Game Design Log: Rules of Enragement (Part 1)

Have you, or anyone you know, ever quit playing a game after an incredibly frustrating sequence of events? Every single roll of the dice lining up, seemingly deliberately, to tell you specifically there is no hope? I’d be willing to bet that you’re lying if you say that you never even considered rage quitting a game in this way. Gamer rage and rage quitting are a well known phenomenon in video games at this point. And we all know the childhood stories of flipping over the Monopoly board when you’re losing. I’ll take the honesty leap here, and admit there are a wealth of moments I would like to forget where I was a sore loser when playing a game where I felt like nothing was going my way. But where does this rage come from? And how can we do our best to mitigate that feeling in players when building our own games?

This is somewhat a continuation, and somewhat a refinement, of my first article in the Game Design series “Putting the Fun in Functional Game Mechanics.” That isn’t required reading for this, but it may make a nice companion piece as you think about how to make your games enjoyable to play. This is also a two part article, we are going to focus on just one out of three elements of gamer rage today, since I apparently have more than two weeks worth of words to say on this topic.

First, let’s set out a definition of gamer rage, like I am doing some kind of scholarly work here. I’m not, I don’t even have a works cited section for these (yet). Gamer rage, at its heart, is the feeling of being cheated out of a success you feel you deserve. Regardless of whether it is a justified or true statement, you believe that the current state of the game is unfair to you in a way that is not your fault. I think it is important to note that this is a very human response to an unfair situation. If you were to sign a contract saying you will get paid 500 dollars for completing a task, you complete said task, and are only given 50 bucks, you are going to feel pretty upset. Now imagine rolling a d6 (a six sided die) ten times in a row, and the die showing nothing but 1s and 2s. No strict contract was signed, but by your casual understanding of averages and random chance it sure sounds like this should have been impossible (If my napkin math is correct it’s somewhere just shy of 0.002%, but please correct this in the comments for me.) So you feel cheated, you feel like the dice have betrayed you and led to you failing through no fault of your own. That feeling is normal. I need to reiterate here that being upset when something is categorically unfair is very very human. Your response to this unfairness is another matter related to emotional maturity and self-control, but the core feeling of frustration or anger is rational.

Actually let’s cover the outward expression of gamer rage right now. Obviously while I am discussing the feelings of anger that a game can bring out in people, that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to actually flip over the table. Screaming at or insulting your opponent, sulking in a corner, or otherwise making the game less fun for everyone around you are behaviors that should be immediate red flags to everyone around you that you kinda suck to play games with. The difference between someone who says “Man these dice suck. I’m going to throw them out and get some new ones.” in a moment of frustration, and someone who violently throws said dice at the wall is notable and important. Teaching a child how to be a “good sport” is pretty early development stuff, and I do not want it said that I am validating or rationalising people who get carried away in their gamer rage, despite my sympathy to the root of their anger.

Now we’ve already discussed a few examples, but what types of scenarios bring out gamer rage? I have a few categories that I think capture the broadest swathe of examples. There’s being cheated by fate, where dice or other random elements seem to defy probability to specifically and personally attack you. Second is being cheated by game balance, where you feel hopeless because your opponent seems to have a significant and innate advantage over you, to the point where the game stops being competitive. And lastly is being cheated by teamwork, where you feel unfairly targeted by another player or players, or you feel that your allies have failed to have your back. Today we’re going to focus on the cheated by fate category, as I think it is the best of the three at laying out the parameters of gamer rage. The other two are going to take up much more time to unwrap, and will be relegated to Part 2 of this article in two weeks time.

It is impossible to completely eliminate the possibility of someone being cheated by fate in any game where cards get shuffled or dice get rolled. If there is any element of random chance in your game design at some point some player will get cheated by fate. I play a lot of Warhammer Age of Sigmar, a game whose every mechanic is built around rolling fistfulls of six-sided (d6) dice (unless you run that rat-bastard Teclis, who gets to cheat and not roll dice). Even with the d6’s relatively low variance next to larger dice, the quantity of dice you roll can lead to some of the most incredible moments of being cheated by fate I have ever witnessed. There’s something incredible about throwing 41 dice at the table, hoping for a 4+ (4 or higher), and being left with 4 successes. I’m still halfway convinced my wife has unbalanced dice that are weighted towards the 5s and 6s because I swear she has never once rolled less than 70% 5+’s when she really needs it. This is all to say, if you have an element of randomness to your game at all, over the course of a thousand games, someone will inevitably have a game with the worst possible luck. 

But we can still mitigate the level to which that randomness can harm the player experience. A particular pain point for a lot of AoS players is the priority roll. A single die roll that you make each round to determine who goes first for the round. So instead of the classic sequential turn order, you have the random chance for a player to take two back to back turns. A lot of ink has been spilled on this turn structure, so I won’t opine much on it here. What’s notable is that this one roll is immensely powerful, and I have definitely won and lost games due to a double turn. And it feels awful to be on the receiving end of one (also it’s unsatisfying to win off the back of one.) It feels like that singular random moment is 100% responsible for the outcome of the game, even when there were other factors involved. In a game that can take upwards of three hours to play, one roll carrying so much power can easily become the target of a lot of gamer rage. One that you have no way to affect a majority of the time (there have been rules on occasion that allow you to affect the priority roll, but those are few and far between). So when the edifice of this game rests on a foundation that is so mercurial and out of your control, it makes that roll feel incredibly unfair regularly. Players take to tactical war games like Warhammer because they want to test their wits against their opponent, but a timely priority change makes it feel more like a casino game based on blind luck.

The lesson here when building your own games is to try to balance how random something is against how impactful it is on gameplay. If something is both too strong and too random it is significantly more likely to produce gamer rage than a more balanced mechanic. One way AoS succeeds in that is in their attack sequence. Every attack makes the attacker make a to hit roll, followed by a to wound roll, then the defending player makes a save roll, and oftentimes a ward roll after that. The number of rolls you make evens out the spikes quite a bit compared to the priority roll. Even if you rolled hot on your hit rolls, if your wound rolls are average it still comes out looking fair. And even when you manage to spike both your hit and wound rolls there is an element of it being such a legendary moment of good luck that it can take the edge off the pain. At least that’s the case for me, I’ll still be mad about being cheated by fate, but damn if it isn’t a cool moment.

And now the necessary caveat time, your mechanics must also fit your game. If you are building a game where random chance is more central to the play experience obviously your balance point will be very different than a more tactics based game that rewards planning over chance. Gambling mechanics are a lot of fun to a lot of people, perhaps too fun to some but that’s a different discussion. So how much control should the players have over random chance? Many games have built in mitigation for extreme bad luck that could bring about gamer rage. Dungeons and Dragons has the inspiration mechanic, which allows players to reroll a dice. A lot of card games allow you to mulligan your opening hand if you had an unlucky draw. AoS just recently instituted a mechanic that can allow a player to reroll the dreaded priority roll, and I have already seen it influence the game positively. But if your game is harmed by smoothing out the rough edges, you may want to avoid those mechanics. Most D&D games that are played to an audience remove the inspiration mechanic, largely because the emotional highs and lows of random dice rolls create a better show when they aren’t neutered by the safety rails that a reroll would add. Randomness in this instance greatly improves the narrative experience of the game.

And that’s all for this article, if it seems as though there was no overarching conclusion, you’re right! Stay tuned for Part 2!