- Player Agency: A common early childhood game model is the roll-and-move, something like Chutes and Ladders (or Snakes and Ladders, if you're a Brit). This kind of game creates a structured experience ideal for young children, but it isn't really "played" in any meaningful sense. Instead, it plays itself without the need for any outside decisions. There are no choices to be made, and so the game lacks player agency.
Providing meaningful player agency is actually tougher than it seems. Just providing choices doesn't suffice. For example, suppose you're on a game show where you get to pick two unmarked doors. One of them has $50 randomly behind it, and the other has $500 behind it. You get to choose the door, but since the selection is based on zero information there's still nothing to "play". You might as well flip a coin. Now suppose, instead, you have two marked doors. Does that provide agency? Not really, since now the correct choice is obvious. That's a trivial choice that might as well be automated and made by default.
But suppose that behind the marked door with $500 there's also an angry rabid badger, and someone just handed you a knife. Now you have meaningful agency, since the choices are nontrivial to rank - based here on your own self-assessment of badger-fighting prowess!
Agency requires intermediate levels of information. If you can't see the chessboard (you have zero information), deciding whether to move the knight or the pawn is just a coin flip. But if you're playing against a deterministic computer program that you wrote yourself (you have perfect information), then you can anticipate how every set of moves will end the game and select only winning moves. There's some optimal intermediate level of information that maximizes agency.
Agency also requires intermediate levels of granularity. If an entire battle is resolved by a single dice roll (low granularity) with odds representing the power of each side, there are no decisions left. But if you need to allocate the firing pattern of each gun on a battleship, then nothing short of a supercomputer will allow you to intelligently predict the outcome of shifting your aim a dozen inches to the right. Again, there's some optimal balance between these extremes.
Some games try to hide their lack of agency by creating the appearance of agency within a narrative that distracts the player from the substantive content of the game. (In RPG circles, this is called "railroading".) This is not always a bad thing, since it can support other aspects of the game that are primarily concerned with theme and narrative (see verisimilitude, below). But this kind of agency deprivation needs to be carefully monitored to make sure that it doesn't violate the social contract of the game, a special problem in the context of RPG and computer games where the social contract often involves a third party (either as referee or as content provider).
- Emergent Complexity: You're playing a computer RPG. At level 1, you fight grey rats with 10 health, and do 3-5 points of damage with your dagger. At level 100, you fight neon pink mega-rats with 10,000 health, and do 3000-5000 points of damage with your ion sword. Curses! You've been duped into running on a treadmill!
A very simple game can involve repeating a single task until the point of mastery, but most complex games need a sense of forward progress that rewards you for good task completion. You start in Civilization with a settler caravan, and found a city with a militia defending it. After building for a while, you have a dozen cities, and an army of phalanxes and chariots. A while after that, you have wonders, and ships, and irrigation, and dozens of mechanized armies waging war in every direction. You're playing a game that started simple but became complex while operating under a fixed rule system. This is usually a highly addictive experience.
Complexity can develop in terms of the raw scale of the game. Once a difficult task is mastered, the game asks you to do it three times, all at once. But it's important that the numerical scaling be nontrivial. If you make the same attack with a hundred star dreadnoughts as you do with a single star dreadnought, then the game is just making you roll extra dice after you make the same decision. Adding ships to your star navy needs to open up new tactical possibilities to make the mechanical cost of running the larger naval more than a narrative novelty. A better (but more difficult) model is to allow larger-scale play to include new rules that are inclusive of the old ones, like a strategic scale map that forces you to move around squadrons of 4 to 12 dreadnoughts each using a custom logistic system to engage some of them in coincident battles as part of a larger war in a persistent world.
Another form of complexity is depth of the decision matrix. So, say, initially your warrior has three abilities available each turn: basic attack, dodge, or parry. After you gain a couple levels, you now have two more abilities to choose: power attack, or sweep. Maybe some of these cost you more energy, or can only be used occasionally. The deeper menu of choices forces you to balance more objectives. But if one ability dominates over the others, then it quickly smothers the complexity and reboots the player to a simple game. This is a terrible problem in computer MMOs, where players constantly search for a way to collapse their personal decision matrix back into an "instant win button".
The most difficult form of complexity to manage is dynamic inconsistency, the way in which the relative value of game objectives changes situationally. This is a fairly abstract concept that takes a number of concrete forms, like the changing weight of risk versus reward based on victory criteria. For example, if your opponent is about to win the game on the next turn, it suddenly becomes very appealing to make a high-risk desperation attack! There are many more subtle examples of the same phenomenon, serving to disrupt the usual equilibrium of the game.
- Verisimilitude: When used in the narrative sense, this word denotes the faithfulness of a story to the reality it depicts. In game terms, however, it's pretty important to realize that a second layer of simulation is often present. In development of a game's theme, it is often the case that game events are intended to simulate not a reality, but a fictional world (from literature, movies, etc) that is intentionally fantastical. This creates a strange paradox of the game needing to be faithful to something that is intentionally unfaithful to reality. In many cases, actual "realism" can instead become the enemy of that desired fidelity to source narrative, and should be avoided.
The standards for evaluating the quality of a theme's development is another aspect of social contract. If you call your game "Swords and Sorcery", then you suddenly have a player assumption that your game will allow them to replicate the feel of a Howard novella. Every element of the game, not just the title, makes some intangible contribution to shaping the social contract: art, writing style, game mechanics, even the manual's font.
The overall quality of these presentation elements is often less important than their ability to define the social contract in ways that makes the outcome of the game feel satisfying. It's acceptable to have the majority of your local gaming group's Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu adventures end in a spectacular catastrophe. It's probably less acceptable these days to create a Pathfinder campaign that slays multiple characters in the first battle (as my friend Jeff was complaining to me over Christmas break). And if you're a nostalgic DM who wants to haul out an old tournament classic like Tomb of Horrors, it's essential to find ways to communicate to your players that they're about to play the first kind of game, not the second.
Diminishing returns (DR) is the idea that a particular player choice, if repeated, eventually yields a lower return on investment of resources. Including a DR mechanism is an easy way to balance a game's economy (allocation of resources toward objectives), when it doesn't naturally emerge as a result of competition between multiple players. Many solo or cooperative games absolutely need a strong mechanism of this sort, and will become "broken" if it isn't present. A simple way to enforce DR is create sub-linear relationships between resource investment and outcomes.
Mechanical diversity, the creation of dissimilar rule subsystems for handling dissimilar situations rather than using a uniform design model, tend to boost the verisimilitude of a game at the cost of additional rule complexity. I am usually in favor of this model, so long as the subsystems are comparable in complexity to one another and the enthusiasm doesn't go overboard. Modern game designers often look askance on this approach, but there's something very satisfying about the idea that a land battle should involve a totally different sequence of actions from a naval battle. It also gives the game a rawer, more organic feel that creates flavor and excitement. It also tends to promote asymmetries in dynamic inconsistency, where the player of one strategy responds rather differently to an event than the player of another strategy would.
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