Hurricane Katrina was a disaster that killed over a thousand people, and after-action reports described the response to it as a failure to prepare on many levels.

Several video games present procedural rhetoric that dis-incentivises preparedness. It comes across as a prank played upon the player, that the player either cannot or should not plan ahead, that the future is a fog of undiscovered country, essentially revelling in jump scare mechanics.

It seems to me that a better way would be to specifically reward the player for actively engaging in foresight and planning for the future. So that the moment of arrival can be a great reward for the player who did engage in such activity.

This is potentially an interesting design topic - hopefully people keep it design-focused instead of a bash-games + defend-games debate. Thanks for posting it!

I'm not a heavy gamer (hours-wise), and haven't particularly noticed situations where games discourage preparedness. Could you give some examples?

I, in discussion with other gamers, sometimes lament how some games don't make resources (like health potions and ammo) scarce enough to be worth conserving, and throw so much resources at you that you're almost always at max ammo / healthkits.

What are some examples you've encountered where games discourage preparedness, or prank the player for being prepared?

What are some examples you can provide for rewarding players to be prepared?

Other than rationing your resources, or grinding exp, what other examples of preparedness can players do in the average game?

Games should be challenging, but unless the game is upfront that it's requiring you to ration your resources, it shouldn't maliciously punish a player for not being prepared, if the player is able to just improvise and overcome the same challenge. So success over the challenge itself can't be considered the "reward" for preparedness... at least not the only reward.

If success isn't the only reward, what other ways do you suggestion rewarding preparedness verses merely rewarding for success?

If I overcome a challenge by improvisation, and the reward for overcoming the challenge is an item, I get that reward for overcoming the challenge regardless of whether I improvised or prepared.

I think thinking-on-your-feet (improvisation) also is worthy to be rewarded. Button-mashing, bullet-spraying, stumbling-through-the-game is different from spur-of-the-moment and skillful improvisation.

I see three paths to overcome challenges:

- Clever improvisation (Maybe should be rewarded extra)

- Winging-it: Brute force/stumbling-through/spray-and-pray/button-mashing

- Foresighted preparedness (Maybe should be rewarded extra)

How would you detect and reward foresightedness over a player just winging it?

How would you detect and reward improvisation?

Note: For I'm not saying a player "just winging it" is a play-style that should be discouraged or that it's a playstyle that's less deserving than other playstyles. For the purpose of this discussion, I'm assuming the game design of a specific game is trying to promote foresightedness or skillful improvisation as part of that game's gameplay-experience.

Note: For I'm not saying a player "just winging it" is a play-style that should be discouraged or that it's a playstyle that's less deserving than other playstyles. For the purpose of this discussion, I'm assuming the game design of a specific game is trying to promote foresightedness or skillful improvisation as part of that game's gameplay-experience.

Is it actually useful to try and force the player into a play-style they do not favour?

My general train of thought is that you actually want to reward the spray-and-pray gamer with more resources, because he needs them more than a careful planner, and restricting them doesn't increase his enjoyment of the game...

Note: For I'm not saying a player "just winging it" is a play-style that should be discouraged or that it's a playstyle that's less deserving than other playstyles. For the purpose of this discussion, I'm assuming the game design of a specific game is trying to promote foresightedness or skillful improvisation as part of that game's gameplay-experience.

Is it actually useful to try and force the player into a play-style they do not favour?

Sometimes, yes. Not every game can satisfy every play style and appeal to every player, so I would argue that it is sometimes more financially convenient or artistically important for indie developers (or even larger developers) to focus real deep on a specific audience, especially if your game is trying to convey a certain experience that you are trying to get across. I think this is what The Witness is trying to do. I haven't played Journey (no PS3 - wish they'd port it to Windows and Steam), but I'd argue one of the strengths of Journey is the experience they are trying to simulate/stimulate. If a specific play-style is needed to help generate that experience, and it's not going to alienate too many of your customers, it might be worth it to go all the way and create a "masterpiece" for that specific sub-sub-sub-genre or niche.

