Exploring Game Mechanics

Among the Bartles types, I'm primarily an Explorer. Specifically, I enjoy exploring game mechanics. All my charts and spreadsheets for Travian were, in part, to figure out how the game mechanics manifested -- what was the most efficient way to goal X?

With a toy, people develop their own goals. Either they (incorrectly) perceive the game to have a goal that you are "supposed" to achieve, or they explicitly choose something to explore, or they do what they did in the previous similar game that they played. I'm going to explore each of these in turn.

Misperceived Goals

When players project a goal onto the toy, they become frustrated when they get to that goal and they aren't rewarded. The same thing can happen when they are playing a game and misperceive the goal. This is especially frustrating when the game did a poor job of communicating the goal. If it's only once the player has played towards the goal that they understand it then you've lost an opportunity to keep that player happy. (Unless your mechanic is confusing players, in which case you're developing a niche title, and rah for you. I'm not talking about small-market hardcore games.) And some players might get distracted along the way, but that's besides the point.

Challenge is important in games, but only in that it manifests as perceived challenge. Since it's unlikely for a game to be challenging but not seem so, the important point here is the contrapositive: a game that players perceive to be challenging but really isn't. Players succeed and think they're smart in doing so. In the case of our toy with misperceived goals, players find the game to be extremely challenging and themselves to be under par because they can't win. I don't like losing, even if it was a good fight. I prefer losing a good fight to winning on a coin flip (unless we're talking real money, in which case it's better to be lucky), but losing when it's an unfair fight weighted against me just makes me frustrated.

The root of such frustration is misplaced expectations. Manage your player's expectations. If you've built a toy, let the players know.

Choosing Exploration

Experienced explorers tend to know they're explorers. Maybe they haven't heard of the Bartles types, maybe they don't think of it that way, but when you sit them down in front of a toy (or game), they'll go to work taking it apart and figuring out its mechanics.

To them -- or, I should say, to us -- figuring it out is the game. We're curious. I've got a competitive side, and that manifests as wanting to know the rules. Since most games don't document themselves well that often means it's up to the players to figure out how to win, whether one strategy is better than another. In strategy games, this is, really, the point, but there's also a mechanical aspect to winning: just how effective are the various units? If you face two off in a fight, which one will win? Which is more cost-effective? These sorts of explorers are comfortable with math -- at least the basic algebra used to derive these effectiveness measures.

Other explorers want to figure out your AI -- do feints work? Can they draw the NPC troops into an ambush? A great many players fit into this type of explorer mold, and it's generally an explicit part of many games. For toys, of course, there's no goal to win, so exploring the AI in a toy is a chosen goal.

Trying to keep mechanics-explorers happy is a difficult process. The more successful your game, the more people will be trying to figure it out. There's so many people playing WoW, for example, that the only undiscovered rules are those for the rarest and most inaccessible of content. Even in complex-rule games like ATITD, there's enough people pounding at the formulas that a great many of them have been found. There's two things going for that game here, though: (1) many of the rules are still very complex, such that the basic formula is sufficiently obscure that it wouldn't have been discovered except for developer intervention, and (2) the player base is small enough that there's only a small group dedicated to exploring any given mechanic. Yet it's a great example for developers looking for ways to keep their mechanic-explorer playerbase happy.

Default Play

This is the catch-all category. "Default Play" is what happens when gamers are given a toy, and when games don't tell players what to do. Many players (probably most) aren't sufficiently sophisticated to figure out that your 'game' is actually a toy. The distinction itself is somewhat arcane. It's also aggravating when the developers themselves don't know (as is the case with Travian).

This mode of play is the less-offensive younger sister to the first option. I'm saying that players pursue a goal but only indirectly, through the actions that they expect that the game wants from them. Stick a score somewhere on the screen (such as accumulated dollars or gold, or city population, or whatnot) and that becomes the perceived goal: how high can you get that number?

Games like The Sims keep the player so busy in many day-to-day life choices that they might not even know what goals they are pursuing.

The problem with this path is that players might eventually grow bored. Not knowing what goal they are "supposed" to achieve, they wonder why they spend time in the game. This was a problem for me in ATITD, to some extent: I knew what I wanted to do (play with crossbreeding), but I didn't know how to get there. What was I supposed to do in the meantime? I knew I had to somehow level up, but it wasn't clear which way I should go to do that.

And hence the problem with open worlds: when players are allowed to go anywhere and do anything, they often find themselves puttering around a bit hoping they had some direction.

Conclusion

Explorers are a subset of the overall gaming market. A niche, if you will. Catering to them can be very rewarding for those explorers but leaves everyone else scratching their heads. A game like ATITD would, theoretically, be heaven to me, if it wasn't for the atrocious UI and the excruciating primary mechanic (i.e. waiting).

You can add some fun for explorers by hiding some game mechanics. Although this will frustrate some of your early-adopter Achievers, eventually the explorers show up and start mapping the territory. Most games have simple numeric systems somewhere; combat is an obvious place. In addition to basic math and stats, consider adding in ATITD-like mechanics: complex tradeskills or gathering results or world spawns that follow a formula that diligent players can unearth and profit from.

Above all, make sure to match player expectations. Let them know what they're getting into.