Games that Devalue the Player

I wanted to start a new topic on this, rather than derail the Roxxon thread that Charlie started. I almost sat down to write this up as an article, but I thought it'd be more interesting as a conversation here. Fair warning: this will go all the way around the barn, so be patient with me while I tie all these strands together.

So to begin with, yesterday Matt Colville (whom you might know if you play a lot of D&D) posted this video:



This touched on my main gripe with Pandemic Legacy, a game I enjoyed overall. It felt like I was playing exactly the game and experience as decided by the designers of the game. As the architect of my own experience I feel like my own role in the game was diminished. I was a participant in someone else's vision.

Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. But as I watched Matt Colville's video above, I realized that he was talking about something similar. Most games are just a pile of components until you sit down to actually play it. It's the experience that is the actual game. Pandemic Legacy pushes against that as hard as it can. It's not like the experience exists without the players, but by adding the legacy elements, the one-use components, all of that, the game is putting very narrow parameters on how I can enjoy the game. This is becoming more true of games today, I think. There seem to be more and more single-use board games, like Gloomhaven, TIME Stories, and Roxxon. (That last one isn't exactly single use as I understand it, but the parameters on how to enjoy the game are apparently of more substance than the game itself, which seems purposefully finite. I also know that the games aren't like one-shots, but they have a finite amount to offer the player.)

I've heard good things about all three of those games, especially the first two, and I'm sure they are awesome. But there seems to be this assumption that because the experience is strong enough, we are willing to allow the designers to put limits on how a game can be played. And maybe a lot of people want this! I daresay it produces a smoother experience, and that's not a bad thing. But I think it's starting to diminish one of the key advantages that table games offer.

So let's tie this back to Colville's video. In RPGs, most players will assume that if something in a system doesn't work for your group it can just be changed. The rules and components of the game are not the actual game experience, which means they can be tweaked to get whatever outcome you like. But we're starting to see a lot of games that are pushing against that. The designer has a much stronger say in how the player experiences Pandemic Legacy than how I experience, say, Talisman. I feel like this pulls us away from something vital in the medium.

So what do you all think? Am I overstating this situation? Is this even a thing? Am I completely off my rocker here?

I think there's room for both approaches in the marketplace. Different strokes for different folks.

I have a friend who dislikes open world video games like GTA. He doesn't like that level of freedom; he likes being put on a path and sticking to it. I, on the other hand, like as much freedom as I can get in a game.

I haven't played any of the games you mentioned, though I have played vanilla Pandemic. But my perception is that you are talking about two different kinds of games with limited replay value. Some games offer specific scenarios that can be played once, and I can see where that inherent limitation shifts the focus from player agency to story primacy. But a legacy game is actually responsive to player decisions, giving them an impact that outlast a single play of the game.

Though outside the scope of your post, I am sometimes frustrated when a game offers dimensions that players are reluctant to explore. For example, there should be more bribery happening in games like Dune or Spartacus, but players are usually too focused on the more conventional uses of resources and currency.

yeah, maybe this is different strokes for different folks sort of thing, but it goes back to why I'm really not so much into boardgames these days. Perhaps it's a cycle I'm currently in, but with minis games and rpgs there's so much free form that the overall experience is richer. We played Man O War (a competitive game) and we made many houserules and such on the fly, but no one sweat it. Minis and RPGs seem to push the players into building their own experiences and narratives.

The opponents in a boardgame aren't really going to be cool with you making up rules on the fly or deciding some components will or won't be used.

Conversely, in videogames, I'm not interested in free world exploring games at all. The last thing I want is to sit in front of a screen for 40+ hrs meandering around in someone else's world. Here, I prefer tight confined rules and spaces (MK, SF, SSB). I compete and get out.

You're right on the money, in fact it's the main reason why I gave up on traditional board games for more or less 15 years. Role Playing games, when GM'd properly, can provide a tremendous amount of freedom of action, assuming you have a DM that is worth his salt. Board games by their very nature are much more bounded and structured.

One of the issues I have in particular with worker placement is that you have an exceptionally tight set of options, and those disappear as the turn moves on. I find myself making moves that are the general consensus of everyone at the table, and at that point I'm mailing it in. I disengage from the play. Even a game as bounded as Nexus Ops gives me a lot more freedom than Pillars of the Earth or Age of Empires III. There's a spectrum of course, one of the reasons I look for games with a map and with freedom of motion of your pieces. That's an indication to me that the ruleset has a more open nature to it.

Now, I've been in RPG adventures where the GM wasn't offering any freedom. You did what he told you or you got nuked, or frankly you didn't even have that option. But I chock that up to incompetence, not the nature of the game. Successive versions of AD&D got more structured, but they've wisely eased off of that in their most recent version.

