The Joy of Complications

How much of the excitement and joy in playing a game stems from messing with your player

In our previous post, we discussed in greater depth the importance of establishing elements for the player, making them legible, and clearly signaling the articulations between them, i.e. how game elements interact with one another and make certain forms of gameplay possible. For the second part of our Establish—Complicate—Resolve narrative mapping sequences, we’ll be dealing with the considerations of the vast middle that makes up the majority of what a player will be doing in game.

In this post, we’ll focus on:

• Ludonarrative Irony - introduced last time, this is the notion that one can make productive use of a disconnect between what the game is telling you is happening (in terms of story) and what you, the player, are doing.

• Subversion - gameplay structured like a joke, where there’s a clear setup and “punchline” in the form of some clear subversion of expectations.

• “Random” Events - events which appear to come out of nowhere, but actually structure a feeling of rising and falling tension over short and long periods of time.

As always, this list is by no means comprehensive but is rather a way into thinking about the many ways you can mess with your player to “improve” their overall experience of the game.

Ludonarrative Irony

The hub and spoke design is a mainstay of modern RPGs, because it creates a way to break up a large world whose narrative will unfold over 50+ hours of game time. Each hub is typically represented by a town center or key NPC who provides the player with the main through line for quests that might be given by other NPCs in their vicinity. These quest givers will send the player out into the surrounding zone to complete a number of tasks that lend a narrative cast to killing enemies or collecting things off the ground and, ideally, tie together disparate elements, events, and environmental features so as to keep the player interested.

Forgetting to Remember

The Kingdom Hearts series has a somewhat novel take on this hub and spoke system, meant to give the feeling of navigating a theme park as you progress. Each planet Sora and crew visit derives from some pre-existing (usually Disney) property, and the player gets to relive these famous stories in a truncated form. But while reliving a Disney movie might satisfy some childhood fanservice dream, Kingdom Hearts does quite a bit more than replay the same VHS tape over and over again. In fact, the Disney property is typically just one layer of a larger, allegorical narrative structure.

If you’re not familiar with allegory, it’s simply the notion that you can have several layers of meaning at play within a single series of events. The Matrix can be both an exploration of fears resulting from that old Platonic questioning of the relationship between representation (what we see, hear, feel, etc.) and some underlying “reality” as well as a longform cinematic metaphor for the experience of being transgender (look it up). As the movie plays, there is only one sequence of events, but they can be read in distinct ways, depending upon the thematic frame you apply to them.

In Kingdom Hearts 2, when Sora arrives—for the second time—in the Hundred Acre Wood, he discovers that Pooh seems to have lost his memories, of Sora as well as of the entire cast of characters in the classic children’s tale. This twist gives us our primary task: to restore Pooh’s memories and put the Hundred Acre Wood back in place. But, if you’d played Chain of Memories, you’d know this memory loss bears an eerie resemblance to what Sora himself experienced in Castle Oblivion. The fun, cutesy adventure that transpires is tinged both by how Sora helping Pooh is reminiscent of Namine helping him and by how Sora’s re-emergence at the end of the Prologue is consequent with Roxas’ having been, in a sense, absorbed back into our hero.

Nowhere is this irony more obvious than when Sora leaves Twilight Town by train and says farewell to Roxas’ companions, who are now completely oblivious to his existence. Sora waves and gives a cheery goodbye, while also weeping uncontrollably. He doesn’t understand why, but, as players, we understand this is Roxas weeping for the people he’s leaving behind. This complication will later explode into a more literal conflict, when Sora and Roxas fight each other as a sign of the psychological turmoil of their being one person.

Many Worlds, One Universe of Understanding

One of the great ironies of Kingdom Hearts as a whole is how Sora’s original remit from King Mickey, to keep all the worlds from collapsing into one another, is belied by how Sora’s adventures forge a clear narrative link between them. KH at times invites over-interpretation, but there seems to be a real tension between the expectations established through gameplay—to go everywhere and do everything, though not all at once—and the narrative justification of keeping everything in its proper domain. Bringing order to the—err—galaxy?—means Sora also creates chaos in his wake. Though the hero, he is synonymous with the events and ill-tidings of one world bleeding over into the others.

