So, a failure mode with buffs is when they present obligatory inscrutable math problems. Buffs aren’t the only thing that does that - this is an example of a more general failure mode in games. Jay Wilson, game director for Diablo III, calls it the “spreadsheet moment”:

There is a point I call the ‘spreadsheet moment’ where the variables have become so complicated that the average player can’t make a decision about their character or an item in their head. They require a spreadsheet, not for perfect optimization, but just to get an idea of what they’re doing. I’ve been known to map out abilities for a game I love in a spreadsheet for optimization. As a designer I want that level of depth in a game I make, but there is a point where you dump so much math on a player that they’re no longer capable of just making a decision and running with it because it’s what they like. When that point occurs we all portal back to town and alt-tab to the internet so someone who is better at math can make the decision for us.

Gamers are smart. They can feel when the math has gotten so complex they can’t process it in their heads, and the reaction is to assume that there ‘must’ be a clear correct singular decision. We desire that correct decision because humans like to apply order to things that seem chaotic. When we’re that sure of a singular right way to do something, no one wants to be the dummy who did it the “wrong” way. Unfortunately when players enter this mindset they’re no longer making the choice they want to make, for the sake of fun, but rather the choice they feel they have to make for the sake of being right.

I would argue there’s more going on here than just the complexity of the math - as I mentioned, Valkyria Chronicles grades and rewards you based on your efficiency, making it increasingly painful to make “wrong” decisions in combat - you’ll have fewer resources for the next mission making it even more important to avoid “wrong” decisions in a self-reinforcing cycle. But in a game like Borderlands an enemy drops the same loot whether you kill it in five seconds or six, so it’s less important to pick the absolute best gun. So even though the math on which guns are better is arguably more complex than the math on whether you should buff your soldiers, I’m much more comfortable eyeballing the guns and proceeding based mainly on feel.

And the clarity of the math matters a lot too. Explicit numbers with obvious meanings can still interact to create the “spreadsheet moment,” but if the numbers or their meaning is obscured, things get worse. As Shamus Young put it:

A good system is clear and understandable right away, but will reveal interesting trade-offs once you get to know it. (Diablo 2)

A boring system is straightforward and there is always a single, optimal answer. (Most BioWare games, at least until they abandoned gear-hoarding altogether.)

A bad system is one where you have no idea what decision you’re making and you have to do a bunch of homework and run a spreadsheet before you can know which hat you should wear.

A horrible system is one where you have to read the wiki just to know what options you should be researching. A system where you have over twenty attributes and most of them are synonyms. A system where you can read the wiki, a forum thread, and a leveling guide, and still not really have any idea what you’re doing because nobody agrees on how the stats work, which ones might be bugged, or if all of their calculations were made obsolete by the latest patch.

It’s easy to miss this amongst the other complaints, but there’s another key factor here as well - “interesting trade-offs” are part of a “good system” in Shamus’s nomenclature. He said this as part of a discussion of stats in World of Warcraft, where he argued that complex stats were particularly obnoxious because they generally boiled down to a simple trade-off of “efficiency versus survivability”. In his view (which I agree with), “you should never have more complexity than depth” and should present “decisions [which] are easy to understand but difficult to make” instead of ones where you have to do a bunch of research or math to find the unambiguous but uninteresting correct answer.

Extra Credits refers to the difference in these kinds of decisions as “calculations” (which are fundamentally math problems to optimize specific variables like DPS with options that can be cleanly quantified and ranked) and “incomparables” (which are more qualitative trade-offs like between a stealth or or combat build with no objective best option). With incomparables, players must make an actual choice based on personal preference and play-style - but we run into problems when games “mask calculations as incomparables”. Trying to make a calculation more interesting by making it more complex doesn’t stop there from being an objectively correct option - it just makes it harder to tell which one it is.

What Kind of Mage Are You?

I made these some years back as results for a hypothetical personality test.

Mostly I wanted people to understand what I meant when I told them I was a Blue Mage. :)

Buffs are cool in concept (and I like Green Mages) but I feel like they are rarely implemented well.

One of my favorite examples of buffs done badly is Valkyria Chronicles. That game has a “command point” system that allows you to take a certain number of actions per round. A point can be spent to have a unit move and attack, but you can also spend points to execute “orders.” These include special options like evacuating fallen allies and buffs like increasing a soldier’s damage against certain enemy types. The trouble is, despite just being a numerical calculation it’s not at all obvious when it’s better to use an order to increase your damage output and then attack versus saving the command points to just attack multiple times.

This is because of two problems. First, the UI doesn’t explain how much difference the buffs actually make. If the numbers were clear you could do the math and figure out when the buffs were worth using. Cosmic Star Heroine leans heavily in this direction and is a great example of how to do this well. It has an unusual combat system in which most abilities can only be used once before they need to be recharged - the recharge action then recharges all of your depleted abilities. But it costs a turn, so it’s usually worth using most or all of your abilities first. Many abilities have buff-like effects or other interactions and all the numbers are clear, so it’s a complex but feasible analysis problem to figure out the optimal abilities to use in what order for the current situation. Buffs are thus an interesting tactical option that are often but not always correct to use.

