Optimal vs Fun - Designing for Different Playstyles - Extra Credits

In a great many games, the player is given the opportunity to develop their own strategy. From Magic to League of Legends to Warframe to a ton of others. Part of the fun of joining a games world or community is developing your own style and strategies. But what happens when all strategies are not created equal? What happens when your fun cat tribal deck keeps losing to optimized ones the internet has determined to have the highest percentile chance of winning in the current meta? Well, friends, it's then you found yourself right in the middle of the gap between the fun and the optimal. Before we begin, I'd like to point out the amazing journey this episode took to get on your screens today. If you're not familiar, our resident streaming overlord Will has been running a show over on our Twitch channel called the EC Writers' Room. And with the help of all you fantastic folks in the Extra Credits community, he's been researching, hypothesizing, and writing this episode of Extra Credits. And here it is, hot off the presses.

That's right, bud. The community is already helping Will write another episode. And he wanted me to pass on the invitation to all of you to come join him on Twitch to help him choose a topic, do some research, and learn some cool stuff together. Okay, so with the housekeeping achievement unlocked, thank you, let's get to it. First, when we say the word optimal, what we're talking about here is a strategy that succeeds more often than others in a game. However, defining fun is a little bit harder. Or, you know, is it? I mean, if you're having fun, enjoying your time in a game, or getting what you want out of the experience, then that right there is fun. And as Will did research for this episode, one of the things that kept coming up was that having a path to an optimal strategy in a game tends to help players enjoy their play time. But the problem arises when the only way to perform any task, usually at the highest levels, furthest reaches, or at the biggest boss fights, is to play the game as optimally as the game will allow. Because when the player loses out on choice, that can lead to less ways for

them to make their own fun while experiencing the game. So, the challenge then becomes making optimization difficult to achieve and rewarding to pull off, but also fun throughout the process. Just as long as there's been ways to make strategies in games, people have also found the fun in playing less than optimally to add variety to gameplay and increase their personal enjoyment. I mean, just last week Will was telling me about a less than optimal men in shirts tribal commander deck in Magic the Gathering. And during my last play through of Skyrim, number nine, I believe. I don't have a problem, you have a problem. I opted for a cleric type character, which is far from optimal as maces and healing definitely aren't the best choice for early game dragons mining. But, enough theories and definitions. Let's focus on a single example of each end of the spectrum. In games that use randomized statistics to generate loot, like Will's new favorite monster taming game Temtem, it's pretty easy to see that a player will get some Tems, which are better than others. And it's equally easy to see that there will be an optimal strategy for that player using the most powerful Tems based solely on statistics and types. However,

none of that accounts for the player's preference and desire to have fun in a unique way. No matter how much a trainer wants to use a Lumina Tataru or Skrunch in high-level competitive play, they're just never going to be adequate to the challenges of PvP. And right there, the player's fun has been thwarted by the need to optimize their team to meet the circumstances laid out by the game. But, there are also games centered around that gradual quest for optimization. Working for harder and tougher goals built so that only the most efficient, most statistically superior strategies can prevail. And for some people, this very process of optimization is what they find joy in and therefore what constitutes their fun. So, we should be careful when we talk about this topic not to diminish the joy players find in crunching the numbers and finding frighteningly efficient new ways of playing. Heck, sometimes that even leads to redefining the game for its entire player base, kind of like rocket jumping in FPS games. One example of this quest for optimization can be found in a game that many of us here at Extra Credits are quite enamored with, Warframe.

Because each mission has unique challenges, but those challenges can be approached in a myriad of ways. And there's always a goal to get more optimal and more powerful, but what that means and how each player prioritizes it is up to them. Some might choose to be healers, others invincible tanks, and still others damage dealing mages. Each of these roles has many different paths to an optimized solution, and each of those optimized solutions has a few different ways of remaining fun and flexible in the face of the many challenges that the game offers, even at the highest levels. And this is pretty easy to see if we compare the ways that Will and I each play Warframe differently. Myself, I just love being a space ninja. I want to bullet jump all over the place, stab evil aliens with weird melee weapons, and have fun with my friends and Kavat Zoe. Will, on the other hand, has explained to me how he wants to reroll a Riven to get critical chance to push his new Kubrow Brack over the threshold so he could get guaranteed crits, and then build for corrosive and radiation to maximize damage for late game Grineer and armor stripping. And while my eyes may have glazed over during that last part, I think I just

noticed Will's twinkle with the delight of possibilities. And that illustrates the point pretty well. We can both enjoy the game in our own ways, despite how different they may be. Just as there's no one way to have fun or to get enjoyment out of a game, there are also many ways to design with this dichotomy in mind. Some games appeal to those who find their fun in crunching the numbers, making an optimal build, and squeezing every little bit of power they can get out of their play. Others reward flexibility and innovation, creating new ways to play, new absurd memes, and combinations of style. And with that balance in mind, if you can design your game to make the optimal fun and the fun optimal, then chances are that the game will appeal to a wider audience and allow for players to enjoy it in their own way. But what do you all think? Do you prefer games that are more in the crunchy optimized side of the spectrum or more fun and goofy games where you can blaze your own path to a good time? Maybe like me, you're somewhere in the middle. Whatever your preference though, head on over to our Twitch channel and talk to Will about what you thought about this episode. He's probably

working on the next one of these already and playing games with chat while he does it. Hope to see you over there. Legendary thanks to Ahmed Ziad Turk, Alicia Bramble, Casey Musgraves, Dominic Valenciana, Gunnar Clovis, Kyle Murgatroyd, Moulay Chickaoui, and Orioles once.