Game Balance: Meaning and Terms.
1. One cannot refer to "game balance" in the context of Toys (see this article, for the definitive declaration on this subject). One may discuss "quality" in such contexts, but balance isn't appropriate.
2. While one can attach the term "game balance" to single-player titles, my feeling is that this is an example of a negative-sum game, where game designers are mainly just changing under what conditions and how often the "house" will win.
This is more an act of editing for proper dramatic impact- in a game where a single player takes on some sort of role (whether heroic or not is irrelevant) the game designer is trying to ramp play towards making the player's actions within the game feel properly relevant to the overall story that the game is telling. Single-player games, when you boil them down, are nothing more than problem-solving exercises with some sort of narrative (whether simplistic or not is besides the point- Asteroids and Space Invaders can sit next to Fallout and Bioshock- the level of "depth" is logically irrelevant, imo).
3. Therefore, all concepts pertaining to "game balance" take place within games which are played by more than one person.
4. While "game" is a fixed term with strongly fixed meaning, "balance" is not. Nor should it be.
The following essay defends this argument.
Essay: Introduction
Before I get into the meat of this, a little background is in order.
When people think of "game balance", they are mainly asking whether a game is "fair". After all, when we were little children, we were taught that we had to play simple games, like Tic-Tac-Toe (or insert a simple game for small children, for those of you who come from cultures that don't play that one) in a certain order, following certain very simple rules.
We were taught that if we didn't play by these rules, that we weren't being "fair"; i.e., that we weren't allowing the other person an equal shot at winning. Therefore, it is important to remember that "fair", in most cultures, is defined in games in the same ways- I'm sure there are human cultures that don't have a concept of "fair", but I can't recall any at the moment. Exploring this issue might be interesting, but it would be beside the main points here.
As we got older, most of us played sports and more and more complex games of various kinds. Some of us, like myself, loved games enough that we started making our own up, borrowing at first from other peoples' designs, and gradually making things that were our own.
I made my first game when I was 12. It was a clone of Car Wars (an ancient tabletop game), with a slightly different scale (I wanted to use Hot Wheels, because they were plentiful in my house) and rules that were designed to be simpler to play (Car Wars is a fairly complex game, when you actually look past the initial rules).
I was a big visitor to the local game shop, which back then meant board-games, RPGs and tabletop war games, and they invited me to test my new ruleset with a bunch of strangers. Fellow geeks all (this was back when "geek" was a major insult, young people- it didn't used to mean "smart person who knows technology"), they willingly sat down to play, with my collection of 1/72-scale rubber army men, and Hot Wheels I'd painted as if they were from a bad Mad Max ripoff, complete with toothpick spikes on their bumpers and lots of fake blood (Testors makes a model paint that is called "Ruby Red", IIRC, that looks like fresh blood, and I liberally applied it all over the cars).
It was a flop. An absolutely terrible, terrible game. I'd made several basic errors in my mathematics, and the element of flukey, random death introduced by my mistakes made the game entirely one of statistical chance. That, and one player had randomly rolled up an uber-weapon from my poorly-designed random table, that slaughtered half of us in one round of play.
While the older kids and young men were generally kind to me, I realized immediately that I'd made a terrible game, that it wasn't fair, and wasn't fun, and that I'd failed. I went home and fixed most of the major problems, but I was too embarrassed to show up at the game shop again with my creation, and it eventually ended up in the trash, along with a lot of other things like that I've thrown out over the years. The memory is the important thing- and 21 years later, it still stings.
Essay: Three Views on Game Balance
1. Game balance is the perception, by all parties, that their skill and some luck will secure victory. Not the absolute certainty. Good game balance presents players with enough choices that they feel they have a fighting chance.
Balance isn't about two sides being entirely identical, and having entirely identical starting positions. That's a logical fallacy. I hate it when people drag this argument out, and having heard it multiple times, I'd like to clear things up.
First off, we have to look at the game design in strict terms. Is the game zero-sum, positive or negative-sum? Multiplayer games may fall under any of these categories.
For example, online gambling games feature game balance, in the sense that I'm talking about this topic. They're negative-sum games- i.e., the odds favor the "house" overall. The degree to which they favor the "house" or individual players is a very strong part of their game designs (and one of the biggest trade secrets, for obvious reasons).
