A version of this article first appeared in the June/July 2012 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Football is a sport with a lot of situational game decisions – the plays that the coaches call are going to be very different if they are sitting on a 30 point lead are going to be very different than when they are down a field goal with two and a half minutes to go.  Indeed, the fact that the playbook varies so strongly based on the situation is one of the reasons why football can be so deep and strategic – the team that is behind needs to score quickly and needs to leverage certain rules, such as running out of bounds, in order to stop the clock. Defenses adjust in order to limit these likely plays from happening, but often in doing so leave the field open for a high-risk, high yield play.

This kind of play is interesting, but there is another kind of situational play in football that is more strategic and less tactical – teams spend a considerable amount of time preparing for every game.  Most football teams only bring a limited number of plays they will call, and so time is spent studying the opponent’s film.  If they have a prolific quarterback, defenses may opt to sacrifice run defense in favor of better pass defense.  A key injury on the other team might prompt an attempt to exploit the second string player taking his place.  Even the weather factors in – heavy rains may prompt a coach to abandon the passing game, and strong winds may limit the effectiveness of a kicker. 

Strategic Planning

This kind of planning and foresight before an engagement is not unknown to the video game sector.  Games as old as XCom and as recent as Mass Effect have had a mechanic of squad selection, for example, where you determine which party members to bring with you into a fight, and how you choose to equip them.  However, they tend to lack a key element of the decision-making process: a sense of reconnaissance.

Very few games give the player an idea of what challenge they will be fighting beforehand, and as such, players often don’t have the best information to make the best decisions.  If players lack the ability to decide, before the step onto the battlefield, which is the best squad to take with them, they will play the averages and take the teammates that happen to be the most effective at any given time.  In many games I’ve played, the only way to learn that bringing the sniper is necessary is through trial and error.

If there is a training or gear-equipping subgame with managing the teammates, this problem will compound itself over time. Players will favor their favorite allies – companions that have the best synergy with their characters, provide the most interesting story, or even the most interesting color commentary – and keep those companions up-to-date.  The rest of the stable, however, will fall slowly behind due to disuse, which means that when a lazy player finally gets to the mission where the sniper is king, he is so far behind the power curve that he isn’t good enough to be useful.

And the real question is, in these cases, is it a good idea to fight the player?  He may have valid other reasons for having a favorite sidekick, and if the player is by-and-large happy running with the same squad most of the time, is the occasional mission where players are forced to run without their wisecracking love interest something they are going to appreciate or resent?

Dominion

As a game designer, one of the most inspiring games of my career is the card game Dominion.  The game is a relatively simple game with a ruleset that is altogether easy to learn and teach a new player.  The goals – accumulate wealth in order to accumulate land, are simple to understand.  Combos offer a lot of depth, but even casual players can usually get the hang of them.  However, the interesting thing to me is not any of that – it’s the setup.

Over the course of the game, players build their own decks by acquiring cards, hopefully driving towards a coherent strategy.  While there are, with the expansions, hundreds of potential cards that could be chosen, only ten cards are, and these cards are all a player can use to build his deck.  Because these cards are chosen randomly, the most important phase of the game is the player figuring out which of these resources are available, and how they might synergize into an effective deck.

The result is a remarkable fertile game dev environment.  Cards that are normally powerful may be made impotent by the random selection of another card that counters it.  Cards that are frequently weak can synergize with other cards in often unexpected ways.   Players who can identify these unlikely interactions are often rewarded, if not with outright victory, then with ludicrously fun power loops.

In Dominion, performing reconnaissance and responding to it isn’t optional – it’s the core game loop.  Failing to do so is effectively abdicating the game.  The game mechanic succeeds partially because of the time and opportunity to strategize around the possibilities – but it also succeeds because, at its core, its not optional.

Web Guide Recon and Raiding

In the modern day, every gamer is a few button clicks away from theorycraft that tells them how to best play their class or defeat their boss.  This can have some unexpected side effects.  Many MMOs with raid gameplay, for example, work to make bosses with puzzle mechanics that force players to play their classes in new and interesting ways.  Many players take pride in actually being among the first to defeat these bosses, and then post their strategies for all to see.  Because the event is largely static and predictable, reconnaissance for the frontline soldier is knowing the mechanics, and executing his role.

However, sometimes these fights can be quite lopsided in the effects they have on classes in these raids.  A common problem is, for example, to too often make fights that are easier on ranged damage-dealing classes and very difficult, or near impossible, for those fighting from melee range.  Some raid leaders, when faced with trying to teach a difficult maneuver to one of these problem classes, may instead opt to replace that player with someone playing a less problematic class.  This is pretty much just like being benched in the real world – and feels just about as good.

Between Tactics and Strategy

Personally, I’d like to see more game mechanics that randomly change the battlefield during the fight – something that is not necessarily driven by the player’s adversaries, but is the environment spicing things up.  The prototypical example to me is always the hawkmen’s arena in Sky City in the movie Flash Gordon – nothing makes you adjust your strategy quite like random spikes emerging from the floor.

You see some of this in video games – one interesting example was the ‘Week of’ bonus in Heroes of Might and Magic – if it was the ‘week of the dragon’, you could buy twice as many dragons to add to your army.  Taking advantage of this was something that could be powerful.  What was missing from the game was a way for a player to know what was coming – if you could spend a resource to know that this purchase opportunity was coming, the savvy player would be incentivized to shift his strategies, save his cash, and quickly steal control of dragon-producing cities from his enemies.

This idea of reconnaissance as a play action is something that has a lot of potential, although the value of it is strongly different from game to game.  Magic: the Gathering is another game that has a lot of both tactical and strategic events for players to respond to – mostly related to their own draws, and the contents of their opponent’s deck.  Most decks have only the power to respond to these cards and/or events.  However, blue in particular tends to give players the ability to get a glimpse at their own deck or their opponents, and in some cases, rearrange the possibilities to a limited degree.  Played poorly, and such cards are almost always a waste of deck space.  Played well, though, and a talented blue player may be able to prevent an opponent from ever having an effective turn.

In Conclusion

Making interesting strategic decisions before combat begins offers a lot of depth and replayability to a game, especially when these strategic game factors have random elements that force the players to adapt and think in new ways.  These mechanics can in fact give a game new life, by giving players new ways to experience the content.

However, random is not enough.  If players don’t have a way to get a hint of the contours of the fight, they won’t have enough information to make informed strategic decisions.  Since they can’t, they will tend towards building generalist strategies, and only deviating from them via trial and effort.  Offering even a glimpse of the path before them can make the player feel clever, and that feeling is one of the best feelings gaming can provide.