Game Design Log: Rules of Enragement (Part 2)

This is a part two from my previous article, you may want to read that one to get my definitions of the terms I’ll be using, like gamer rage. Because I might be using it in a different way than you would assume. To recap briefly anyways, last article we went through the definition of gamer rage, why it is important to consider when designing a game, and have begun to zero in on why it manifests the way that it does. We finished last time outlining the type of gamer rage that is caused by being cheated by fate. Meaning random chance aligned in such a spectacular and improbable way that a player feels frustrated. Today we’ll discuss the other two ways to incite gamer rage, being cheated by game balance, and being cheated by teamwork. And we’ll cap it off with some conclusions.

So first, what does it mean to be cheated by game balance? This is a problem in many competitive games where each player does not have access to the exact same abilities. Stepping out of the realm of board games for a moment, this is typified by hero focused games like League of Legends (LoL), the second all-time producer of gamer rage (just behind Mario Party). In LoL each player plays as a unique hero with vastly different stats and abilities. If you are facing off against an enemy hero who is inherently superior to your own, there is a frustration to it. You weren’t necessarily beaten by a skilled player in a duel of reflexes, rather you lost before you even showed up to play because they locked in Nasus and you were stuck trying to make Udyr work (this is not a current reference, I haven’t played LoL in over a decade because I take care of my mental health). This is usually an issue within the rules of the game, but not always. The feeling of being hustled, of playing a player who is in a different league than you, can lead to the same rage. The root of being cheated by balance revolves around the phrase “There was nothing I could have done from the start.” 

So let’s rip the bandage off for this one now. If your game has any asynchronous rules, you will not achieve perfect balance. Let’s say your game is a grid based combat game. If one playable character has 5 Attack and 4 Movement, and the other has 4 Attack and 5 Movement, even if all other aspects of their characters are the same they are already unbalanced. Depending on the rules make-up of your game one of those two will end up being the definitive strongest option (and in this case it will almost certainly be the higher Movement character, NEVER underestimate how powerful movement is in a tactical game). So unless you are making something that plays like Stratego, where both players have access to the exact same tools at the start of the game, you cannot create a game that perfectly balances every player option. But still we can mitigate these imbalances in a few ways.

We can get “close enough”, meticulously balancing and tweaking numbers until the game reaches a stable and playable point. To accomplish this you’ll need to playtest… a lot. This is a tedious process and there isn’t much more for me to offer here than “Just do the hard work”, but it is very worth it. The more options you have for players that are “competitively viable” the less likely you are to induce gamer rage in this way.

You can also obfuscate the imbalance with randomness. Like a good Dragonball villain, last article’s being cheated by randomness has come back to help us out. For example, the Monk is the weakest 5th Edition D&D class on paper. But tell that to the DM whose boss villain spent three consecutive turns doing nothing after a few successful Stunning Strikes. Just a little bit of good luck for the player and suddenly the statistically less powerful choice becomes an absolute powerhouse.

You can also mitigate balance issues by leaning in. People love to test themselves against a direct challenge. Call your weakest option “Hard Mode” and watch people line up to prove themselves against it. This does tend to work better in non-competitive games. If you spent any time playing Pokemon games once you had aged out of their target demographic you may have heard of the concept of a Nuzlocke. The specifics of the challenge are unimportant here, and it seems everyone has their own pet Nuzlocke variant anyways, but the crux of it is Nuzlocking is a significantly more difficult way to play through a game of Pokemon. Despite the official games never supporting this playstyle there is a thriving community of gamers trying to make the most difficult Nuzlocke, and beat it.

Players will experience gamer rage as a factor of benign cheated by balance when there is a problem external to your game as well. These are almost impossible for a game creator to build around or avoid, but I think these do bear examining here. First up is skill issue, and the feeling of being hustled. If you played against a Chess Grandmaster in your first game, you may feel the bubbling up of a little gamer rage at being annihilated so profoundly. The feeling here is still “There was nothing I could have done.” But that feeling is more related to not having spent years of practice to reach the same intricate level of knowledge of the game as your opponent. In the same vein is losing when someone else paid to win. Arguably the biggest problem in the card game Magic the Gathering is how much money it can take to build a tournament ready deck. If your mana base is full of cards that go for less than a dollar on the secondary market, but your opponent’s cheapest land costs ten dollars, it can feel like you were beaten by being outspent. This is more of a question for a future article about the ethics of creating a secondary market around your game pieces. For now I’ll leave it at this, when the players with the most real world money are inherently advantaged in your make-believe game, it is normally good for the company that makes the game, but bad for the actual game itself.

