Stunning Victory…An Economics Approach to Game Design (Part I)
I have always been intrigued by the intangibles in gaming. How can a few pixels on a relatively small screen give us such an adrenaline rush or feeling of tension? How can a few little lights signify the difference between life and death and actually make us feel like this digital dimension matters? It’s all due to the perceived danger, and how we managed to overcome it. Getting Mario over that pit may not accomplish a lot outside of the game, but within its own context, we get gratification from successfully completing events. But a game isn’t just one event, but a series of events. How these events are created and arranged is what I hope to analyze in this article.
To begin with, I should cover the one principle that makes researching this article possible. In economics, utility is the measurement term used when something provides satisfaction to its consumer. For example, if you like hamburgers twice as much as hotdogs, you could say that hamburgers provide you with two utility units while hotdogs provide you with one. You may also say that hamburgers provide you with 200 units while hotdogs provide you with 100. The numbers themselves are arbitrary; the only thing that really matters is the ratios between the various numbers. Utility has no absolute value; the utility of an entity can only have meaning if it is compared to other entities using the same scale.
How does this apply to a video game? Think of an event as a single serving product. A gamer gets satisfaction from an event by experiencing it: this may mean defeating it, experiencing it, obtaining it, etc. If event A is twice as rare as event B, players should gain twice the utility by experiencing it. Simple enough. But what about repeated consumption of event A? Will experiencing event A still be twice as satisfying? Probably not. It may only be ninety, fifty, or even ten percent as satisfying as before. There is a good chance that its utility value may decrease below event B, depending on the exact dynamics of the game.
What does all of this mean in terms of game design? It means that ideally, a game will consist of a series of events that are strategically ordered to provide the most utility from each event. Whether a game has three, ten, or a hundred different events to choose from, the difference between an engaging game and a boring game is how these events are used. Part II will look at a few well-known games and examine how these principles are applied.
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