Payoffs: Why You Bother
Posted by Rob Herman at January 29th, 2006
If you think about any game you play regularly, you’ll think about certain things that you really like about the game. They’re the reason why you play it, the reason why you enjoy it, the reason why you come back. I’d like to call these the “payoffs” of a game.
One of the cool things about playing a wide variety of games is the wide variety of payoffs you get to enjoy. I’ll eventually talk about things like having multiple kinds of payoff in a single game, the pacing of payoffs, and which games I find don’t much like because of their lack of payoffs that I enjoy. For now, I’d like to share some examples of their tremendous diversity:
Scrabble: The satisfaction of finding a really high-scoring play, or a neat word, even if it doesn’t score you all that many points. Boggle has the same thrill when you find good words, and that game also has the satisfaction of finding a bunch of little words.
Chess: The exciting search for a good play; the thrill of seeing your plans come to fruition. The witnessing of familiar-and-yet-new patterns as they unfold on the board. A lot of players enjoy the feel of nice, heavy pieces, and the feeling in your hand of capturing an enemy piece. With intricate, complex games like chess, you get a feeling of accomplishment from finding strategies and patterns that you would have missed a few months ago. Blitz chess concentrates less on the beautiful patterns and more on the intense rush of bloody engagement.
I’ve never seen Go played blitz-style, but it otherwise has many of the same payoffs, even though the game is very different.
Poker: Probably no other game features such intense anticipation so many times during a session. This makes the thrill of victory incredible and even when you don’t win, the adrenaline is pounding and you always leave excited!
Trivial Pursuit: This isn’t one of my favorite games, and I have several complaints about it. I’ll discuss them later, but the payoff is clear: You get to feel smart when you get an answer right.
Settlers of Catan: A truly remarkable game for its fine balance, mixture of luck and skill, and variety of different payoffs. Getting the resources you want is exciting, either from well-positioned settlements or trade. You can take pride in watching your little empire grow. For some people, cooperation is a payoff in itself, and those people love to form mutually beneficial arrangements. Others enjoy aggression and the thrill of the struggle to be on top. For those people, the chance to impede your opponents is a payoff, as is the chance to form a “mutually beneficial” arrangement that just happens to benefit them the most.
Iron Dragon: This is an Empire Builder-style railroad game. Watching your rail network and pile of cash expand is great, of course, but I’ve talked to a couple of people that really enjoy the chance to play and draw with the crayons used to mark your track.
One of the most important pay-offs for many games is making plans and seeing them come together. Chess and Go obviously fall in this category, but Puerto Rico, Power Grid, Tigris and Euphrates, and Taj Mahal are also perfect examples. For this to be the dominant payoff for the player, two factors are necessary -
1. A large number of strategic decisions. You must frequently ask yourself, “how am I going to win the game?”
2. A large delay between making the decision and seeing the results.
When these two conditions are prevelant, the payoff to the player is the feeling of control over a chaotic situation, that the setbacks and accomplishments of the game are all within a framework that ends in victory. It also gives these games the crushing poignancy of coming up with a plan that is almost good enough. It also allows for a type of conflict between players I call, “what’s going on, anyway?” Two players may look at the board, and with the bias of how they want things to go, each decide that they are winning. It is probable, depending on the level of chance and uncertainity in the game, that one player’s plan is actually flawed, and that he needs badly to reconsider quickly. The advantage is then to the player with the clearest idea of the actual game-state. This is a huge factor in games like Puerto Rico and Taj Mahal, since you want to convince your opponent to take a course of action that he thinks benefits him most, when it actually just plays into your hands. All without excessive tabletalk or ass-dragging. Which leads into the topics of in-game communication and signaling, which I recomment this blog consider sometime.
All of your points are well-taken. I don’t think a large number of strategic decisions are necessary. In fact, you might make only one–the choice of a general strategy for the rest of the game–and spend the rest of the game making smaller-scale decisions to execute it correctly. For instance, in Puerto Rico, you need to decide early if you’re going to go for an hacienda/factory strategy, a ship-lots-of-corn strategy, or something else. Switching strategies mid-game is just too costly. Luckily, the game is short enough that if your plan falls through, you can try again later.
One of the marks of a really good game is that more than one player can feel they have the upper hand (or feel they’re in big trouble) at the same time. I don’t know any bad ones that fit that description, and it certainly adds a great element of tension. I’ll try to expand this as a full article sometime.
Well, I would disagree that that’s how you should play Puerto Rico; I think the opening part of the game is about flexibility and gathering information about which strategy to commit to, and when. In general though, there are games where the strategic element is decided at the very beginning, or even before the game. In CCGs, for example, you already know how you plan to win before the first card hits the table.
You missed one aspect of a game that can contribute to why people enjoy it, and I suspect it’s because it’s not something you personally look for in a game, but is one of the reason’s I enjoy many games, including Trivial Pursuit.
The social aspect of a game (beyond cooperation in the game play itself), is how much conversation and social interaction you can have with the other players without slowing down the game. The more strategic the game the more irritating it can be to have someone chatting at you instead if taking their turn or letting you take yours. Games like Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, and even Settlers of Catan all allow for side conversations and are ideal for larger groups, especially if there’s a mix of gamers and non-gamers.