I don't pretend to be much of a game designer. I feel like my real strength is in crafting worlds, not gameplay mechanics. That said, the primary experiences I'd like to encourage in my own games are awe/majesty (especially coming over a large crest of land and seeing the world sprawl out before you, and knowing you can visit any point you can see), exploration and discovery (finding areas that just feel special, or just being in a world and knowing that you *can* go wherever you want, without feeling like you are *forced* to, and without feeling like you are missing out from every road you don't take), danger and overcoming challenges (more specifically, sudden unexpected and intense danger, and then the thrill of surviving and living through it), and adventure/journey/travel (tying the 'danger' with the 'exploration' and with goals and purposes in a story which is just your part of a larger story of the world you are in. Hero's journey-type experience).

Those are just some that I'd like to target, but there's a huge array of experiences that games can convey. To throw out a number without actually considering or calculating, I'd say there are hundreds of "experiences" (for lack of a better word - there's definitely some intertwining with 'emotions', but experiences are more general than that, and are distinct from emotions. They're more like events that often invoke an emotional response).

My personal opinion is that games are best used to convey an artist's experiences, and that 'immersion' can be greatly used in service to experience. If a specific play-style is needed to strengthen immersion in aid of experience, or if a specific play-style is needed to convey or help convey the experience directly, I think it should be heavily considered.
Just enforcing a play-style because it happens to be my favorite play-style would be a bad idea, but using playstyle as a trade-off to gain in another area is definitely an option that should be on the table for designers.

I feel like I need an appendix here, even if just to solidify in my own mind these thoughts which I've never put to words before.
This isn't directly related to the topic, but since it's about game design and just a side-note, maybe others will find it useful inspiration for creativity.
[rollup=Sidenote]
awe/majesty = Awe is the appreciation of encountered majesty. A mountain is majestic. To appreciate the mountain's majesty, you are in 'awe' of it, until you've fully soaked all the majesty that is there to be appreciated.

exploration and discovery = Discovery is one of the goals of exploration. To explore, you never want to wander without a purpose. You explore, looking for something. You don't always know what it is you are looking for, or even if it exists, but you explore to see what there is to be discovered. And discovery is when you encounter whatever it is to be discovered. This is the difference between searching (looking for a specific thing), and exploring (looking for what there is to be found).

"Not all those who wander are lost" - Tolkien

danger and overcoming challenges = The thrill of danger is not the danger itself, but how close you came to sucumbing to that danger. The more you encounter danger, the more numb you get to it, because the more confident (whether well-placed or not) that it is not a thread and that you aren't at risk. The thrill of danger is the perceived risk more than any potential reward. So it's that split-second, that half of a moment, where you were stalemated in battle, or approaching the cliff, and then suddenly you know the tide has changed in your favor. That is the overcoming - the coming over the crest of the hill of danger, and knowing you made it to the top, and seeing success on the other side, even while the danger is still ongoing. The moment where uncertainty and the risk of loss turns into certainty and confidence of success.

adventure/journey/travel = 'Travel' is merely a tool of a journey. It's part of the journey (and often a boring part, at least for me personally). Journey is traversing a set of nodes towards a goal, maybe across land, maybe just a mental or spiritual journey. Maybe the nodes and goal are known in advance, or maybe not. Adventure is when the potential of danger or discovery is mixed into the journey, making it more than just a travel. Journeys have purpose, not all adventures do, so with adventures that don't have purposes, the goal of the journey is in service to the desire of adventure (danger, risk, discovery, or whatever else).[/rollup]

I'm not into art just "for the sake of art", but feel that art has value for what it brings, not merely for what it is. I don't fall into the "toiletseat hung on a wall is as much art the monalisa" crowd.

