Week 5: Journal

Fairness

The question of “fairness” in games is quite an interesting one, as I think it is often hard to distinguish between what is being “unfair”, and what is instead an attempt for the game to be challenging for the player. In single player games this concept seems rather strange, as usually the whole intention of the game is to provide the player with ever increasingly difficult challenges, which they must over come in some particular way e.g. puzzle solving, skills or knowledge they have acquired throughout the game. Games that are super crazy hard to beat can often be seen as designed to be challenging for a reason; providing a specific experience for those dedicated or obsessive enough to complete them. Even games that are near-impossible to excel at from the first level can just be seen as having a steep learning curve, who wants to sit through boring tutorial levels anyway? Ok so what about the games that have some obscure little choice early in the game that, if decided wrongly (unbeknownst to the player), can cost you the game many hours of gameplay down the track? Well, maybe they are trying to teach you a lesson, or just plain going for replay-value. It’s also important to keep in mind that many single player games come with “difficulty levels”, for when players feel that the game is being “unfair” towards them. Now of course, I am being a little extreme here, and I’m sure there are ways that single-player games can be considered “unfair”, I’m just pointing out that the distinction between fairness and difficulty is hard to judge.

Multi-player games however are easier to examine. Seeing as there are now multiple players, fairness simply becomes the idea that all the players should be given the same opportunities. Yet, whilst it seems easier to define fairness for multi-player games, it can be difficult to discern between unfairness and other factors. For example, consider a game of Chess: just because a certain Player A always beats Player B, does not necessarily indicate that the game is unfairly biased towards A. The simpler explanation is that A has more experience than B – that is, he is a better Chess player. It is this possibility for vastly different levels of expertise in all players for virtually any game, that causes the most challenge for multi-player games, and indeed often is the basis for the multi-player experience (with less experienced players attempting to improve their skills, and people of equal experience testing their skills against each other). It is up to the game then, to provide an equal opportunity to each of these players. If we reexamine the Chess example, and find that A had always been going first as the White side, then we can see that the game is perhaps unfairly giving an advantage to Player A each time, and we could consider this game to be unfair. If however, the players alternated who was White and who was Black, then we can see that it is fair again. Obviously playing as White might be considered as an unfair advantage, but it is negated by sharing the circumstance between the players – and seeing as unfairness in multiplayer games can in fact provide for a more interesting experience, this idea of sharing the circumstance is widely used to restore balance to games. For example, swapping teams/sides of the maps in many online games.