Design Pattern: Winning and Goals

As the Women’s World Cup rolls forward, I though we’d talk a bit about goaaaaaaals! Or just goals, as English-speaking commentators call them.

Reiner Knizia once said “When playing a game the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.” At first impression, Knizia appears to be saying something about the idea of the magic circle: that the game can only exist so long as we agree on what winning is, even if winning has no meaning outside the game. We decide that the person who scores the most points wins, and that agreement creates the incentives that we all respond to and align our strategies around. However, it doesn’t really matter who wins, right? The winning itself is like a Macguffin in a film. We all simply agree to desire it.

This idea, that winning doesn’t really matter, or that it shouldn’t matter, has been bothering me for a long time, and I’m finally ready to say that it is flatly untrue.

Demoing games at a convention, you’ll quickly observe that the player who wins the game is far more likely to buy the game than the losers. Generally, publishers will instruct demo staff not to win against potential customers. Similarly, designers pitching games to publishers will let the publishers win.

There is no doubt that winning is more fun than losing. When we win, we get a hit of dopamine that is physically pleasurable. And conversely, when we’re losing, we experience real frustration. And yet, we persist with this canard that winning doesn’t matter, or that it’s “only a game.” What are we really saying?

I’ve been considering Knizia’s comment in light of the emergence of a class of games that is very popular among the swelling ranks of new gamers. These games are characterized by lush design, relatively low levels of player interaction, and by their de-emphasis of mastery and competition. Consider a game like Bob Ross: Art of Chill. The subject and title convey up front that this game will not be hyper-competitive. And indeed, the game provides an indirect competition, in which players race to collect sets of cards to complete painting objectives, while considering whether to use their sets to score a greater number of points by painting a feature, or investing in learning a technique that will earn points throughout the course of the game.

It is impossible to play Bob Ross and blow out your opponents. The game’s framework simply doesn’t support that possibility. Inevitably, all players will score points in roughly the same band. Another way of saying this is that the game offers low returns to mastery: the score difference between a novice and a master will be small. This isn’t to say that there is no skill to the game, or that there aren’t satisfying decisions. Yet, it is fairly easy to separate out the bad decisions, and the remaining group of decisions, from average to great, have relatively small differences in rewards. As a result, players can play casually, and score nearly as well as the player who is maximizing every move.

Wingspan, the hit game from newcomer Elizabeth Hargrave, exhibits a similar pattern. Engine-building games are notorious for creating a runaway dynamic that strongly favors players who can discern minor advantages, particularly early in the game. Wingspan neuters the potency of engine-building a few ways. First, only a fraction of the cards have abilities that can be re-activated repeatedly. Second, players choose from an incredibly small number of available cards – three face-up cards, and one face-down cards. There are no abilities to fetch specific cards from the deck or otherwise mine the deck. Contrast this to Deus, a game with a similar stack-activation mechanism, where a player can user their turn to discard five cards and draw ten new ones!

Deus card stacks, a game-end tableau (by Boardgamegeek.com user The Innocent)

Wingspan further reduces the effects of engine-building by escalating costs for playing cards. In addition to the food costs of a card, cards can cost eggs, based on their position in a given habitat. Playing the 4th or 5th card in a habitat costs two eggs – and eggs are expensive because they are worth victory points, and it costs actions to produce them. The advantages earned by triggering your stack of cards and all their abilities are constrained by the increasing costs of assembling them.

In lowering the relative returns to mastery and eliminating direct player interaction, these games focus players on solving the puzzles before them. Though they retain the forms of other games, like turn order, card draws, and resource acquisition, it seems that the purpose of these structures is to limit the rates at which players can make progress relative to one another. In other words, these games wear the clothes of a competitive experience, but play much more like parallel puzzle-solving, in which players make progress at a roughly even, or at least not highly uneven, pace.

As a result of this approach, games like Wingspan, or Bob Ross run the risk of being pleasant time-passers, but a bit boring. Yet, neither game feels this way, and the genre, which might include many roll-and-write games too, doesn’t seem to suffer from this. To avoid boredom, the designs are excellent at providing many small goals and milestones that provide a small payload to the pleasure centers of the brain. Painting a feature in Bob Ross, or playing down another bird in Wingspan give players a sense of progress, an encouraging and affirming pat on the back.

And this is where Knizia’s quote comes back into focus. Knizia himself created many highly competitive, direct conflict games, and games with enormous returns to mastery, from Tigris & Euphrates to Through the Desert to Ra. Yet his notion that it is the goal that matters, but not the winning is an insight that powers a new generation of low-interaction, soft-light games, with diffuse and gentle play patterns that offer players frequent, small rewards, and no major setbacks. And perhaps, they make winning a little less meaningful, and losing a little less stinging, and in doing so, they open the world of gaming to mainstream audiences that aren’t looking to stake their egos on a tabletop conflict. Because we may say that losing doesn’t matter, and it’s only a game. But we all know we’re lying.

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