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5 Reasons Not To Pursue Your Dream Game

Many people are tempted to create the game of their dreams when first trying to design games. Please don't! It's one of the worst ideas you can possibly have, and there are plenty of reasons why, of which we'll discuss just five.

1) It won't get finished

If you build a game after an image in your head, the urge to make it absolutely perfect can be hard to resist. Given that nothing will ever be exactly how you imagined it, you'll often need to leave features in an unsatisfactory state or leave them out altogether! If you don't and keep perfecting the little work that you have done, you'll never get to the important parts of designing a game and quit long before you're ever able to release it to the public.

2) Your game will be bad

Chances are your game won't be all you're hyping it up to be. It can be tough to regard your own projects objectively, especially when working on something close to your heart, but it's imperative. If you never pitch your game or listen to feedback, you'll have your sights set on what you want, not what the gaming community wants. Make this mistake and your game is bound to crash and burn.

3) Changes are hard to make

An idea usually forms itself subconsciously, somewhere in the back of your head. This is detrimental to most every aspect of game design, as it should be as conscious as you can possibly make it. One of the results of subconscious design is that your entire game might hinge on something that holds it back, making the process of creating it unnecessarily rigid. If ever you want to change something about a subconsciously designed game, you'll likely need to do more work than you bargained for.

4) It is hard to design

Closely related to reason three is the fact that subconscious design will lead to flaws in how you imagine your game to be. Memory can be a funny thing and if you don't write down what you want to do you can quickly get cornered by conflicting mechanics, plot holes, incoherent play and so on. To create an engaging experience, you need to leave behind some of what you hoped it to be in favor of creating a more solid product.

5) You don't have the capability

If you're a newcomer, game design might seem easy and even an article like this might not convince you of the fact that it isn't, so it's time to turn to technical limitations. Creating a game is not only a matter of designing it; achieving that design is equally as important.

As a programmer, if you don't know your limits, any project you attempt will find itself filed in the bin before long. The reason for this is twofold: both you and hardware are limited in what you can achieve.

The latter might not seem troublesome at first; after all, machines get faster every day. However, if you can't write good code, I can almost guarantee that your game will slow down to a crawl halfway through the development process. On top of that, larger projects pose many unique obstacles. The only way to overcome these is to have experience, so please start with something small.

What should you do?

Game design is not something you should turn away from just because you can't make your dream come true right away. As with everything, learning from others pays off. Try dissecting simple games such as Mario or Tetris. Find out why the developers made those games the way they are and use that knowledge to create something simple of your own.

If you want to become a well-respected game developer, you'll have a long road ahead of you. However, if you take the time to make yourself proficient in design, you'll find that it's a fun experience all the way. Always be wary of overstretching yourself and be aware of your limits, and you'll surely be successful sooner or later.

How the Skinner Box Ruins Fun in Games

“Only design games for the player's profit, not for your own”. After all, if you make a good game, people will want to spend money on it without dubious tactics. It's one of my most important mantras. However, many designers, especially in the mobile games market, aren't so gentle with their customers. 

Often, game designers will use tactics that abuse the human psyche. This needs to be talked about because it's a trap I fear many aspiring game developers will fall into out of ignorance. This article will explain what a Skinner Box is, how it applies to games and what we can do against it.

What a Skinner Box Is

For Free to Play and microtransaction games, revenue is closely related to playtime. To ensure that players keep coming back, the so-called Skinner Box is a common sight in game design.

The Skinner Box in its most basic form.

Originally, the Skinner Box, named after the psychologist B.F. Skinner, is a machine that conditions rats to press a lever over and over by giving out rewards. In his research, Skinner tries out different schemes for rewarding the rat: he schedules rewards only to be released at a certain time or after the lever has been pressed x number of times. For the best results, Skinner rewards the rat after a set amount of lever presses, after a random amount of time or randomly altogether.

The Skinner Box in Game Design

In most RPGs, Skinner Box mechanics are very common. This isn't bad - but I'll get to that later. First, it's important to understand how games thrive by using this theory. The game mechanics I want to talk about are character leveling and randomized loot. 

Level Up!

Let's tackle leveling first. Leveling is a mechanic in which a player is rewarded every now and then for repeating a certain task. The task will improve the player's skill over time until a new level (the reward) is reached. In most cases, the player can see exactly how much they still need to do. This corresponds with rewarding the Skinner Box rat every x presses.

Randomized loot is next up. When a game hands out random items after completing tasks, it's, of course, random. The player can never see how much time it'll take them to obtain a good item (the reward). They don't even know for sure that they will. This lines up perfectly with rewarding the rat completely randomly.

When the Skinner Box Is Used Incorrectly

In game design, using B. F. Skinner's findings can help us greatly. His research provides us with a way of reliably pacing the player, making sure they are ready for a difficulty increase; or strengthen the feeling of joy when they get something they desire. There is nothing wrong with supporting engaging game play with knowledge of the human psyche.

What Skinner Box games can do.

There is a big problem though. The Skinner Box works on its own. Recently, game designers have caught on and are starting to use it as an excuse to create bad or boring content, while relying on Skinner to make players stick around.

The point I'm making here is that games need to be engaging and fun for the player. When using Skinner's method as a way to save money on content creation, you're doing it wrong. Players should come back to your game because they want to, not because they're compelled to by the way you make your game; that's a bad habit.

What Can We Do?

Now that you know the dangers of the Skinner Box, you can do something about it, both as a designer and a gamer. Being aware of how this method works helps a lot. 

As a gamer, you can now see when you're being exploited. When you want to go play a repetitive game, ask yourself why. If the answer is because it's engaging, go on. However, if all you can come up with is that you want to grind a few extra levels, maybe you should reconsider just leaving the game alone. You won't regret it!

As a designer, you can review your usage of Skinner's research and adjust it to be supportive rather than exploitative. After all, using it to make your game more rewarding for the player isn't a shame. Using it to rake in subscriptions or microtransactions, however, is. Use the Skinner Box sensibly!

Sources and External Links

- B. F. Skinner
Wikipedia
- A Brief Survey of Operant Behavior
B. F. Skinner Foundation
- Different Types of  Reinforcement Schedules (pdf)
National Professional Development Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders.