A version of this article first appeared in the June/July 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine.

For years now, the Stone Temple Pilots have been my great white whale.

Ever since the original Rock Band came out in 2007, I’ve been banging on the skins, taking drum skills that started as shamefully comical (I believe I caught the dog laughing at me once) and slowly and earnestly practicing and getting better.  Improvement was relatively quick – I slogged all the way from Easy up to Expert, and one by one songs that seemed unplayable were conquered.  But a few of those songs continued to elude me.  One such song was “Vaseline”.

At first, I could barely finish it, and once I did, my scores were laughable.  The song was a chore for me to play.  I liked the song- it has a certain nostalgia factor that takes me right back to my unkempt days- but as I progressed through the game and advanced through the game, I stopped playing it.  I didn’t stop playing the drums, though – I kept playing, downloading DLC, buying expansions, eventually getting the pro set.  But I kept avoiding “Vasoline”, up until one day, three years later it was thrown in a random set list by happenchance.  As the familiar drum beat kicked in, I approached the song with a certain level of trepidation.  But then a funny thing happened.

I destroyed it.  Apparently, somewhere along the way, I’d picked up enough drumming skills to not only skate by the song, but to utterly conquer it – gold starred, top score, you name it.  What once seemed borderline impossible now seemed shockingly simple, and the sense of victory that arose was well beyond that of beating your average song, but a taste of sweet, sweet vindication.

Few moments in gaming are more powerful than that moment in which you completely own something that previously flummoxed you.  Fortunately for us designers, this is a feeling that we can manipulate and inspire.

Skill and Vindication

No matter what genre, you can see this effect happening in great games.  Interestingly, it can also take many forms, based largely on the kind of advancement that drives the game.   In Rock Band, advancement is almost entirely skill-based, and as such, an increase in skill is what results in our little Eureka moment.

These moments can exist in almost any hobby, of course.  Just ask the guitar player who realizes he can now play “Crazy Train” without looking down at the fretboard.  Or the knitter who can now whip out a well knit cardigan in a week instead of a hobbled-together disaster in three months.  This sense and feeling of growth is one of the reasons why these hobbies are so compelling and rewarding in the long run, and these quick and easy victories help spur the hobbyist on to harder challenges.

It should come as no surprise, then, that similar feelings occur in almost any game with a strong skill element:  cavalierly clearing a board in seconds in Mindsweeper, or topping your friends list in Bejeweled Blitz.  Realizing that you’re building railroads while the AI is building chariots in Civilization.  Going on a rampage in Unreal: Tournament.  A Flawless Victory against a boss you could previously barely beat in Soul Caliber.

As sweet as all of these little moments are, they do present one problem to the designer – only the player who invests the time to gain the skill is going to taste them.   The trick is ushering the player along that path, in hopes that he doesn’t get discouraged.

Faking Skill

This feeling can, however, be manufactured.  Progression in action games like Dante’s Inferno or God of War is more based on stats than skill, as the player’s capabilities are increased by the unlocking of more powerful moves and weapons that make you feel more godlike.  However, the lack of a skill component doesn’t dampen the feeling of sweet vindication that occurs later on when monsters that previously stumped you as bosses or minibosses start showing up as easily dispatchable trash.

Nicole Lazzaro, president of the game consulting group XEODesign, often speaks of the various kinds of fun found in games.  In particular, she points out that the best games on the market have a vicarious, immersive play loop that curves between easy fun and hard fun – easy fun is soothing and enjoyable, whereas hard fun is challenging and interesting.  The balance is tricky – too much easy fun, and the game becomes a snoozefest, and too much hard fun and the game becomes tedious and frustrating to take a single step.

What God of War does, then, is interesting – they take moments that are clearly hard fun early in the game – throwing a single minotaur at the player that takes time, skill and a couple of deaths to defeat – and turning it into easy fun later on – throwing them at you three at a time, knowing full well that your player abilities have been upgraded enough that this task is trivial.  Beyond feeling awesome, this design helps serve a couple of clear design goals, providing a real sense of character growth and helping support the narrative that Kratos is slowly becoming powerful enough to challenge the gods themselves.