I wouldn't sacrifice gameplay mechanics just to be "artistic", but if I choose to use art to bring value to the player by providing and sharing experiences, then I'll sacrifice gameplay mechanics in service to those experiences, where I feel the tradeoffs (such as enjoyability or accessibility) aren't too costly.

My general train of thought is that you actually want to reward the spray-and-pray gamer with more resources, because he needs them more than a careful planner, and restricting them doesn't increase his enjoyment of the game...

Agreed. Intelligently detecting that a player is low on ammo and providing more is a good idea, and reducing the amount of ammo available on harder difficulties is also something worth doing, because the constraint on the resources is where alot of the enjoyment comes in for me personally.

I'd rather have less ammo and healthpacks, instead of the usual "throw more enemies at the player", and instead of the usual "same enemies, but x4 the damage". If there was some way to detect the player's preferred play-style, and ramp up the difficulty in a way that the player enjoys more (More enemies, less ammo, player moves slower, enemies do more damage or move faster or have more health), that'd be a huge step forward in some game genres.

Is interesting to note that some games add extra ammo on harder difficulties, because they add extra monsters - which is an important consideration as well.

For some games, it's almost like we should offer players the opportunity to choose their preferred play-style just as we offer them a selection of preferred difficulty levels. If we can learn to dynamically modify difficulty to adapt to the player (which we are increasingly close to doing), and also dynamically alter the pacing of the challenges (also very close to becoming common-place), then we could just present the play-style as the only option the player needs to mentally consider.

I think what AngleWyrm is getting at is that many games rely on uncertainty for their sense of surprise, rather than on good writing, clever design, or emergent artifacts. They keep the player guessing by manifesting the unguessable, rather than being genuinely clever. They use a series of small-scale, cheap plot-twists which may be surprising, but are ultimately intuitive and unsatisfying. Thus, the player's lack of ability to plan ahead, and a feeling of always catching up to the latest information.

Without citing specific examples, the worst offenders throw you up against odds that you would only be prepared for through either serendipity or an obsesive-compulsive drive to exhaust all previous areas, you (being unprepared) die, you load a previous save knowing what's ahead, and you then seek out an advantage before coming back.

I think that meaningful choice is always an interesting vehicle for gameplay, but the amount of meaningful choices to be had is limited when a game becomes a series of unanticipated events. More-so as the period between the choice and the outcome increases. I'd much rather face and prepare for a set of plausible contingencies, than respond to events beyond my control or anticipation.

Alas, there are very few games that reward the player for undertaking preparations. Survival-Horror often rewards conservation of resources, which is not quite the same thing. Building games sometimes reward preparation in various ways: I'm rewarded for building my nuclear power plant on an island in SimCity when it had a meltdown. I'm rewarded in RTSs when I build an outpost to monitor enemy movements or key routes. I'm rewarded in Minecraft for securing a safe-zone around my dwelling. But even the modern RPGs like Fallout or Morrowwind, which should be a last bastion of forethought (as their Pen and Paper forebears are). don't reward preparedness in ways that amount to much more than lip-service.

I'd much rather face and prepare for a set of plausible contingencies, than respond to events beyond my control or anticipation.

Oh my god this. That was really insightful, what was said earlier about keeping you guessing by doing the ridiculously improbable. I think what you're describing is a good antithesis to that.

It's what I really like about games like Dishonoured where you know that there are two or three "styles" of play, and the mechanics cater to you adhering to those styles.

The only problem with this is that the player is railroaded onto one of a few paths, as opposed to having actual mechanical freedom.

It's a tricky issue. On the one hand you can enhance the experiences you know that most people are going to have, or spend the time fleshing out a system that allows for more outcomes, but fewer tools.

More directly to OP's point, The Witcher has always rewarded if not required planning. It also does a really good job of not allowing you to predict encounters based on metagame elements, i.e. they're giving me lots of loot, so there's probably a tough fight coming up.

I think you could put it simply like this: I'd rather be given the capacity to prepare myself, than be prepared by the game.

