Boredom as a game design tool

Today we're gonna talk about a peculiar topic: boredom. Today, more than ever, I don't have any answers or definitive lessons, just a few thoughts to spare. I'll start with a quote that many game designers meet during their life: players will optimize the fun out of a game.

The idea behind this quote is that people play games to win/reach goals and will find the best way possible to get what they want, even if it means employing a boring strategy or making impractical moves. This in turn will bore them and drive them out of the game.

Challenging the status quo?

While I strongly believe this is true, I noticed recently there are a few exceptions, where things are purposefully designed to be less practical or comfortable to encourage the desired gameplay, even when it is not the optimal gameplay. This whole article was prompted by the beautiful video about Balatro by Game Maker's Toolkit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk3S3o1qOHo). In Balatro you play poker hands, each scoring different points depending on its power in the original game of poker, the cards you used and any special ability you have. While it's technically possible to know how many points you will score in advance, the game designer wanted to create an exciting and fast gameplay and if he let players knew how many points each hand would score, they would just bruteforce every possible hand until they found the best one. So he chose to hide points preview from players, running a great risk: if players wanted to optimize their plays, they would found themselves with a game even more boring than if the points were always shown, as they would have to do all the calculations. On the other hand, he greatly discouraged players from playing mathematically and optimally, by making that play style super boring. In the end this solution worked really well for Balatro and it really surprised me as it was against everything I had learned until that point. I was still trying to wrap my head around it when I noticed another example of this strategy in one of my favourite board games: Spirit Island. Spirit Island is an asymmetrical cooperative game where players defend an island from colonizer. The game is revered in the board game community as it solves a common criticism done against cooperative games, that is the fact that players take all the decisions together for every character in the game. Players feel that this doesn't show a cooperation among players but more of a hive-mind, taking all the decisions indipendently by which character is controlled by which player. This in turn leads to a "player alpha" problem, that is when a player is more skilled than the others and takes all the decisions for the party. But how does spirit island solve this problem? You guessed it, by making extremely boring the undesired gameplay. It is indeed a game so asymmetric and so complex, that Is really hard for a human mind to digest every information and every characteristic of the players' spirits in a way that makes it possible to take all the decisions together in a reasonable amount of time. If really players always wanted to optimize the fun out of the game they would openly discuss and adjust every detail of their strategy together.

This brings us to a point often made in game design and in many other fields: humans don't always act rationally. This is remarkably true in game theory, where experimental evidence suggests people are more likely to act based on their emotions, clashing with the theoretical optimum (this is not necessarily bad, for example people are often more likely to cooperate than the optimal strategy would suggest). Players aren't perfect computers, their brain wants the maximum result with the minimum effort and, while sometimes it is possible to make a minimum effort in exchange for a great result, often the brain has to compromise between the two. Depending on the situation, people can prioritize the results or the effort. "I want to be informed about the current events in the world" is my desired outcome and even if I would get the maximum result by reading five newspapers a day, it's much more likely that I will listen to a 5-minutes podcast while brushing my teeth. So what will happen really depends on the importance of the desired outcome and what options I have to minimize the effort.

The lesson learned is???

So, I really don't know what is the takeaway and I strongly urge everyone reading to suggest what drives players to optimize the fun out of a game in some cases but not in others. That said my idea is that it depends on two things:

• What is at stake in the outcome

• What kind and how much boredom the players would feel

Let's take kiting as an example (when you make an enemy follow you around while keeping it too far to let him attack you). I would argue that in games where kiting is employed, often there is your life at stake. That strategy prevents you from losing in an obvious way, helping you avoid the fear of a direct fight against the enemies. You don't have the stakes so high in a normal turn in Balatro or in Spirit Island except from when you really could lose in that exact turn or you start seeing that things are going pretty badly. Indeed, in those turns, it's not uncommon to employ the "boring strategy" motivated by the fear of losing.

Next there is the kind of boredom. I think that kiting in an action game, while is obviously less exciting than the main strategy design for the game, makes players feel powerful, clever, in control. The same can't be said for taking a calculator and multiplicate numbers. If you wanted to do that, you would have probably found a math textbook or you would have filed your taxes. So it's probably important to understand in the context of your game what is the meaning of boring, confortable or exciting. Hence, while we should be careful and ensure that the optimal strategy is also the most fun, it's also important to remember that players play to have fun. Emiliano Sciarra, designer of Bang! tells how he initially feared that each player wouldn't do anything every turn as it is technically possible, and sometimes even a viable strategy, to pass your turn to wait for the actions of the other players. He even wanted to write a rule that would force players to play every turn, until he realized in playtests that no one wanted to start a game of Bang! only to do nothing every turn.

In conclusion, while it's a fascinating subject, I think I would be scared to really try and use boredom as a tool to nudge players toward the desired gameplay. But, these are the sort of thing that stay in the back of your head and that can surface while designing or playing games. Also, who knows if there are other ways in which you can use boredom or even things that are unconfortable in your favor. Let me know if you have thoughts on this risky subject.

I wish you a non boring week,

see you next tuesday for another article!