Activision game designer James Portnow has an article up on Next-Gen where he explores the concept of fairness in games. Games, he argues, must be unfair in some way to make them engaging, which seems counterintuitive. The problem with generating unfairness is to make the game challenging without making it frustrating. Dissatisfaction, he reasons, is brought about by the frustration at being unable to overcome the unfairness, rather than the unfairness itself.
Let us again lay out the standard argument against making an unfair game, “making a game unfair makes it frustrating and a frustrating game is unfun!” In this sentence lies the key to our problem. If we examine this sentence closely we find that it is not the unfairness that makes a game unfun but rather the resultant frustration. Thus our great question becomes: can we make a game that’s unfair and yet not frustrating?
Then, he does almost a 180° turn and decries indiscriminate use of unfairness.
“Of course we’re talking about a dangerous subject here, playing with fairness is playing with fire. There is no easier way to sink your game than to make it unfair. In my studies on the topic I have found dozens of games ruined by unfairness and only a handful elevated by it…but the potential is undeniably there.”
More inside.
It seems to me that there are two different issues here: can a game be unfair and still fun, and can a game be fair and still be fun? It should be painfully obvious that the answer to both of these questions is an emphatic ‘yes’. Games like checkers, chess, and even tic-tac-toe with their impressive longevity clearly illustrate that games that are fair can be quite engaging and stand the test of time quite well. This directly parallels strategy games where a sufficiently balanced (i.e. fair) game will be considered to be quite the achievement. Starcraft, for example, is still seeing significant amounts of play after ten years on the market. Fairness extends beyond strategy games, any game supporting multiple players must be fair. It’s important that as many aspects of the game be as fair as possible, so that the deciding factor of the match is the player’s wits.
Does that leave room for unfair games? Of course! In any single-player game, or in a game played against computer-controlled opponents, unfairness is de rigeur. The computer has faster reflexes, more resources, and generally more everything than you do. But we love the underdog. We love to see a scrappy, no-nonsense hero overcome overwhelming odds to become victorious. The difficulty, of course, is to strike a balance. If a game must be unfair, it must be possible to overcome that unfairness, and there must be some reward for doing so. Although folks will claim to climb a mountain simply because it was there, very few will attempt to overcome some monstrously unfair challenge if there is no benefit to doing so. I am aware of a subset of folks doing obscene challenges in certain games just for fun, but they’re a puzzling minority.