I started out sympathizing with this guy, and then I got really angry. He's not making much sense. His bullet points in particular are total garbage.
It forces the player to “play designer”. When you have to make a non-strategic choice that has strategic ramifications, it creates tremendous cognitive dissonance. “Should I pick the thing that I think is the best, or should I pick the thing that seems like it would be the most fair, or should I pick the thing that seems the most exciting, or should I just pick the thing randomly?” Ultimately, the player is not free to simply play the game – they must first make decisions about what the game will be. Other configuration options like choosing stages/maps/item settings/timings make the problem even worse. In these situations, the player is under tremendous pressure to skirt some weird line between “doing what’s best for the game” and “doing what’s best for me as a player who wants to win”.
I fail to grasp what he's arguing. I've never thought about skirting any sort of line; my objective is always just to win.
It tends to cause games to be vastly less elegant than they otherwise could be. If you make a fighting game with just 4 characters, what you’ve actually done is create ten different games. Each matchup is a distinct game. For this reason, as well as others, I can only think of a few asymmetrical games that don’t have a ridiculous amount of content. Most asymmetrical games – fighting games, card games, real-time strategy games, etc – have truly insane amounts of content. At the time of this writing, League of Legends has a whopping 115 champions, each with four unique spells and a passive ability, not to mention unique stats. Having to step into a game like that, or even a fighting game with 30 characters, is crazy. It’s way too much stuff to have to learn, it causes individual elements to lose contrast, and…
I see the connection from asymmetry -> a lot more content, but why does that lead to loss of elegance? Elegance is not synonymous with minimalism. I rather like having a lot of content: it makes for a deeper, more enjoyable game. Elegance is one possible way to create an enjoyable game, but it is not necessary nor sufficient.
It generally causes games to be vastly harder to balance than they should be. In videogames, instead of pushing towards “balance”, we instead push towards “an acceptable tier list“. This is to say that there shouldn’t be anyone in God tier(characters so powerful that you can only ever justify playing them), and there shouldn’t be anyone in trash tier (you can NEVER justify playing them because they suck). But we accept everything else. It’s just peachy that some characters are flatly better than others, and the reason we’ve accepted this is because with as much information as we cram into these systems, we just can’t really do much better than that. In fact it’s a tremendous feat that we’re able to get a game with 30 characters to not have a trash/god tier.
This is certainly true. But a badly designed game is a badly designed game. None of the asymmetry games that I enjoy have these kind of brutal balance issues. If anything, videogame asymmetry is less affected by imbalance, because if one character is super weak then you can just not play it, and if one character is super strong, you develop counters to it. See, e.g., A Few Acres of Snow (inherent asymmetry is unsolvable) vs League of Legends (overpowered champions are either banned or countered).
It constrains dynamics. Great games, as they are being played, emerge into a massive beautiful and mysterious web of dynamics – a resource is expanding over here, which is tied to some other resource over there, which is dependent on player one taking this action right now, which is possible because he took another action six turns ago, which in turn opens the door for a huge resource gain for player two three turns from now. Because of this, only a few turns/seconds into most good games, you already have naturally emerging asymmetrical forces at work. You can think of a player’s set of powers and resources halfway through the game as a “character” that grew out of the system.
Videogame-style asymmetry, however, gives players a “quick start”, starting you with “forced” asymmetry that you chose before the game even began (i.e., it’s not a strategic decision). The cost is that the game dynamics are constrained the entire game by a decision you made before the game even began, and they’re forced, not emergent. That emergent character is now constrained by something you chose before the game even began.
Why can't you have both? You can have both forced and emergent asymmetry. They aren't mutually exclusive. It's true that initial selections constrain the rest of the game, but constrain it in relation to what? If you choose a PvZ matchup in Starcraft, you will never see Marines or Command Centers, but you aren't supposed to. You still have emergent asymmetry in many other ways, just set in one particular framework. What forced asymmetry does is allow multiple forms of emergent asymmetry: in Brood War, TvZ has one kind of emergent asymmetry (e.g., Hive timings), and PvP has another (e.g., reaver vs templar switch).
It’s a smokescreen, making it harder for designers to really judge the quality of their system, which results in worse systems. Videogame asymmetry makes a somewhat boring system seem more interesting. If Street Fighter 2 only had one character, Ryu, then I think that the designers would realize that they probably need to make the system itself a bit more elastic and interesting. But, since there is a forced-dynamic obfuscating the system itself – now it’s Ryu versus Zangief, I wonder how those two things push up against each other! – it’s harder to see that the system itself is kind of flat.
Further, there’s a psychological trick that asymmetry pulls on you. While you’re playing as one character, there’s a bit of a grass-is-greener thing, where you imagine other characters to be more interesting. Not consciously, but in the back of your mind, that “wonderment” at not just seeing other characters in action, but how they will interact with THIS character, is compelling in a somewhat cheap way. Even if you’re just going to choose Ryu and never play anyone else, you’re still going to play against other characters, so this effect takes place.
This is garbage. If you remove one of the core features of this game, it suddenly becomes a lot less interesting. We're discussing whether or not this core feature is interesting, not whether its removal results in a meaningful game.
I think that the above psychological effect is highly noticable with the card game Dominion. While Dominion isn’t asymmetrical in the way I’ve been describing, it does have a “customizable” card market. You swap cards in and out, and during the game, you get to combine them and see all kinds of effects happen when they’re put together. Eventually, you reach a point where you’ve kind of combined everything, and then you either need to get an expansion, or quit. So in a sense, asymmetry (or customizable-ness) ends up really just being a strange kind of “asset tour”. You want to see all of the things.
I'm sure we all got mad at this paragraph. Forced asymmetry is a "shortcut" to deep gameplay, because it uses the power of permutations to generate interesting dynamics. But you know what? I like that. I like interesting dynamics, regardless of how they are created. That's what gives games replay value. Judge the outcome, not the means.
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Topic: An interesting article against asymmetry in game design (Read 10126 times)