitor. Yielding . Allow a competitor to voluntarily call out their own defeat. Either so an only opponent wins or to drop out of a larger competition.
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