Theory and Principles of Game Design

When the subject of free versus restricted saving comes up , people often end up conflating the issues of players being free to save their progress at any time and games requiring players to replay certain segments upon failure . The assumption is that the proper response to player failure is for the game to reload the latest save state, thus leading to a framing of the issue of loss of player progress in terms of free versus restricted saving. Unrestricted saving mechanisms are essential in modern games in that they allow players to quit the game at any time without losing progress. This does not, however, mean that loss of progress upon failure is an illegitimate mechanic. Countless commercially successful game designs that purposely incorporate just such a mechanic show quite clearly that loss of progress upon failure is a perfectly legitimate mechanic. Ultimately, the answer to the "free save" dilemma is not to design a game such that progress can never be lost, but to d...

F ailure by random numbers can occur whenever the random processes that determine failure aren't significantly influenced by the player's choices, giving players little or no meaningful control over the outcome of their actions. For the most part, games should be designed such that players may improve their chances of success according to the choices they make in the game, giving them meaningful control over their future.

Principle: S ometimes a player's mistakes aren't really mistakes . If a player has no good reason to believe a particular action might lead to failure, then failure should not be blamed on the player. F ailure by surprise occurs when the player's actions do not appear as if they should lead to failure, because the relationship between action and outcome is either obscure or counterintuitive, or because the element that makes a particular action lead to failure is presented too late for the player to react to it. King's Quest and Dragon's Lair are known for this kind of failure mechanism, where the wrong move can easily result in unexpected death or failure 1 . A game should generally provide enough clues for players to anticipate danger, and should otherwise give players a fair chance to react to any surprises. Footnotes 1. See Ways to Die/Lose in King's Quest and Let's Fail Dragon's Lair v2.0 ( not safe for work ).

Defeating an enemy; overcoming an obstacle; surviving in the face of adversity: success and failure are at the very core of the game-player's experience. Games offer players a number of choices, some of which lead to success and some of which lead to failure or non-success. Together with the challenges presented to the player, the fact that the player might fail lends significance to the player's choices and actions. Although failure can be a negative experience, it is also the very thing that makes success meaningful . There are two kinds of failure in games. One kind of failure concerns the player's inability to satisfy a particular success condition that nevertheless remains satisfiable, and another kind of failure takes place whenever the player encounters a particular failure condition . While the first kind of failure is simply a failure to succeed, the latter kind calls for a particular response to the player's actions. The manner in which a game responds to pl...