Gambling games don't even pretend that all sides start off with even chances of victory- in a poker game, you may be hosed no matter what choices you make, as a player, and this is an accepted part of the game. While many Spring players would probably find this reprehensible, and whine about how things are "imba", the fact is that almost many people gamble with real money, with full knowledge that they're probably going to lose, than play video games. Heck, it may even be more people- I'll have to check the stats on that. At any rate, a game or games that are inherently "imba" may still be considered to be "fair", if all participants (aside from the "house") are considered to have equal chances- Lady Luck may be fickle, but she may also be kind. And skillful players may work with human psychology and the odds and come out ahead, on average, due to factors that aren't inherently part of the game design itself.
I'd never play poker, or even blackjack (traditionally, the best odds of any gambling game that I know of are in blackjack, because it's so simple) for money against people online. I can't bluff them, and I have no way to see how the "house" is screwing with the odds. Whereas if I play it in a casino, I can do both things, and maybe put this knowledge to my advantage. Not to mention putting on a nice sportcoat and a tie, and pretending I'm James Bond for a minute
Examples of positive-sum games abound. They're called MMORGs. Y'know... the most popular form of video game, and most profitable, period? While I personally don't get into them, I understand that a very huge number of people do, and I get why- they can live out fantasies of being someone else- from the trivial power-gamer, who wants to be a super-heroic wizard or warrior, to somebody who wants to be an Elf from a fantasy world they've invented in their spare time... they can get together with other people, and create a game that is more than the sum of the parts. WoW would be extremely boring, if all you could do was solo. I've watched people play it, and compared to, say, Oblivion, it's a mere sketch of an RPG in the single-player sense.
However, as a social game, it and many others have proven excellent draws, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they contain both positive-sum and zero-sum games within them- positive, when one is in a party and hunting for treasure against the server, zero-sum when one is playing in the various competitive "wars" between factions within the game-world.
Nobody in a MMORG who is not a complete power-gamer gets all that worried about asymmetry between classes and races. "Game balance" in such a title, even for the zero-sum parts, implies social cooperation- my Wizard can stun and hurt the other side at a distance, your Warrior can hack away at them up close and tank, and my other friend, playing the Priest, can keep us both alive with buffs and heals. Nobody worries a lot about whether a Warrior and a Priest are "equivalent"- they're supposed to complement and contrast one another. And when two or more factions meet, with their own weird sets of complementary powers, nobody expects them to be identical. WoW's two factions are an excellent example of this- while game-balance in raw stats is a factor, there are all of the human elements that also matter- good stats won't make up for poor teamwork or coordination.
The only positive-sum game type I've ever really gotten into is the FPS genre. Here, again, we encounter positive-sum games, within what looks like a zero-sum game framework.
Before everybody jumps on my statement... let's examine it for a second. While a game like Counter-Strike is clearly zero-sum- one team wins, another loses- the experience of playing can vary considerably, depending on how both teams choose to play. If you've played CS for more than a minute, you'll understand what I'm saying immediately- there's a giant difference in a game played with a hardcore bunch who take teamwork seriously, irregardless of skill levels, and a game played with random pub people, who are mainly playing for Kill:Death ratios.
In the first type of game, people are playing for team wins. In the other, players are playing for individual wins. Both types of players are in the same framework of rules, however their definition of "win" within that zero-sum framework are entirely different. The team players are playing within CS's specified rules. The Kill:Death people are ignoring the rules, and are playing for a score that is nowhere in the round system or objective system of the game.
Having played lots of CS, I am very reluctant to condemn either way of playing as "wrong", even though the second type of play is not used in serious competition. But I think it's fair to put forth the argument that while the strict, by-the-book CS "round" play has a zero-sum element, a pub player with the top K:D ratio can fairly define themselves as winners, even if their "team" is losing, because they're not really playing that game at all, and the "rounds" mainly serve as a way for everybody to respawn and attempt new tactical approaches to killing each other, as opposed to the stated objectives- a slow-motion variant of Quake, as it were.
When we get into purely zero-sum games, like a 1-vs-1 game of Spring, then we get into the more familiar channels and discussions of what "game balance" means. Moreover, we start very quickly getting to the root of this issue- that "balance" is a perception, not a mathematical certainty- when we examine the true level of complexity in a modern RTS.
Simply put, balance in a sufficiently complex game is usually statistically unprovable, short of exhaustive analysis. Don't believe me? Do your homework, and hunt down people's game-theory theses on Monopoly sometime. Heck, I'll make it easy- go here. It won't be fun reading, I promise you, but you will very quickly see that even a game that "simple" is extraordinarily complicated, and difficult to analyze.
