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Putting Feedback to Use
As a game design schema, Games as Cybernetic Systems is one of the most practically applicable frameworks presented in this book. Cybernetic feedback systems can be wonderful ways of balancing your game to arrive at a particular result. What is wrong with your game: Is it ending too soon? Running on for too long? Is it too uncertain? Not uncertain enough? Is it too easy or too difficult for players to gain an advantage? You can address all these fundamental questions by looking for feedback loops existing within the formal structure of your game's design, or by adding additional loops of your own. In his lecture, Marc LeBlanc boiled down the relationship between game design and feedback systems to a set of design "rules." These rules offer a useful set of guidelines for integrating feedback systems into your design. Here are a number of LeBlanc's "rules" and some of our comments on each of them:
Negative feedback stabilizes the game.
Positive feedback destabilizes the game.
These two observations form perhaps the most fundamental cybernetics insight for game design. As a designer, you should be aware of the ways that your game creates stabilities and instabilities. If your two-player card game lets the most powerful player take cards from the weaker player, then you have created a positive feedback system where the most powerful player will quickly dominate. The game is unstable, and will rapidly fall out of balance. Perhaps the solution is to add more players to the game and allow them to team-up on the player that is ahead. This would be adding a negative feedback system to re-balance the game and make it less likely that a player who gains a small advantage will end up winning.
Although our examples have emphasized negative feedback as a useful game design tool, too much negative feedback can make a game too stable. Imagine a variation on Chutes and Ladders in which, whenever a player is ahead of another player, all of the players go back to the start. Although this rule would certainly add negative feedback to the game, ensuring that no player would get ahead of the others, it stabilizes the game to the point of stasis, so that the game doesn't move forward at all. Finding a balance of negative and positive factors for your game is crucial in designing meaningful play.
Negative feedback can prolong the game.
Positive feedback can end it.
LeBlanc's next two "rules" should follow intuitively from our many examples of feedback systems. Positive feedback can rush a game to conclusion, rewarding a player that is already ahead, as in Warcraft II. Negative feedback, as in the Chutes and Ladders exact landing rule, makes it easier for a losing player to catch up, prolonging the game by reducing the winning player's lead.
Positive feedback magnifies early successes.
Negative feedback magnifies late ones.
These two "rules" follow closely from the last pair. In Warcraft II, an early advantage in establishing positive feedback resource loops can put a player too far ahead of the other players. In Chutes and Ladders, on the other hand, negative feedback at the very end can allow a player that has been behind the whole game to catch up. How can you apply these ideas to your own game design? It depends on the kind of game experience you want to create. There are no universal guidelines for the proper length of a game. Wargamers might play a game for weeks, whereas less hardcore gamers might think an hour is a long time to be playing a single game. Similarly, there are no fixed rules that tell you to make the opening moves or the ending moves the most important ones in the game. Your guide to making these kinds of decisions should be the core principles of meaningful play. Regardless of the length of your particular game, you should strive to create meaningful play at all moments, where the game outcome is uncertain until the end and every action a player takes can help determine that outcome in an integrated way. In general, players that play well should be rewarded with victory. But perhaps there is always a chance for a dramatic turn of events at the end, where the first becomes the last and the last becomes the first.
Feedback systems can emerge from your game systems "by accident." Be sure to identify them.
Feedback systems can take control away from players.
LeBlanc's final few "rules" are crucial. Game systems are complex and unpredictable and you can never be sure what feedback systems might be hiding out in the space of possibility you are constructing. Feedback systems can be great ways of shaping player experience, but as LeBlanc warns, as you incorporate systems into your game that actively reshape the experience, you run the danger of removing player agency, leaving your players feeling powerless. Some feedback systems, such as the last space rule of Chutes and Ladders, are relatively innocuous. But many game players will feel "cheated" if they can detect a game adjusting itself to their play. If that second place car is always on your tail, does it really matter how well you perform? Perhaps there should be limits on the speed of the second place car, so that a truly masterful player can have the satisfaction of driving far ahead of the rest of the pack.
As this last example clearly demonstrates, the most important thing about players and control is not their actual control in a game, but their feeling of control in the experience of play. We explored this phenomenon in the schema on Uncertainty, and it is just as valid here. Meaningful play is, after all, measured by what a player experiences, not by the underlying rules of a game.
