About Game Design

New ideas sometimes shed new light on old problems. I have been reading a a lot about player types these days. I am talking about Barles  player types and the other types that have spawned after his.  And even though they are (achiever, explorer, killer and socializer) mostly aimed at MMO/MUD players their usage don’t stop there.

In regular single player games it can be hard to discern player types as single player games seldom allow freedom of personality, and because they guide the player through a predefined rule-set. Having a pre-defined rule set brings (most often) with it a defined rule set for reward and punishment. And since most singeplayer games are about progressing they would have a punishment system based upon that. Which also seems to be the main way we talk about the notion of “punishment vs reward”. We use hardcore vs casual dividing, which really is a crude tool if you think about it.

We might call facebook games  ”casual” but they also are more geared towards social player. These players that might not like the achievement paradigm that most single-player games follow.  And that paradigm also involves the regular reward punishment way.

A very quick and dirty evolution of games could be that games are moving towards other play styles rather than just casual and mass market. A larger player base that don’t naturally like the idea of  ”you must achieve to feel good”.

I personally think reward vs punishment is a universal “thing” of game design, but it doesn’t have to be the ol´ death/health/hard/easy discussion. Instead I mean action and reaction, effect and cause, action and consequence, challenge and reward.

An example would be facebook game X that’s geared towards social play. It tasks the player of doing task Y. Making Y hard to do with lots of reward/punishment would be the old way of doing it. Instead doing Y could be very open ended without any punishment for doing it “incorrectly”. That means the “how” of completion of Y is not important. Instead when its done, other players review your effort and give you praise or criticism. That would result in the reward/punishment being moved from execution of tasks to a more social tool.

What I am proposing is, stop thinking about punishment vs reward as a way of making the game hard or easy in the old sense. But look at what player type you are geared towards and then make conscious choices about what types of challenges they like and how they like to be rewarded.