Overbalancing

I can't remember the detail, but I remember my angst. The devs had once again removed an enjoyable feature of gameplay from their at the time genre defining MMO EverQuest, and quoted "balance" as their reason. It was a bemusing explanation, as anyone who played the game understood the feature neither gave nor removed advantage to anyone who discovered it. All it had done was create enjoyment for those who found it, and the game was poorer without it. Whatever balance the devs were referring to, it had suddenly become the antithesis of fun.

There have been many such moments since then. As a developer I have suffered countless rounds of similar angst relating to games I've worked on as fun, delightful, enriching features were progressly culled from them in the name of "balance". Dogmatic adherence to a subjective quality no-one can define when pressed for a clear explanation has now become an unwritten rule of "good" game design. Everything must be tunable, have purpose, and fit in with everything else in a mathematically predictable and controllable way, or it is cut or truncated. It seems there is no longer room for the extravagant detail and delightful uselessness and asymmetry that so often is the hallmark of memorable gameplay.

This misguided notion of balance is homogenizing the goodness out of games.

Mathematical evenness does not equate to good gameplay. It may work on a spreadsheet, and it may make the game systems more controllable, but it's making the games themselves progressively bland and disatisfying. And they are all beginning to feel the same.

Games are about human fun, not mathematical nicety. Evenness may be easier to control and understand, and it fits more easily into Microsoft Project, but that does not make it compelling. Fun is not a symmetrical, smooth, and tidy thing. In fact, it is more often than not the chaotic and surprising that delights and inspires. You cannot systemize fun, and you cannot quantify it definitively, despite what the theorists would like to believe. "Balance" might make nicely encapsulated code, but in my experience it also often equates to dull and uninspiring play. Real fun, I suspect, involves a certain amount of mess.

And mess by its nature is UNbalanced.