Tuesday, December 1, 2009

What makes a good game

A question that can come up relatively often is what makes a good game? What makes a game better or more interesting? Why do we choose some games over others? The most obvious answer is how fun a game is but fun has the problem of being somewhat subjective as well as being rather difficult to quantify, so my focus is going to be more on aspects of fun, IE what makes different games fun/not fun.

One basic part on the idea of fun might be participation, IE being able to be and stay involved in the game. This is why I've met some people who hate monopoly because it is very easy to be eliminated from the game and the game itself can take hours (or that lovely record setting months). It does get a bit hard to enjoy a game when you can get knocked out of it and be forced to watch everyone else. This is dull, not to mention frustrating, in fact this is probably where a lot of relatively well known variant and house rules come from to help keep people in the game longer. RPGs have similar elements, most players hate being hit by things that remove them from combat or enemies that they are unable to affect.

Another area could be random chance vs. stability. IE how much random chance (dice rolling, drawing cards, position in turn order) affects the game versus relatively stable rules that affect everyone more or less equally. A game that is perfectly stable gets dull, everyone moves X squares, etc. it can feel incredibly dull. One example I see people use is Risk, almost anyone that has played it normally wants to start in australia because that lets you constantly build up large numbers of troops. While there is the element of dice rolls in risk there is still the problem that no matter what some areas are just hands down better regardless of chance. However, go too far on the side of random chance and you can develop issues of your own. Random dice rolls/card draws/RNG decisions start making any hope of strategy or planning moot. One example there might be the Handheld RPG game Lunar Dragon which didn't even let you target enemies, you hit attack and your characters bounced randomy attacking different targets, focus fire and strategic assaults were out.

The last big area I can see is in the idea of games playing to strengths. People enjoy showing off talents that they have. Those with an encyclopedic knowledge of various subjects are likely to enjoy trivial pursuit for example. Those who are good at persuasion are likely to enjoy games like Malarkey. That being said I kind of want to know what my readers, if I have any, think. If you feel that there are other elements of what make a good game or make a game fun, feel free to reply.