Now that you've gotten a glimpse behind the curtain, and hopefully arrived at this paragraph with an open mind... let's do a thought experiment.
Ask some BA players, "does one Tremor beat four Flashes, on a map with flat ground?". I'll bet that, if I go to the Lobby right now, and can get them to stop cursing randomly at me for being a "nub" for a minute, that everybody will say, "no".
A good game designer is going to ask, "how far away are the Flashes, and do both players know their relative starting positions"? Because this is directly relevant. The other question to ask is, "how much starting E do both sides have?", because that's also directly relevant. If the Flashes start far enough away, and the Tremor player knows their location, and the player has unlimited E, then the Tremor actually has a chance to win this confrontation.
However, the larger the map gets, the less determination can be made by the Tremor player as to the probable paths of the Flashes- it cuts both ways. In the end, the Tremor probably loses, irregardless of skill levels on both sides. But it's an uncertain equation, with an element of luck.
Players know jack squat about this kind of problem-solving.
It's not that they're stupid. Don't get me wrong. They're just focused on the elements of play, as opposed to theory. I suspect that the very best players of any RTS aren't like this, but the only person I know who's truly expert-level is DRB, and he's not a typical player.
I think it's very interesting, though, that when you see the Korean players at the top levels of StarCraft play, that they aren't just random punks who happen to be good button-pushers. I strongly suspect that they probably are quite capable of using, and understanding, the deeper mathematics of that particular game.
However, most players often don't think past the things they've learned from a relative handful of games, against handfuls of people. They end up in all sorts of pattern behavior, because most of them don't ever bother learning enough about the game design's fundamentals to really know what is effective, and why. It's even worse with the Spring community, where the number of really excellent players is very low, compared to a commercial RTS. Think about it, fellow game-designers.
And yet, players often feel like their judgments supersede anything a game designer has to say, and dismiss our arguments, even though we're the ones having to do the hard work, under the hood.
To be fair, they're the ones who see any egregious flaws in the designer's logic, and their patterns often reflect areas where the designer, either intentionally or accidentally, created probability curves that favor a given strategy. Such is the world of "game balance"- where the game designer has to take the deep view, and analyze all elements, the players take the broad view, and see the totality. Which is why any good game designer playtests, and playtests frequently, before releasing a product.
But they're just seeing the results, not the underlying phenomena. They don't really understand when you say, "this unit is now using a different Armor Table rating, therefore its total effectiveness against every other possible unit must be re-evaluated".
You can tell 'em that, but they're not going to understand you, even if you break it down to case-by-case basics. They may even spout some numbers, in isolation, in their paragraphs about how you've "ruined" their game. But they don't get it, and we shouldn't even ask them to. They play for fun. We design to make something we hope is fun. They know what they've played that was fun before. We know what we're trying to do, that's different enough that it might be interesting. And we're the people with months, or even years, hanging on their reactions. It's not the same thing at all.
When I made NanoBlobs, I didn't give a shit about what people wanted, frankly. With PURE, I decided to give a shit. Hopefully I'll make something people like. But that's the view, from the other side of things. Maybe it explains why me, and most of the other designers, seem a little bit cranky sometimes.
2. Most good game designs include an element of chance. This is not a cultural fluke- look at games throughout the world, and this is almost always the case, aside from purely physical games such as soccer. And even a game like soccer contains elements of statistical probability- what the conditions of the field will be like today, the conditions of the stadium, the weather, etc. Ask any bookie, or serious fan.
When elements of chance are thrown into the mix, any concept of statistical balance becomes more and more problematical, because you're looking at intersecting curves of probability, and the same mixes rarely recur often enough, in practice, to arrive at a final judgment.
Let's take a look at a typical game-designer puzzle for a minute.
If you have a unit that, once in 100 shots, will automatically kill whatever it shoots at, is it 1% effective, and thus worth 1 / 100th of a unit that will kill another unit every time it fires?
No. Because, for 50 of the supposedly crappy unit, I would have a 50% chance of a kill on the supposedly vastly-superior unit, on the first round, then 49%, and so forth. Therefore, probability is entirely in favor of the 1% unit. In fact, it isn't until we get around 10 of the supposedly-crappy units that probability overwhelmingly favors the unit that kills every time. Even at 25 of the crappy units, probability says that a hit will occur before they're all dead.
If you don't believe simple probability theory, it's easy to set something up to test this, with turrets on Greenfield. Try it out.