Finally we arrive at our third major category of rage inducement, being cheated by teamwork. This encapsulates two different ideas, being ganged up on, and being failed by your own team. For the first part let’s think of a multiplayer game where each player is individually trying to win. This is the classic board game set up. Everything from Monopoly, to Catan, to Blood Rage operate in this manner. In these games, if two or more players decide to specifically stop you from winning, you have been primed to feel the kind of gamer rage that comes from being ganged up on. This frustration relies on one thing the game designer is incredibly limited at stopping, the above the table politics inherent in multiplayer games, and one thing they very much control, the ability of players to harm other players directly. My favorite example of this in action is the game Munchkin. More specifically it’s the way my play group ran Munchkin before we ended up banning it from game nights. The issue is that Munchkin allows for a dizzying array of ways to harm another player. Seemingly half of all cards can be used during your opponent’s turn to thwart them somehow. So a player who is about to win will always, inevitably, have an attacking card played against them to stop them. This ended up reinforcing a play pattern where none of us would play any attacks until one player was on the cusp of victory. That’s when the table would bring the hammer down and absolutely destroy them. Sometimes games would pass the three hour mark because nobody could break through the arsenal that would be levied against them if they had the audacity to try to win. And this is without talking about players forming an over the table alliance. By the way, one way to fix this issue in Munchkin style games would be to remove players’ ability to play cards on your opponent’s turns. Incentivizing players to spend their cards earlier in the game, since you cannot guarantee you’ll be able to stop a player immediately.

Negative player interactions like these are on a sliding scale. And they can be the best tool to mitigate players ganging up on one another. To put it another way, you can’t stop players from stabbing one another in the back, but you can at least stop giving them knives. When a game allows for too much negative player interaction too easily, it can induce gamer rage. In my Munchkin example, by taking away enemy turn interactions I would be pulling the scale back a step. Games like Wingspan have removed most of the ways players can directly harm one another, instead focusing on how you can chase your win condition faster than your opponents. Less of a battle and more of a race. This is in some ways the opposite extreme from Munchkin, and it isn’t inherently a better mechanic. Finding the right point on the negative interaction scale, as always, is up to you to determine for your game.

The other way you can be cheated by teamwork is the Yang to the Yin of being teamed up against. It’s being failed by your own teammates. Remember when I said League of Legends is the second highest gamer rage producer of all time? This is why. There is an implicit contract when playing a game like League that everyone on your team is going to coordinate to help one another to win. The damage dealers staying as safe as they can while picking up kills, the tanks protecting the frail damage dealers by blocking enemy attacks, the supports existing and actually healing your team. All these elements are usually necessary for you to win. So if a damage dealer keeps dying at the start of every fight, if a tank is too aggressive and leaves the backline undefended, and if no one picks support, you now have a problem. This is easily the most potent of the various gamer rages, and is almost always what people are thinking about when they mention the term. Because being bested by a foe that you never had a chance against, or losing due to a roll of the dice, are one thing. But losing because your own ally was incapable of holding up their part of the deal? The rage gets just that little bit heightened. While it feels bad when you fail, you know how hard you tried. You were there, in your own head, through every decision that led you to defeat. But when you perceive it as someone else’s fault? We tend to be a lot less forgiving towards other people than we are towards ourselves.

In any team based game the potential to be let down is there, but we can ease the pressure a bit. One option is to obscure the goal line. Like giving players secret objectives they are individually chasing. In the game Dead of Winter all players are ostensibly on a team together, however each player is given a secret role to accomplish on top of the general survival mechanic, there’s even an optional traitor mechanic. In this way when someone makes a move you think was a bad choice, it may trigger a lot less frustration since you are aware they are chasing a win condition you aren’t. This could also take the form of a hidden role game like Bang!, where everyone knows there are 2-3 teams, but not which players are on which teams. It’s hard to feel abandoned by a team member if you don’t even know who’s on your team. But the best way to avoid this kind of gamer rage is to design your game mechanics to limit the stakes in team based games. If the game requires too much time investment for instance. I’m fine with a teammate making me lose after 20 minutes of time investment, but if a session takes 3 hours I might feel more upset. But this is only a part of the issue with games like LoL. The games are too long, yes. But also winning or losing alters your player stats permanently, and for the best players in the game real money can be on the line for winning or losing. And that’s only the broadest of overviews, it feels like League was purpose built to cause as much anxiety around winning a match as possible. So when designing your own team-based games I would almost use League as a cautionary tale.

All gamer rage is linked to feelings of unfairness, of hopelessness, of the fact that there are things that are outside of your control, and that some challenges cannot be overcome. It is a manifestation of the human desire to win being crushed by insurmountable odds. As I mentioned in the last article, I do not want to excuse or validate any of the behaviors that people exhibit when they give into gamer rage. I want to understand these feelings, both in the way the design of a game can worsen them, and in why I feel them myself. As a perfect and enlightened being I should be able to take any loss in stride. But I have failed to be gracious in defeat due to every one of these inducers of gamer rage. Talk to me about my Kruleboyz in Age of Sigmar for any length of time, and I can’t seem to stop myself from bemoaning the game’s awful faction balance. You cannot eliminate gamer rage without eliminating the human desire to win. You can mitigate it, steer players away from it, but never fully destroy it. So be cautious in thinking through how a mechanic might affect player enjoyment, but don’t cut everything that could possibly cause a problem at the table from your game. That’s an exercise in fighting human nature, and the shittiest among us will always find a way to make your game unfun. If you have good enough mechanics and a design geared towards fun, you can make a game that people will love.