Barriers and Ceilings

I wrote the bulk of this post the day after creating this blog, but keep putting off publishing it because I've been pretty verbose here. I decided that it's not acceptable to delay publishing a post for a whole month in the hope that it'll rewrite itself, so here it is - Please forgive the wordiness.

I've been playing a lot of Tribes: Ascend lately, and before that I played Quake Live a whole bunch. Though I like to think I'm pretty good, there's always someone better. That's OK though - it's a great thrill to test my skills against great opponents, regardless of the outcome.

I'm going to write about rocket jumping later on, stay tuned.

The term 'eSports' is often used to describe the competitive side of videogaming, and high-level competitive play has been seen across many genres and gametypes, from high scores in Donkey Kong, a solo game in which gamers try to beat the reigning champion's high score, to the recent surge in top-level MOBA competitions in which teams compete in real time and in the same gamespace. It's a broad subject and one that I'm not broadly experienced with, so I'm going to talk about some particular design metrics that I feel sufficiently familiar with to discuss in detail, and why they're important for all games, but particularly in competitive ones.

First I'll describe a relation - Player Skill vs. Player Success. Skill and success are obviously very broad terms, so let's just say that 'skill' in this context relates to any talent, understanding or training that is relevant enough to the game in question that it would positively impact a player's success. Success, on the other hand, refers to the actual result of a competitive match. People can make mistakes, be off their game or distracted somehow which may negatively affect the player's success despite being otherwise skilled enough. These values don't really need to be deconstructed for this article, but skill is something I'd like to discuss on another day.

This is a pretty important relation when you consider the goal of most competitive gamers - To engage in fair competition such that the best player or team wins. The competition would be meaningless if the winner was determined by some factor other than player skill.

Success is not solely tied to skill though - there are factors that augment the actual result, like the previously mentioned mistakes or distractions. The goal of a successful eSport game should be the reduction of these factors which cause the relation between skill and success to deviate from the expected result. With this in mind, let's have a look at two things that I feel are strongly related to this issue.

I'll define Entry Barriers in this case as the difficulties that a new player might face when trying to join a game's competitive scene. These barriers can include such simple problems as hardware requirements, but I'm going to disregard things like that and assume that a player is already running the game and joining competitive matches. What other barriers could there be? In this case the kind of entry barriers I'm talking about are the different skills required in order to play the game at a reasonable level of competence. In a game like Quake, that means knowing the game rules and becoming comfortable with the controls such that the player is able to compete against the other players, rather than his or her controller.

Quake's a pretty good example of a game with fairly low real entry barriers (though the skill level demanded of even low-level competitive play is surprisingly high), because its input scheme is very simple. An input scheme is defined in this case as the actions required of the player to make the player's in-game avatar do something. In Quake, the basic input scheme is to use the W, A, S and D keys to strafe the player's avatar in four directions, press Space to jump, move the mouse to look around, and click the mouse to shoot. There are other important input mappings but these are the most common. Each of these buttons is mapped 1:1 with a very simple action, but if you watch people play the game you'll see them perform these actions together as though it were second nature. It's pretty easy to become comfortable with the controls of the game, and you can be running around the map shooting at people with minimal trouble.

Next is the Skill Ceiling, which I'll say is the point at which a player is sufficiently skilled at a game that there is very little room left to improve. A player who has run into this 'skill ceiling' would have a very strong understanding of the game's rules, environments and strategies and be extremely skilled at controlling the game. It's not a hard ceiling, of course, and neither is the entry barrier. An example of this would be if someone has figured out the ideal moves for any situation in Tic-Tac-Toe, and plays the dominant strategy correctly every game, then they would have hit the game's skill ceiling. This exists similarly in videogames, but it's generally a subtler effect. Imagine if Quake only had one weapon - It'd certainly be a different game, and you might argue that the skill ceiling were lower because the tactical options offered by other weapons had been removed.

Dominant strategy in Tic-Tac-Toe
From Wikipedia, adapted from XKCD

In competitive gaming, it's critically important that the person who is playing best on the day is the winner. If this is not the case then the integrity of the game and the competition is compromised, and the winner's glory is diminished. For this reason a game should have a very high skill ceiling - so that we may better distinguish the differences in skill between top-level players and accurately see who the best competitor is. It's also very important that a game's competitive community be vibrant, have a stream of newcomers and be well-funded to promote itself. To this end, it's ideal to have a low barrier to entry, as it allows more players to join the fun and potentially rise through the ranks to challenge the old kings. A stagnant community will die out, so a low entry barrier can help extend a game's lifespan as much as a high skill ceiling can foster high-level competitive play.

For games in general, these metrics are important too. A game that's easy to learn but hard to master is engaging for a longer period, and can foster a community of players helping one another, making instructional videos and discussing the game - All of which can generate word-of-mouth awareness for the game.

Skill Ceilings and Entry Barriers are things that I'll talk about sometimes on this blog, so I figured it'd be a good starting point to link back to later on. When I think about the games I want to make, the mechanics are generally focused around giving players a set of simple tools (low entry barrier) that can be used creatively for varied and skillful play (high skill ceiling). In a broader sense these 2 figures are often discussed by players, but without using these terms ("I just can't get into it", "Once you know X you've basically won"). I hope I can put what I learn from playing eSport games to good use in my own games someday.