If you take a game such as Minecraft, you'll see that it tries to balance the effective randomness of procedurality with some clear rulesets for what to expect within a certain range of possibilities. In some areas, Minecraft succeeds expertly at it. In other areas, Minecraft is absolutely horrendous.

Minecraft is rather good at giving the player some pre-emptive ideas on how difficult the next tiers of challenges are. The Nether area is fairly brutal for a poorly geared player, but Ghasts that shoot fireballs with their distinct screams is a tell-tale sign that you've just entered an area that'll eat you up if you don't tread very carefully. So the player will prepare a little, and then he'll move on out. But if he then chooses to fight the neutral zombie pigmen, he'll quickly figure out a new tier of difficulty and retreat back home. Assuming that he knows how to enchant gear, find diamonds and make diamond gear, the player is able to reach a point when even the Nether is effortless.

That last sentence, regretfully, is also a testament to Minecraft's greatest weakness. You can't realistically play Minecraft to the fullest unless you also use the Minecraft Wiki website as a supplement. With such a daunting number of crafting recipes and no clear ways to actually learn them (except randomly putting items in the crafting window and trying to "figure them out"), it's a prime example of how Minecraft fails to present the player in-game with his boundaries. In other words, Minecraft has a lot of content that is rarely, if ever, going to reveal themselves to players who don't also use the Wiki effectively. Now, using the Wiki is no effort at all, but I just think that it's sloppy for any program to rely on other programs in order to work to its fullest.

Personally, I'm a great and strict fan of gameplay-promoting lore and tutorials. At the same time, you don't want to tell the player something he should be able to figure out quickly on his own. For instance, I like the idea that players are forced into gameplay bottlenecks that promote imagination and trying to figure things out. But if there's no way for the player to realistically figure something out, it's going to be a diminished experience for the player. Not only that, but there's going to be a lot of superfluous, unused game design floating around (which btw is also true for these "infinite" procedural worlds that nobody will ever be able to explore even 1% of).

Will Wright got it right. Possibility space is the key. But not just what the player is potentially able to do (with no ways of learning about them), but specifically what the player is actually able to do because he or she knows exactly where those boundaries are (or is guaranteed to learn about them at key progression thresholds).

"Prepared-ness" is a weakly descriptive term, which makes it hard for me to parse out exactly what you mean. I'm going to interpret it as "anticipating future events and taking specific actions the player would not otherwise take so that he or she can meet those challenges".

I think that the big issue with preparation in games is that it requires operational knowledge of what will happen, which is trivially easy to gain by failing and then reloading, at which point any possible preparations have been revealed and will be undertaken as a matter of course (as opposed to contingency planning). With the complete knowledge already gathered, prep becomes indistinguishable from the thing for which you are preparing.

Giving this information in advance is tricky. If the danger is clearly and conspicuously presented, then prep is more or less a simple chore, not a choice. If the dangers are too vague, then prep is impossible. If I have to happen across some character or sign to know of the danger, or the danger is cryptically hinted at, then I have to take arbitrary actions just to have the opportunity to prepare.

Procedurally generating situations for which players can prepare sounds difficult to me. How does the game analyze what the player is "trying" to accomplish, if anything, by taking a given action? How many possibilities can the game throw at the player, and how clearly can patterns be discerned? How bad are the consequences for the player wrongly anticipating the future? Going with the bullet-scarcity example above, a panicky bullet-sprayer will find more spare ammo to replace what is used and never need to prepare. A bullet conserver, on the other hand, will have an inventory generally more filled with ammo and so will lose out on other items they can't carry as well as the plentiful bullets there would be if not for their own caution.