The other problem with the Valkyria Chronicles approach is that the buffs are expensive and short-lived, meaning it’s often a close call whether they’re worth using even if you did have the numbers. World of Warcraft, at least back when I played it, was an example of the opposite approach here - most buffs were cheap enough compared to their duration that they were always obviously correct to use even if you didn’t look at the numbers. This meant they were more of a rote chore than a tactical decision but the result was a system that encouraged class diversity and balanced teams. If you had a Mage in your group everyone would have buffed Intellect, if you had a Priest everyone would have buffed health, and so on. These buffs might as well have been automatic passive bonuses, but they achieved their goal without creating any confusing decisions or making you stop playing to solve a math problem.

Games like Valkyria Chronicles where you can choose to trigger a short-lived no-numbers buff instead of taking an additional action give the player a math problem that is both uninteresting and obscured. There always is an optimal choice, it’s just hard to suss out. So you can either interrupt the action to look up and crunch the numbers or play on knowing you are often not doing the best thing - which is frustrating in games like Valkyria Chronicles that grade and reward you based on your efficiency.

In practice, I usually avoided using the buff orders. Having a unit move and attack was more fun than picking a buff from a menu anyway.

One of my pet peeves is when games require attention without providing true engagement. Usually this is through rote actions that require no skill or decision-making and might be entertaining or novel once but must be completed over and over again. It’s a very clear way for a game to show that it doesn’t respect the player’s time, which is one of the fastest ways for a game to lose my interest.

Some games seem to be built around these kinds of interactions. Pokémon Go turned out not to be a good game to play while walking the dog because the Pokémon encounters and PokéStop visits required too much attention despite having no real depth to them. Similarly, Pokémon Quest requires you to sit through its expeditions without providing much control over them.

I assume that what’s going on here is that difference audience segments have different complexity thresholds for gameplay to be engaging. For a kid, maybe the semi-interactive Pokémon Quest expeditions are entertaining. For people who want to take frequent breaks while walking, maybe Pokémon Go makes more sense. These games might not be bad, they might just be not for me, and that’s fine.

What puzzles me more is when this shows up in a game where most of the gameplay is more engaging. It feels similar to the endgame polish problem where testing just doesn’t uncover how tedious a particular repeated action becomes over extended play. Interface friction often falls into this - for example, buying fortune cookies or updating your Dream Town in Animal Crossing: New Leaf are things you’re encouraged to do on a daily basis but have several slow and unecessary steps that get really old when you’re doing them every day. I feel like when designing repeatable interactions in games, it’s important to ask, “How will the player feel about this after doing it a hundred times?”

I checked out Harmonix’s recent Amplitude remake. There’s a Campaign mode that’s apparently fifteen songs long, which is more than I wanted to commit to, so I went to Quick Play instead. I played a song, enjoyed it, played another song, kept enjoying it, and kept playing. There was a pleasantly smooth difficulty curve and I had a good time getting slightly better with each song and then moving on to the next slightly harder one. I kept thinking, “Okay, just one more song,” playing it, and then thinking that again.

And then I hit a wall. There weren’t any songs anymore. Or rather, there were, but I wasn’t allowed to play them. They were locked, and I’d have to either play Campaign mode or repeatedly replay the few songs I had access to in Quick Play in order to unlock them.

I would have thought that Harmonix would have learned by now after so many iterations of Guitar Hero and Rock Band not to lock songs in a rhythm game, but here we are. And just… why? Why do this? Why slam down a roadblock and prevent me from enjoying the game? If I felt like I needed to practice the easier songs before moving on to the hard ones, I’d do so. And if I felt like committing to a fifteen-song campaign, I’d do so. In the meantime, why stop me from trying out the songs individually and progressively, when I was having fun doing that?

My response wasn’t to switch over to Campaign mode or grind on the songs I’d already unlocked. My reaction was to put the game down. It’s been a few weeks and I haven’t come back to it. I don’t know whether I ever will.

As glad as I am to see big-name game designers say that accessibility doesn’t compromise their vision (God of War’s Cory Barlog and VVVVVV’s Terry Cavanagh are the ones I’ve seen so far), and as much as it makes me respect them as creators, as a player I kind of… don’t care?

Like, if a couple movie directors came out and said they didn’t mind when people watching their movies at home pause them, that’s all well and good - but if they said the opposite, I’m still gonna hit pause when I have to go to the bathroom. I don’t really care if I’m breaking with their vision.

It’s great that they have a vision and all, but I’m the one having the experience and I’m going to use my own judgment and my own self-knowledge to improve it whether they want me to or not.