Game Mechanics - the new black | Hacker News Reader

Game Mechanics - the new black

joncarder.com

11 pointshumanlever8 comments

I like to read these kinds of articles because it is interesting to see how other people choose to categorize their game mechanics philosophies.

In my mind, a game is comprised of a goal and methods for reaching that goal. You can manipulate the more subjective concept of "fun" by changing the goal's attributes/complexity or adjusting the methods (adding, subtracting, manipulating challenge).

The point to reaching the goal is for reward, which is why I do not list it separately. Reward is often a gateway to more games. For example, the scoreboard is actually a metagame, where the goal is to get the highest score in a competition with other people. The game of "catch" is time-honored and does not involve much more reward than the gateway to the metagame of becoming more dextrous.

By methods, I refer to all the tools at your disposal to try to reach your goal. These can include tools outside the parameters of the game; after all, many people can have fun by cheating the game, and in some games, cheating is part of the point (reneging in Uno).

The point is, as far as I can tell, there are just the two parts to a unit game definition, and the interesting stuff involves all the tweaks you make to those two parts. A typical fun game will be comprised of many minigames.

So I do not agree with this --

Unlike video games, company games need to be simple and focused.

We just need to be clever about shaping motivations and limitations for the audience, be it video game players or "company game" players. The video game industry is seeing greater successes when the games are simple/accessible, too.

Interesting perspective, thanks. (For some reason simply giving you a point didn't seem like enough.)

Winning a game can be a reward in itself. (Or rather, the sense of smug superiority over your peers you get out of it--of course this only works if everyone's playing to win.)

Roll 5 d10 and take the median. You get a bell-shaped distribution, but you don't have to do any addition-- the result is immediately visible.

You have to do comparisons, though.

Anyway, what's the connection to the article?

It's a good game mechanic for RPGs. In high school when all the cool kids were writing their own role-playing systems, I wrote one based on m5d10.

I feel like the computational (and, worse, legalistic) overhead for RPGs can detract from the fun of playing. So I wrote a simpler system that was based on that. Finding the middle of 5 d10s is something you can do (once you're used to it) in 0.25 seconds, so it's "immediately obvious" what the dice say. Adding 5 d10s takes about 1-2 seconds for most people, which is enough of a pause to break flow.

However, the real flow-breaker of RPGs isn't computation, but looking up rules in a rulebook to figure out how many dice of damage you take from a third-story fall before deciding whether to leap. This is one of the problems with formal role-playing systems... but, as always, the quality of the session has a lot more to do with the GM and players than the system itself.

But if I were to do a role-playing system now, it'd be based on Tarot cards (the 22 trumps). RPGs are more about interactive storytelling than about combat and number-crunching.

Fair enough. That's interesting.

The article seems more concerned with goals and incentives, than with nuts and bolts.

By the way, how would your Tarot card system work? They could make for an interesting qualitative instead of quantitative system. Say, you try to do an action, draw a card and interpret "The Fool" as fumbling.

The cards have a ranking that is on the card (Judgment is 21, World is 20, Fool can be 0 or 22) if you need a quantitative result, but it would be a mostly qualitative system. How it would work would be based largely on the GM, since you can't write rule books for qualitative systems.

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