Varying Forms of Vindication

Skill-based vs stat-based isn’t the only way that you can see this.  Boss fights such as those in Everquest or World of Warcraft are highly skill-based fights, but the stat inflation that the gear provides means that those fights gets easier as time progresses, allowing players who lack the skill to taste that endgame content, while making it easy, sometimes trivial, for those who got there first.

Some see this as a weakness of the design.  On the other hand, it does allow for more players to see the content, while still cementing the hardcore reputation of the guilds that manage to defeat the bosses first.  Even more interesting, the slow inflation creates a communal sense of growth as well.  Once upon a time, kingdoms shuddered at the name of Gruul, but now that epic 25-man boss can be solo’d by an evading rogue and a healer.

The other interesting factor is how time figures in.  In my Rock Band example, it took years to feel the moment of supreme triumph (although there were certainly smaller victories along the way).  At the other extreme, the time lapse from frustration to conquest can be minutes in a game like Portal, not by skill or stats but by fooling the player, ever so briefly, into thinking he was very clever.  Indeed, games such as these are practically built around eureka moments.

A Theory of Vindication

In his book A Theory of Fun, Raph Koster describes the cycle of fun found in games as one where the player learns a pattern, conquers the pattern, and then moves on to the next pattern, slowly expanding their mastery of the game.  In this model, sweet vindication holds an important role: one of validation.

There is a perverse joy to be found in massively multiplayer games, in taking your fully maxed out character back to the starting village and destroying the elite level 10 critter that haunted you back when you were a newbie, just as there is joy to be found in discovering you now havethe skill to own a song that tormented you in Guitar Hero.  Whether your progression is based on skill, stats or just time and labor, such moments act to validate the player’s time and emotional investment in your game.

The careful designer can manufacture these moments by finding reasons to send players back to these earlier challenges, and to show him how far he’s progressed.  But be wary – this moment is fleeting.  An occasional revisit is fine, but mentally, the player has already mastered this pattern.  Any long stays in this content will result in only annoyance and tedium.

The Downward Slope

My favorite example of sweet vindication in action was the delicate game balance derived by the creators of Vampire: the Masquerade – Redemption.  This Diablo-style RPG set in the World of Darkness universe was a tightly balanced RPG game for the early going – by no means difficult, but still one had to be somewhat careful and tactical when picking your fights, and yes, occasionally you would die.

In the last act, however, the balance totally shifted.  The end was in sight, and as good a time as I was having playing, I was ready to finish my experience and move on with my life.  Most games throw their toughest challenges here.  Vampire did the opposite – suddenly throwing waves of hordes in front of me, all of which were dispatched with superheroic ease.  The rest of the game had conspired to set up this feeling – to make me feel like I had advanced, and grown, and was now ready for the final confrontation.  The phrase ‘it’s all downhill from here’ came to mind.

And then I encountered the final boss.  Far from being the creampuff that his immediately adjacent minions were, he was one of the toughest fights I faced in the game, utterly brutalizing my first couple of attempts (perhaps, to some degree, because I’d grown sloppy on the way in).  And if the previous hallway in elevated myself and my own sense of character growth – I went in feeling like one of the most powerful lords of darkness the world had ever seen – it also elevated him as well.  I became immediately aware that, I was number two at best.  This only served to make the final showdown more epic, and the sense of gratification all that much greater when I pulled off the kill.

Validation

Some players play games to exhibit skill, and others do it simply to kill time in the drudgery that is their life.  In both cases, players are devoting a sizable chunk of their lives to their hobby, embracing it and improving their skill at it.  Making them feel good about this investment is never a bad thing.

In most cases, players are playing for the journey, not the destination.  But the journey can be long, can sometimes be difficult, and at times might become tedious or overstay its welcome.  At moments like these, a little spot of sweet vindication can go a long way.  After all, anytime someone travels anywhere inch by inch, its useful to provide them a mountaintop so they can realize they’ve travelled miles.