Players don't think that logic through. They just don't. They like to attach all sorts of worth to stuff that's not even worth mentioning, like DPS, when in fact, there is no such thing, outside of isolation cases, where you are strictly comparing two units, without terrain as a factor. Take that Tremor, for example- get three, put them against 12 Flashes, re-run the scenario.
Now probability favors the Tremors, by a long shot, because the probability of hits has increased threefold, whereas the Flashs' movement speed across the map is static. It's simple math.
Put the Tremors on a smooth cone- now the probability changes again (for the math-inclined... figure who is favored, it's actually interesting).
3. Elements of chance are a factor insofar as "fairness" is perceived. This has to do with human psychology. Elements of chance often distort human expectations of outcomes. We often hope that something will be true, even when the raw math states that it is unlikely.
This is one of the things that, especially within the complex world of computer game design, is rather important- when an event has a low probability of occurring, but gives a player a "jackpot" when it does, it generally generates more excitement when it occurs than disappointment when it doesn't. Nothing is more boring than a game where every single time a situation occurs, and a player executes the same moves, the same results happen.
Examples of this abound, but the most classical one in modern game-design history is the probability of headshots in Counter-Strike. The game designers of that title, realizing that headshots are one of the single-most important elements of perceived balance, put enormous amounts of work into this area. I know- I've read some of their commentary. It's very, very interesting stuff... if you're a game designer. Expert-level players favor accurate weapons and identical outcomes. Less expert-level players strongly favored more random chance, so that they'd be able to survive long enough to maybe "contribute" to their team's victory- or even get lucky and take someone out. Counter-Strike's designers, knowing this, have been trying to get this formula right.
I don't like where they eventually arrived- but I was a hardcore player. When I play now, it feels very dumbed-down and flukey. But I understand the reasoning behind it. Most players simply don't think about it, or just adjust without examining the reasoning overmuch.
Chess is often cited as the counter-example of these concepts. If I had a dollar for every pompous ass who said that chess was the ultimate example of a game without elements of probability, and thus was the gold standard for fairness...
However, this is not really true.
Psychological studies of chess players have determined that even the greatest masters cannot see every single possible move more than a few moves ahead- they certainly cannot see the finite tree of all outcomes. While they can and certainly do memorize all patterns that lead to consistent victory, they frequently are playing in large part within a framework of probability- the only certainties are the patterns they have memorized.
While it's strictly accurate that this reflects their human limitations, and not the logic of the game design, it doesn't really matter much- chess players, even at the highest levels, engage in classical risk-taking behaviors.
To summarize:
1. Game balance is perceptual. It is frequently resistant to analysis. I don't mind that players want to endlessly argue about stupid stuff that they don't really understand, and create fake terminology, like "DPS", which they then use to argue amongst themselves- that's OK. However, game designers should read between the lines, and then look at the depths, to arrive at an appropriate answer. Most of the time, players are basically arguing about whether or not a particular unit is worth building, for what it can achieve. This is frequently a very complex argument- a Jeffy, for example, may have some utility in combat, but its primary role, in most alphabet-soup mods, is that of a scout. Therefore, game designers should ask themselves, frequently, "what is the purpose of this unit? Why is it important? Why should it be in the game?" If you don't have a good answer, you should take it out, until you do, or perform a crazy experiment, like doubling / halving an important variable.
2. Most good game designs include an element of chance. In games involving Spring, this has implications all over the place. Weapons may have random chances to hit a target, so you can only talk about probability, not certainty. Even a weapon with a 100% probability to hit within its blast radius of a given target is not the same weapon every time, if you've used EdgeEffectiveness or other variables to influence the outcome. Such tools are in Spring because they provide game designers with small tools for small adjustments- not every game design problem requires a sledgehammer. Use what's available. Ask questions. Use Spring to its fullest- most alphabet-soup mods barely even touch the surface, and look shockingly crude, next to many of the other games that have been made. Ignorance is not a good excuse.
3. Elements of chance are a factor insofar as "fairness" is perceived. If you're going to build my "every time it shoots, something dies" unit, then you'd better have something like the 1% unit in the game design, too, and price them very, very carefully. Probability is your friend, because it helps make balance even more contextual, and less linear. Less linear balance makes for a more exciting and interesting game design, and rewards micro. You don't have to go this route, of course, but keep in mind what you're sacrificing.
That's it- that's really all I have to say about this topic, short of releasing PURE. I hope you found some of it useful.
