New Rule

The other day I finally completed my hard-fought, bloody conquest of the planet Kronus. While victory was always certain—merely a matter of time, and a question of in which order my enemies would perish—it was nonetheless a lengthy campaign and a fight worthy of the Emperor’s Finest. But by the time I had purged the melancholic Necrons from their ancient catacombs under the desolate central plains, and had turned my attention to the feeble Eldar huddled in the far Northwestern provinces, I had grown…weary…of war. I tried starting a new campaign as the Tau, and I gave up after one victory.

The game in question is, of course, Dawn of War: Dark Crusade—one of the finest RTS games ever crafted, based on an equally splendid and rich tabletop miniature game, Warhammer 40,000. I love strategy games of all kinds, and I grew up on the PC so I have that lovable habit of going on campaign binges where I play for twenty hours straight and run the table on the hardest difficulty, eschewing sleep, interpersonal contact, and hygiene in my quest for glory. But a long, heroic battle on a schedule like that will wear you out, and however much you loved the game when you first sat down, you cannot help but grow to hate it if you play too much too quickly.

This experience is one of the many manifestations of burnout. No gamer (or game developer) is a stranger to this feeling. The peculiarly addictive and consumptive nature of this entertainment medium, combined with average content lengths of many hours, has the tendency to create a snowball effect that makes these binges possible. And inevitably, players will get worn out by the game and simply become unable to look at it any more. When that happens, they are forced to put the thing away for a while, but too often that “for a while” turns into more or less forever and they never play the thing again.

What I find remarkable, however, is that games seem to have little or no strategy to handle this effect. Games are widely condemned (or touted, if you’re indoctrinated) for their addictive quality, for the often visceral level of the joy they engender. But like a chemical addiction, when players burn out on their favorite games, it’s a case of “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.” Some games seem to find that sweet spot where they manage to stave off the burnout effect or slow it down enough to avoid a real crash, and a precious few can claim to just be so much fun that no addicted player will ever truly forget about it (for example, I’ve had my Starcraft CD key memorized since 1998). For each player, the “sweet spot” games are likely to be different based on what they connect to the most, but in my experience a sweet spot like this is created entirely by accident—independent of the effort or even the awareness of the developer. Granted, developers are always concerned with replayability and game life, but they focus on how to keep players from getting bored—not from liking it so much they play to the point of burnout.

Thus, the very characteristics that make games addictive and wonderful also leads to inevitable alienation. But how can we, the designers, work this problem? We don’t want to tone down the seductive qualities we’ve worked so hard to create, and we don’t want to compromise our design to follow a shallower slope of player engagement that might reduce the urge to binge. The question is how to build a healthy level of play. World of Warcraft, unquestionably among the most successful games ever created, is now internationally renowned for ruining the lives of its most ardent fans (in one case, allegedly causing the death of a child). Clearly, this is not a healthy relationship. But how to you get players to take a break without nerfing the fun of the game? How do you build a lasting interest, one that can endure for years or even a lifetime? How do you nurture the player’s mental health, rather than pillage it? How do you cure burnout?

Tags: Game Criticism, General, The Industry //