And for the record, I play wargames with an old guy that more or less changes rules mid-stream, whenever it suits him and he can achieve consensus. A little crazy, but we sure as heck ain't worried about what the designer intended!

As far as I'm concerned this is a fundamental facet of a game's design, one that doesn't have a measurement associated with it, at least not until you write your article.

I'll give you a purely Euro comparison: Feld vs. Knizia. Feld creates machines. You basically strap into that machine and make small adjustments to what the machine is doing. Knizia creates a road and gives you a place to get there. Get there however you want. It will usually end up by interacting with other players.

Games are products. In an attempt to encourage repeat business, their design is constrained in certain ways.

Sometimes they are designed to be single use products, like toilet paper.

Other games are a type of fiat currency (I don't even know what that means, really, it just sounds smart), such as collectible card games, or expansions for Dominion. When we were demo-ing Dominion in SLC, Jay Tummleson (who we really should have just nicknamed Mr. Tummnus) said that the designer had thousands of cards in the wings. I replied, "It'll be like printing money!" and he then smiled very broadly.

So I would say that artificially constraining replayability (and player agency) is a conscious economic decision.

I like different games in different ways. I like other media in different ways as well.

When I read a novel or watch a movie I also have no agency. The story will unfold a given way, and that's fine. That's as expected.

In some videogames there is a story that I'm committed to. I may have some options along the way, but I'm going to be tied to the plot the designers intended. Part of my losing patience with Skyrim was that the plot of the game was stupid and kept intruding on me. I didn't care about these two idiot factions, but they kept bugging me. So I quit. On the other hand, I've played Borderlands 2 several times and it's about as fixed a plot as you can get. The plot of Diablo 3 is best ignored and No Man's Sky has none. It all depends on what I'm in the mood for at the moment.

Same thing with boardgames. I like to have some narrative in a game, but if I want to create an entire story for its own sake I'll play an RPG. Note that I haven't played an RPG in about 10 years because that's not something I want to do. Nor am I interested in making a bunch of plastic army guys fight. But those options are there for those who want them, as are games in which there really isn't any narrative at all, and you're just trying to alter the game state to a finished one in which you most successfully achieved some goal.

I don't really see what the thesis is here. Yes, there are a few games out there offer limited replay value or space in them for players to go off the rails. There are others that don't. Neither type seems to be endangering the other, and if you're looking or not looking for either type you're going to be okay. I wouldn't say that either type values or devalues the player, just that they're intended to appeal to possibly different types of players.

I'm not sure it's fruitful to draw a dividing line between designs that are open (emergent / player-realized) or restricted (an authored efficiency maze to VPs) other than simply acknowledging the distinction. Going beyond that to posit something is more essentially "correct" or better for the hobby runs down the rabbit hole of generalizing personal preferences with evaluative scales that skew toward your own approach to gaming.

On both ends of the spectrum, though, I think a successful design gives the players a means of expression, then builds off of and amplifies that preferred expression. I think that's the backdrop that spans the divide. You can be just as expressive in a well designed Euro VP engine as you can in an open minis game. The types or styles of expression may be different, but that pleasurable reward loop can be found on either side. If a design noticeably fails to tap into this, and agency & expression fade in the service of just watching a game playing itself, that's also a more fundamental problem than the emergent vs. authored style.

You can see this to the same extent in scenarios within games. Some are written well and play out richly and some fizzle while marching you straight to the gallows where fun dies. I've had that experience thinking " I'm actually doing nothing but maintenance here", flip this push that rinse repeat oh look ending script...yawn.

mythjae.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/fated-3/

This is what games should be.

The map is not the territory, but all maps convey their designers' views.

I never played a legacy game. This is the reason why. I always felt they would railroad me just like almost all computer games do, even those that call themselves sandbox. Because if you can't produce the content, there is only content if the designers put it there first. And this goes for most boardgames as well. They provide a framework for my actions. The rules are supposed to enable me to do stuff and put boundaries on what I can do. If I want less boundaries, I'll play an RPG. If I want to ride a system to destroy my opposition, I'll play a boardgame. But both of these get more interesting if I play them with people with interesting thinking. When I found these people I stopped playing videogames.
Games that Devalue the Player. I like that phrase, it's very catchy. But if it is supposed to mean "devalue by diminishing options and cutting down freedom of choice", all games do that to varying degrees. That's the foundation of them being a game, rules. So I'd say we need rules for comparison and framework, but how much I want of that can differ largely from day to day.
I would agree that more games tend to be single use only, for me and other snobs who like their games to offer multiple layers. If I play the latest hotness, it is interesting for one game and then we've seen all that it does and move on. There are still enough great games coming out that need more investment and those are so much more interesting. Because I play with a group with some history. I know I am lucky in this regard and there have been other times. But if the group agrees on hating a rule, we change it. No matter what the game. We have all been playing games for long enough to form an informed opinion on what a designer tries to achieve by a rule and have no problem to decide we don't need that in our game.

