In an attempt to transition out of hiatus, I will be posting the scripts of my Thinking Beyond Mechanisms segment. I don't plan to edit them, so there may be some differences between the audio and written versions. Take the audio as the correct version.
Take That
Welcome to Thinking Beyond Mechanisms, an in depth look at some of the other aspects of game design, the segment that looks at some of the theory of board game design that goes beyond what typically gets covered when we learn how to design games. My name is Sarah Shipp and today I want to talk about take that and emotional investment.
There are two types of player investment, broadly speaking. The investment a player feels about a game’s existence, possibly due to owning a copy or having fond memories surrounding a game session. The other type of player investment occurs during gameplay, when players assume the goals of the game until a winner is declared. As a designer, I am mostly concerned with the emotional investment that occurs during gameplay.
Theme can have great affect on emotional investment, but the lion’s share of investment rises from the mechanics. Geoff Engelstein’s book, Achievement relocked details how players are driven by loss aversion. Generally speaking, players dislike losing progress or rewards. What interests me most is how this isn’t always the case and how you frame the loss thematically makes a difference.
For example, war games inherently involve loss of units and ground. When a game is thematically about loss mechanical loss becomes more palatable. Any two player head to head game is likely to entail significant losses during gameplay. These types of games do tend to frame their themes around the conflict found in play.
Another thing 2-player games do well is forcing the players into conflict from the very beginning of the game, so the losses don’t come as a surprise to the players. However, it is important to note that direct conflict style games do tend to be less welcoming to casual players because of how defeating they can feel mechanically.
Conversely, take that games have a wide audience because of the approachable rules and general silliness of many of these types of games. However, hobbyists and designers rightly point out that as a collection of mechanisms, we can do better than skip a turn or steal a card.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem with take that mechanisms- mechanisms by which a player can target and damage another player- is one of violating player investment. And by extension, if you design take that mechanics with emotional investment in mind, you can avoid a lot of the criticism that surrounds this family of mechanics.
There’s a simple way to determine how take that mechanics are interacting with player investment. Ask yourself, does this mechanism take a player’s resources? Does it remove their progress? Or does it remove their ability to play? The answer to these questions can all be ‘no’ and the mechanism still be take that. However, if the answer is yes to all these questions, the mechanism is almost certainly violating player investment.
The most important question to ask is: does this mechanism remove a player’s ability to play on their turn? If a player can no longer play at various points in a game, they will lose their investment in the outcome of the game. Think of this style of mechanism as temporary player elimination, without the benefit of being able to jump into a new game. This can include ‘lose a turn’ mechanisms but also any mechanism that prevents players from taking actions that allow progress toward winning. A rule of thumb to follow is to let players do the fun actions and have those actions matter to the outcome of the game.
Mechanisms that remove player progress have similar results to those that prevent player actions, but add the frustration of players seeing themselves losing ground and moving away from their goal, sometimes literally in the case of race games. The issue of removing player progress is that it can stretch out the gameplay time without meaningfully adding to the arc of the experience. A rule of thumb here is to give other players positive progress toward the endgame for a similar function without hampering the rhythm of play.
Removing a player’s resources acts to remove progress and can hamper ability to execute turns, but the unique issue here is that players have an emotional attachment to the stuff they collect during the game. This is a smaller emotional impact than removing the ability to take any actions on their turn, but can still degrade emotional investment over the course of gameplay. If removal of resources is viewed as paying a tax or similar thematic framing, this style of take that is less fraught than the other two.
There are other ways to incorporate take that mechanisms that don’t involve players losing something. As I mentioned earlier, giving all other players progress or resources has a similar effect with fewer downsides. However, giving targeted players negative items is another way to circumvent loss aversion. Instead of removing resources, try giving players negative resources, like blight tokens or neutral resources that nonetheless occupy limited inventory space. Then players can use everything they’ve accumulated to overcome the new obstacles rather than working to regain the resources or abilities they’ve lost. A simple rule of thumb here is to ask yourself, are players losing progress or gaining obstacles?
Of course, there are games that use loss-focused take that mechanics to good effect, such as troops on a map games. These games tend to have thematic framing that puts players in the right mood and also carefully manage players’ frustration level by mitigating randomness. Player loss of progress feels worse when players feel they were at the mercy of random card draws as opposed to clever play by their opponent.
Completely random take that still has a place in gaming, but that market is flooded with games that could have leveraged their mechanics in more clever ways. Take that can be an interesting design challenge that requires insight into player psychology or it can be a way to make a player lose a turn.
For more ways of thinking beyond mechanisms, you can visit my blog at shipp board games dot blog spot dot com or catch future episodes of thinking beyond mechanisms on ludology.
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