Rules of engagement

First, let me say that this is really an extension of my last post (Why RTS games suck) , which was somewhat confused.  

Second, a recap  -- in all of my posts so far I've been banging on about decisions and goals as a way to understand and design games.  What separates a game from other activities is consequential decision making in pursuit of a goal, whether that goal be explicit in the game itself -- even just 'survival', or a goal imposed by the player on the game, such as high-score or the innate goal of continuous improvement.   (see Building little empires)  

If an activity doesn't offer any opportunity for the player to make significant decisions in pursuit of a goal, then it isn't a game.  I guess it could be called a 'toy' or an 'experience' depending on the intentions of the creator.

After more consideration, I have pinned down the problem I attributed to RTS games and Civilization, which I labelled 'micro-management'.  To be more precise, I think the basic problem is a lack of engagement, which I see as the player experiencing a period in the game where they aren't making consequential decisions in pursuit of their current goals. 

I highlight current, because players goals can change during a game.  They can change in nature and they can change in scope.   For the player to stay engaged, the game has to allow them to make consequential decisions in pursuit of their currently favoured goals or they will get frustrated.  They may still keep playing if the pain of giving up is more than the pain of getting through the rough patch.  But the job of the designer is to try to keep the player engaged as much as possible.

So 'micro-management'.  Something can only be termed micro-management if its in the context of there also being a macro.  If there isn't also a macro to consider, then its just management :)   In games where the scope of play goes from small to large, as it does in any game where the goal is to make the players position larger and more influential, then the scope of the player's goals are very likely to change from the micro to the macro as the game progresses.

Micro-management becomes unfun when it isn’t in-line with your current goals. Players want to be making decisions that are consequential to the goals that they have prioritised *right now*. When the players goals are in-line with manipulating single units, micro-management is fun, like at the start of most empire-building games, RTS games included. But if the game basically forces you to pay attention to other stuff that is not directly important to your currently prioritised goals, it feels like being asked to take out the garbage while you are watching TV.  Sure, the garbages needs to be taken out, but does it have to be done right now?  Can't somebody else do it?  Im busy! 

This is the reason that games such as these have 'AI' that you can delegate micro-management tasks to, but unless these are as reliable and efficient as a real player, they won't be used.  In Dungeon Bash, it can get tedious to to guide a team of three through a cleared section, one team member at a time, so there is a 'Leader mode' where the rest of the team falls in line behind a designated leader as they travel automatically to a waypoint.  This is only going to be used if the player can rely on it.  So in Dungeon Bash, if any team member sees any monster at any point along the way, it instantly returns to manual control so you can't get ambushed.

So the take-away is that the game design should facilitate the player being able to focus on whatever their currently prioritised goals are, with as little distraction as possible. Easy to say, harder to do, particularly for real-time games where the scope of the players goals necessarily must change from micro to macro as the game progresses.

 Steven is a game designer and developer at at ARMPIT GAMES (game design blog) 

  currently working on DUNGEON BASH for IOS and Android mobiles.