For me, the best mix of factors to model preparation in a game might be:

-Some degree of choice in what dangers I'll face

+I can go to Thief Hideout Mountain or Zombie Canyon

-Clear information, complete or otherwise, on what I might encounter

+I'm headed to Zombie Canyon, suggesting there might be zombies in my near future

-Successful preparation requires some thought on my part about what might work

+I have to draw a connection between some item, ability, or other game feature and the danger I expect so that I can plan what I think will be effective

+Preparation does not involve having everything laid out. To prepare for Zombie Canyon, I should not be required to speak with Zeke the Zombie Slayer and suffer through his associate's course on zombie-killing to prepare, learn how to prepare, or be able to prepare

-Preparatory steps which are used for more than just facing one obstacle and/or are only partially effective against that obstacle

+A healing potion can restore HP for my character or hurt zombies (an item like "Zombie Repellent" is too obvious and too specific to feel like a choice I can make)

+OR a healing potion can help against zombies in a way other than just hurting them (such as, slowing them down or making their attacks weaker)

-Forced choices between competing dangers and their preparatory steps

+Some constraint prevents me from prepping for all or a wide variety of events at once, meaning I must always make an explicit choice to be ready for one danger or another

-Significant, but not extreme, outcomes whether I've prepared well or not

+I miss out on something cool, or have a much more difficult time, if I have not prepared for Zombie Canyon before going there. The game should not end, nor become unwinnable, because I prepared badly

+Preparing well provides something cool, or makes clearing an area easier, but does not provide such an incredible benefit that it becomes de facto mandatory to prep

-A variety of well-defined situations (or combinations of situations) for which I can prepare

There's been a couple misconceptions I'de like to clear up. Procedural rhetoric refers to the procedures that a player performs within the game, and the things that the developer conveys with them about how reality operates or should operate.

Such as learning that stealing everything that isn't nailed down is a customary and normal behavior in most RPGs. Or going from place to place killing anything that moves. Or that your boss will betray you and turn out to be a villain.

The other misconception is about what is being designed. Several arguments have been put forth that living a purely reactionary life, merely responding to the immediate environment, is a personal choice or preference. The perception that this behavior is chosen or preferred is entirely because of experience. And guess where that experience comes from? It comes from games designed to promote that behavior. Game design is at it's core about designing human behavior and interactions.

I've been asked to give more specific examples, so let's look at the 4x space game genre. Most of them will let you design a ship, but none of them will let you choose a sane destination. For example, Endless Space only gives you a limited set of destinations, and your research on what type of planet to colonize will be started before arriving, without knowing what to choose. Some suggestion as to star color is given, but the probabilities don't reflect enough knowledge to make it actionable.

Or let's look at the FPS genre. Stumbling across supplies just randomly scattered about. Don't fret, you'll get all you need for free when you need it, with no significant effort on your part. Rather a strange behavior to ingrain into people, wouldn't you agree? Or how about the business of turning players into scavengers, looting every garbage pail and back alley in search of a tiny little bit of supplies and collectible shiny,. That's a little...odd, isn't it?

Or let's look at the RPG genre. A is generically better than B is better than C. It lacks the very basics of what constitutes a 2-player game: Taking into account the disposition of the opponant.

How about the insurance industry? Make it like a backwards lottery ticket: Let the player "sell insurance policies" to generate revenue that he can use in the game, and then when a disaster hits, his ability to respond effectively to it can impact future attitude to (and thus value of) the insurance system. So if I'm running a SimCity and I get a bucketload of cash by selling insurance against earthquakes and fires and godzillas and UFOs, I have to use at least part of that income to actually prepare for the associated catastrophes.

If disasters happen, I'm accountable for the damages caused, and so it's in my best interest to minimize those damages by invest my fat stacks of insurance premiums into countermeasures, so that the event won't break the bank. It would encourage me, as a player, to build safeguards into my design.

The system, in a perfect world, would just give the player free money, but it would punish them brutally if they squandered it and the big one hit. Sure, you could buy ten mansions and forty yachts with the revenue from those "sucker bet" insurance premiums, but if you're ever called upon to pay out, it could break the bank. Now, you have a good reason to protect your city/sims/empire/civilization/constituents, because you're facing a direct threat to your own assets if you get kicked in the butt.