Alright now here comes the unhinged stuff. This post builds on my previous 2 posts - Encourage Cheese and Risk/Reward Doesn't Scale
Here's a question : would Team Ninja allow Ultimate Technique spam in Ninja Gaiden if they had to start the game with a combat tutorial prompt which directly told every player how powerful spamming it truly was?
Recently I realized that a lot of what I've been talking about is almost like an inversion of the risk aversion principles that Derek Yu coined in one of the best game design articles I've ever read.
The key idea Derek Yu expressed is "Bigness" - to put it bluntly, to make your game more successful you have to trick people into thinking your game is huge. The players rely on surface level signifiers and impressions, so making them feel like a game is deep, varied and expressive will help sell your game. Obviously this is easier if your game actually IS deep, varied and expressive, but as he points out, this applies to every game. It's effective marketing.
I think his analysis is spot on, but I don't think he emphasizes just how deep the risk aversion goes - by relying on this style of design you aren't just avoiding the risk of not making profit, you're also likely avoiding artistic risks. The more this approach permeates games the more they will stagnate.
Games are increasingly reliant on bigness & complexity and avoidant of elegant design - redundancy and RPG elements are being added into everything, including arcade genres. The tendency towards Bigness is enforced by both sides. Developers want it because it sells their games and gives them guaranteed, minumum longevity, players want it because of similar reasons and because it makes them feel smarter.
But Bigness is a dishonest trap. Games are logical systems. They are simple at their base because that's how they are designed. Extra weapons, extra moves, stats, etc. are just variations on simple archetypes. The more pressure you put on a game (through difficulty & optimization), the more clear the redundancy becomes. Eventually, the player is left with the best versions of any given archetype - that is the game's core logic. That is what needs to be fleshed out and built upon the most, in my opinion.
Bigness relies on obfuscating a game's core logic with tricks, not just from the players but from the developers as well. Developers will frequently add first order optimal strats in their games and then "balance" them through obfuscation of their effectiveness. Hoping they are too hard to find, or maybe too difficult to use. They will overlook the logic of their game in favor of player psychology.
I want to introduce the Smallness Principle - the idea is to be very honest & clear about what your game is fundamentally. This is done by focusing on the internal logic of the game rather than player psychology when designing it. This can be applied in many ways :
- Elegant design - cutting out redundancies and mechanics/elements with extremely niche use cases.
- Reductive tutorials - boiling down your game into its most fundamental rules of thumb & gameplans in tutorials, rather than dumping mechanics at the player.
- Clear telegraphing & effectiveness hierarchies - showing which moves are good, which are not in very clear ways, maybe even sorting them into categories.
The goal is to make your game feel as small and basic as it can be, and then make sure that your game still remains engaging despite all of that. On par with similar small games (think Tetris & Pacman) ideally. This jives well with how games are designed - everything starts small before it becomes big. Ideally, you want the player to feel like as they learn a game, it expands, rather than contracts.
Now as Derek Yu points out, this not only will probably result in financial death of your game, but it's also deeply unpleasant for you, as a developer. Very few games survive this kind of reductive analysis, including your own games, or your favorite games. And that's precisely why I think it's important to run games through the Smallness Principle lense - these most core, fundamental, most interconnected elements of games are ones that the medium should flesh out the most, because that's what you are left with after prolonged play. Otherwise it the medium doesn't truly advance, people are just tricked into thinking it does.
Here I wanna come back to the question I started this post off with - would UT spam be allowed if devs couldn't rely on obfuscation? I truly don't think so - I think developers allow themselves to keep OP strategies like this in because they think "most players won't notice" or "it's more fun to do other stuff". And like I pointed out in my risk/reward post, this works until it doesn't.