Researching Mechanics: Creating 'Depth'

A great Gamasutra article talks about the depth of a game mechanic and what really brings an emphasis to what a great mechanic is all about and how those aspects can be amplified. I feel that it is important to experiment with certain game mechanics and see what really makes them 'click' and draw the user into played a game. Coming to think of it, there have been so many games with so many different game mechanics which each create a different aspect for the user to feel accomplished or to feel a certain depth within the game.

The article opens up with explaining how games often look great on paper, but when you test out the game to see how it plays, games often end up feeling repetitive and needing more variety, that is probably one of the hardest things to master in game creation, the question now is, how do we master this.

As explained within previous research, a lot of this is to do with the actual challenge you present the player, if it is not challenging enough or engaging enough, the user will lose interest. A great example of this for me was within Assassin's Creed on the Xbox 360, I remember being really excited to first start playing the game and then as I started to play the game for a few hours, I got hit with feelings or boredom and repetition as the whole game was just about doing the same exact thing over and over again multiple times without much variation or increased challenge.

Assassin's Creed experience of repetition

The main game mechanic within Assassin's Creed was within the stealth kill or assassination of the enemy, this is what would bring about a great sense of pride and establishment for the player as they feel that they have conquered the enemy and achieved a great feat by not being seen. This got repetitive because I felt that even as I was doing this over and over again, the thrill of the first kill was diminished by the same thing happening over and over again and little change within the game environment or difficulty. 

In the Gamasutra article it defines the method to solve and it also explains why this problem often occurs.

• Buzzwords to watch for: The game is "a one-trick pony," "repetitive," "or needs more variety."
• Feedback that can be fixed with these kind of content expansions tends to describe the game as a whole. Players feel they don't have enough different things to do on a global level.

The ways that Gamastura suggests in general to solve this is:

If players feel that an individual game mechanic is flat and unrewarding you can refine that mechanic's "theatrics" by giving the player better feedback, more rewards, better effects, cooler sounds, more personality, a cooler camera, or other bells and whistles. After theatrics refinements, players will often -- with no changes to the underlying gameplay -- tell you the problem is fixed.

So the whole point of this is that if your users or testers do not find much fun within your mechanic or find it boring after a few goes, then this is the issue, the game mechanic needs more depth. The whole article goes into detail on how you can prevent 'Shallow' game mechanics which cause games to be boring, flat or repetitive.

In the article, he goes on to explaint that there are two things that are needed in order for the game to achieve any depth within it. These are:

• It needs clear objectives, so the player knows what he has to do to succeed. Confusion and obfuscation tend to make players feel like a mechanic is LESS deep once they find themselves needing to experiment randomly to win.
• It needs a variety of Meaningful Skills that you, as a game designer, can use to create good challenges for the player and that the player in turn can use to achieve mastery over the game.

So those two things are 'Objectives' and 'Meaningful Skills' which define and create the game to make it what it is. The separation between these two aspects are probably the most important things within the design of an in-depth mechanic.

A good example they make; is where if the mechanic is just a means to do an objective and has no meaningful skills, then it sort just dismisses the purpose of the game. The objective cannot be a brain dead activity of getting form A to B but has to invoke the player to display a certain amount of skill, meaningful skill.

At the end of the day, meaningful skills contribute much more to deep mechanics than the objectives within the game do. 

So that means that most games that don't feel deep enough feel that way because they have way more objectives and not enough meaningful skills. This is exactly why Assassin's Creed was boring, it kept repeating the same objectives over and over again and had little skill change involved to make the game interesting enough for longer periods of time.

The article then goes on to explain activity statements which involve naming what the meaningful skill is and what the objective is, and if it is too vague, the gameplay often suffers.

Here is the five step process which he explains:

1. Identify and list your objectives.

a. For each, ask yourself: "Is this objective functionally a duplicate of any of the other objectives in my list?" If it is, ask yourself if you really need it. Do you really want to spend the time on teaching your players how to interact with it? If the answer is no, cross it out.

2. Identify and list all your meaningful skills.

a. For each ask yourself: "Is this really a meaningful skill? Not too basic? Not an objective?"
b. Ask yourself: "Is this skill functionally a duplicate of any of the other meaningful skills in my list?" If it is, cross it out. You're tricking yourself into thinking you have more skills than you actually do.

Having taken stock, do you now find you have too many objectives? Not enough meaningful skills? At this point, I'll bet you've discovered that, yes, somehow that's happened. At this point, just do the same exercise I suggested above to help my past-self get over his tractor beam problems:

1. Add one or more new meaningful skills to the list.

a. As you add them, ask yourself the same questions as above. "Is this skill really meaningful? Is it too basic? Is it really an objective?"

2. Go through all your challenges and improve your Activity Statements

3. Prototype the new content.

4. Play-test. Is your problem solved? If so, then you're done!

5. If your problem isn't solved, go back to step 1 and try again.

This has been rather insightful, I'll definitely continue to read articles on 'depth' and what influences the mechanics within a system.