You could argue this fact simply reflects a fundamental contradiction that rules the outlook of most mainstream games. You are charged with bringing peace and order—to stop the forces that seek absolute destruction, to save the world—but the only means the game provides the player to overcome all odds is to beat the crap out of people. In fact, as you progress and acquire newer, more powerful abilities, the game is telling you in not so subtle ways that being a murder hobo is the best use of your time. Sure, many strategy games allow for less combative victory conditions, like marrying your dumb kids off to important people (Crusader Kings) or doing the best science (Civilization). But KH falls squarely within the camp of those games where the only viable option is to beat up your problems.

Ludonarrative irony, then, far from being some niche condition you can manipulate from time to time, is actually fundamental. If everything were orderly and peaceful, the game would be pretty boring. The kind of tension that holds the player’s interest is crafted from the antagonism of game elements—at least on a conceptual level. When it comes to running the underlying software, you generally want things to go smoothly. But when we’re in the broad domain of design, especially as relates to the player’s experience, games are, for the most part, made in such a way as to frustrate your desires. So, the disconnect between what a game tells you about who you are (the hero!), what you’re doing (saving the multiverse!), and what you’re actually doing in terms of gameplay (murdering everyone who stands in your way!) is simply another facet of that basic antagonism that we impart to games as a whole.

Subversion

Thus, one way to think of a game, especially when you’re at the planning stages, is as a balancing act of opposing forces. On the one hand you have the force of player expectations: to win every race (Gran Turismo), to get fat loot (every MMO), or dominate your opponent through the superiority of your civilization (Age of Empires). On the other hand, you have the force of the game that, while it makes all those achievements possible, also stands in the way of them. You don’t start off with the best possible car, you don’t have the best gear, and you definitely can’t build trebuchets right out of the gate.

We wrote in our previous post about the importance of clearly establishing the articulations between gameplay elements, and when it comes to the complications imposed by the vast middle of gameplay, it’s also worth clearly conceptualizing what the nature of the game’s fundamental antagonism is. This could take the form of a simple denial. You want a best-in-slot, two-handed axe for your murder hobo, but the raid boss who’s holding onto it for the time being says, “nuh-uh.” Though denial is arguably the most common form this antagonism takes, it’s not the only way to do it.

Triband’s What the… games pose an endlessly fascinating question for designers, namely, “what if gameplay itself were structured like a joke?” Now, Freud wrote an entire book about the many forms and psychological states a joke can take, but here I mean the classic setup-punchline form that most people are familiar with. The setup comes What the Golf? begins by playing explicitly to a player’s expectations. You see a golfer and a hole at the far end of the map. Your swing charges by way of a meter that would be familiar from so many other golfing games, and so it seems, at first, to be a perfectly conventional form of gameplay. But then, instead of hitting the ball, your avatar is hurled forward like a ragdoll, and you have to keep tossing them until they knock over the flag. Much hilarity ensues.

One Gag To Rule Them All

As a fundamental articulation, “gameplay is a joke” becomes about much more than this one interaction, it becomes a design principle. You see it reflected in the art style (cartoonish), the animations (absurd), and the core mechanics (seemingly never the same from one moment to the next). The game’s physics are pretty silly, but that fact never grates on the nerves, precisely because it reflects a consistent design principle. Whereas, when t-poses appear out of nowhere in Cyberpunk 2077, it works against the assumption of baseline realism in the game, despite the SF setting, and so it diminishes the player’s sense of immersion. Such a “bug” in What the Golf? would just feel like another gag.

Bear in mind, subversion—i.e. undermining your player’s expectations—is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. The primary concern is how that subversion fits into the total composition. This is where you have to think concertedly about how game elements work with one another. Even our Establish-Complicate-Resolve narrative mapping paradigm presupposes certain articulations. You establish certain gameplay patterns in the beginning, but “complicate” implies the manner in which you develop those patterns will be fundamentally antagonistic. Likewise, “resolve” implies a kind of catharsis, a releasing of the tension that antagonism has built up over time.

But, I hasten to note, not all games do this. Townscaper, for instance, is more like a toy or like Lego, where you can build and build and build (or likewise tear down) without the game ever really posing much of a complication. It does impose certain necessary limits, but those limitations are not conceptualized as antagonizing the player but rather as fixed parameters to facilitate their creative whims. It’s often said, that when you’re trying to nail down a game’s core mechanics, you want to have at the front of your mind what the player will be doing most of the time. However, we feel you should also have in mind what your player is feeling in any given moment, and having a firm grasp on these articulations can help you get there. It needn’t even be a fixed thing. Deltarune and Dishonored make these gameplay articulations a matter of player choice: you can be a murder hobo, but you can also just get people to chill the !@#$ out. The point is we should all have a little UX designer in us and approach the issue conscientiously.

