Why I want to fail

Last week I started playing Zynga's Empires & Allies. Its a Farmville type game with a little bit of RTS sprinkled above it, such as combat (well a toned down, pick-a-party-and-compare-their-stats type of combat anyway). This does add depth to the game, as finally your resources are spent in something other than more resource-makers. This would, in theory, allow the player to choose over which resources to spend and how to do so, as not all investments are guaranteed returns. If you build a battleship, it may sink, and all those resources go down with it.

This is good; this is a meaningful choice, and that's what good games are made of (more on that in a later post). Yet there is a glitch in Zynga's plan (at least from my perspective); you never fail. In other words, you harvest so many resources with so little effort that you'll be hard pressed to get those counters to zero.

In theory this would be a non-issue. The more resources the player has the more he can spend and the happier he will be. Its this logic that's behind this decision; and for the most part of Zynga's audience (the casuals), it works. They keep spending and they keep happy. However to appeal to a more core audience, the game has to allow the player to f@#$ it up...

This is because, no failure state subtracts from the total depth of the game and the meaningfulness of player's decisions. If there is no punishment for making a wrong turn, then the player is able to keep making those bad calls. It doesn't matter what you decide...you'll keep winning. And if your decision doesn't matter, than the game lacks depth. This is not exclusive of casual games; many MMO have the same problem at high levels. Also GTA had this issue, by the end of the game you had so much cash and so few things to spend it on, that the players just ignored it. There was simply no meaning to it.

Its ok to give the player a helping hand; or to make a game easy. Some people just prefer to play relaxing, unchallenging games. And that's fine. Flight Control, Angry Birds and Bejeweled are great, relaxing casual games; but they all have a point where you can lose the game. Never forget to include it.