Sagrilarus wrote: I find myself making moves that are the general consensus of everyone at the table, and at that point I'm mailing it in.

I hate this so much. I have a total of maybe 30 decisions in this game, and someone wants to help by making them FOR me? Come on, at least let me lose due to my own incompetence, not win due to yours.

Sagrilarus wrote: And for the record, I play wargames with an old guy that more or less changes rules mid-stream, whenever it suits him and he can achieve consensus. A little crazy, but we sure as heck ain't worried about what the designer intended!

One of my life goals is to be that guy.

I tend to be with Legomancer and Frohike on this. The boardgame world is growing and there are people who are into stuff that bores me, but that doesn't bother me at all, it increases my options. Wasting a whole evening on discussing one Robo Rally option card is still more fun than playing anything by Stefan Feld.

I'm glad I posted this as a thread, because there's obviously some perspective I was lacking.

First of all, I think what a lot of you are arriving at is that we are just seeing the emergence of a different kind of game, essentially a new genre. I think this is probably accurate, rather than it being some kind of overall trend where games are becoming less about what the players bring to the table and more about what the designers intend. I'm guessing that it's really hard to design something like Pandemic Legacy or TIME Stories (I'm not a designer so I wouldn't know), as compared to other games. That keeps it from being something that's easy to ape, like say worker placement. To be clear, it's not a genre I'm much interested in, but that's how it goes.

For that matter, the very idea of classifying a lot of disparate games like this says more about me than the individual games. It's really a grouping that makes sense only in my head, since TIME Stories, Pandemic Legacy, Roxxon, and the like aren't really all that similar.

Secondly, I am mentally drawing a distinction between stuff like Pandemic Legacy, where a specific outcome is desired and the game funnels you in that direction, and stuff like heavy Euros, which constrain choices but don't really seem as concerned with the outcome to me. That could well be an arbitrary distinction.

It probably just comes down to the fact that I kind of resent a designer assuming that their experience is so good that I'm willing to buy a pricey game with a limited amount of plays. That's an emotional response more than a logical one, to be clear.

One thing you seem to be glossing over Nate that's really important in some of these games, is the fact that the designer can change the rules. While you may not want to play through someone else's story, their story is more free to develop from an integrated standpoint. The free-form narrative you're building is all kind of above the board and ethereal, completely open to interpretation. Their story is codified with reinforcing bits of mechanical twists. This allows for an experience that you will never get from a standard adventure game such as Arkham Horror or whatever.

san il defanso wrote: IIt probably just comes down to the fact that I kind of resent a designer assuming that their experience is so good that I'm willing to buy a pricey game with a limited amount of plays. That's an emotional response more than a logical one, to be clear.

I suspect it's similar to that but not quite. I think the key is:

When people have the money to buy many pricey games how do their games look like?

I think this kind of game is a direct consequence of gamers both having more available income and being more willing to spend it on games. People have far more games now than they did in the past and I think that affects game design. For example, the reduced lenght of the average boardgame seems the most clear consequence of this fact: In the past people had few games so they needed them to be long to last them an evening. Now gamers have a lot of games so if they play, say, Dune or Civilization they won't have room for their other games.

I once wrote an article called "The invisible hand of game design" in which I argued that these economic realities have shaped game design through the years. It's not a great article, I wasn't as good of a writer back then and it's hard to read, but I argued that cheaper, more abundant games have promoted the following changes:

- Lower player requirements: Groups seemed to be far larger in the past. Many Avalon Hill games seem designed for 5 or 6 players and D&D parties with 8 players were common. I think having more games around allowed these groups to downsize into several, smaller groups.
- Games need less involvement (Time, work, rules-reading, variant-testing, difficulty tolerance etc.). If only have one game having to put a ton of effort into it is fine, as you are forced to play it a lot. If you have several games having to put a lot of effort into them is much less appealing.
- Games are shorter. If you have an evening to fill but only one game chances are that game will take 4 to 6 hours. If you have twelve, they don't need them to be that long. You'll probably prefer something shorter.

In other words. If you were stuck in a desert island and could only play one game you'll probably get something like Civilization or D&D. But if you have a ton of games the idea of them being non-replayable doesn't matter as much.