“Random” Events

It’s a mainstay of classic turn-based RPGs: there you are, minding your own business, just trying to walk your party from one side of the map to the other, when the screen distorts, the music changes, and you find yourself fighting a grouping of enemies only a random number generator could love. You mindlessly mash the “attack” command, because you’re grossly overleveled for the zone, and combat ends with a little victory ditty and a list of crap you’ll have to sell in the next town in order to derive any value from it. Most modern RPGs do a far better job of balancing the composition and frequency of these random encounters—or by doing away with them entirely, the way Long Gone Days does—but as a kind of automated complication, while they create opportunities for your characters to steadily progress, they also run the risk of making the game feel tedious.

Random events need not be completely random, though. In fact, randomness can create more meaningful complications when it is partially or even mostly predictable. With the recent release of the Chaos Dwarfs DLC, I’ve been playing quite a bit of Total War: Warhammer 3, and I’ve been reminded of how modern strategy games seem to have found the randomness sweet spot. In the game, you have two primary means of preventing another faction from declaring war on you: declare war on them first or appease them diplomatically. You can get away with doing neither for a time, even if the neighboring faction hates you—that is until they start to consider you a strategic threat, because you’ve been conquering all your neighbors besides them. At that point, their declaring war on you becomes likely but it doesn’t have to happen on any given turn.

As a result, hitting the “end turn” button and letting the cycle of CPU actions occur can be a butt-clenching experience. The faction that was likely to declare war might not, but then another faction you hadn’t been paying much attention to decides to stab you in the back. Now you need to figure out whether to march one of your existing armies to the other side of your territory, taking several turns, or go into the red trying to hastily raise a new army to deal with the new threat. The point here is 1) this backstab could have been somewhat foreseen, if you’d been keeping an eye on them in the diplomatic interface, and 2) this “random” event will now radically change how your campaign plays out going forward.

The UX of Sudden Setbacks

Much like the joke structure of What the Golf?, randomness as a complicating factor works on the undermining of expectations. Despite this similarity, a random encounter feels very different from a joke. I can’t count the number of times I’ve rage quit a campaign, because something that happened over the end turn completely upended my carefully laid plans. Sometimes I muster up the will to come back and confront the problem head on, but I usually just start a new campaign with a different faction. There are so many to choose from.

When designing a game, the articulations between game elements are somewhat easier to conceptualize than those between the game and the player, because “the player” is, at best, a floating target. Much of user experience research is dedicated to the thorny problem that certain definite things can be known about players in the aggregate but almost nothing useful about particular individuals.¹ This is a problem, because we don’t experience games as aggregates but as individuals. My experience of the tedium of a random encounter will be very different from yours. The hope is, when making a mass market game, that our design choices will maximize the number of people who will tolerate it and minimize the number who rage quit.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from designing an absolutely miserable experience and putting it up on itch.io for the seven people who really get off on that. To each their own. In the main, though, the watchwords for randomness seem to be “balance” and “restraint.” Which is to say, as a “complication” in our paradigm the actual effect of messing with the player is something we should consider whether we want in our game, because—and I’m not quite ready to fully open this can of worms—a game should be more properly understood not as a confluence of hardware and software but a moment of interaction between those things and real human beings. No, I will not be taking questions at this time.

Next Time…

To sum up, broadly speaking, complication is a way of taking the ways you’ve initially set up a player, be it for success or failure, and introduce a little wrinkle they will have to wriggle out of. These wrinkles are what, in terms of the whole player journey, are what make up the vast preponderance of a game, so you need to spend some time thinking about what they are not just mechanically but affectively. Amend “what is my player doing” with “what is my player feeling,” because, as it turns out, facts do care about your feelings.

Next time, barring my own mercurial whims, we’ll consider the third phase of our E-C-R paradigm and discuss how resolutions function not as a culmination but rather as a liminal state between gameplay cycles. See you then!

1. The operative word here being “useful.” An individual playtester can tell you quit a bit about what does and does not work for them. The concern is whether designing in accordance with those predilections will result in a well-received game.