Game Balance Course: Mastering the Art of Balancing Games

Game Balance and Probability

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  Game balance is a crucial aspect of every game project, regardless of whether it is a serious game or requires extensive game writing.
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  The perception of balance in a game is just as important as the actual reality of balance, as game designers are ultimately crafting an experience for players.
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  Game balance can be achieved through a combination of designer intuition, playtesting, analytics, and mathematical modeling.
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  Understanding supply and demand, inflation, and trading systems is important in game design, especially in MMO auction houses and Euro games like Settlers of Catan.
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  Balancing games involves understanding both independent probabilities (like die rolls) and dependent probabilities (like drawing cards from a deck) to create a fair and engaging experience.
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  Using a transition matrix and probabilities, Markov chains can help determine the possibility space of game states and the likelihood of being on certain spaces in a board game like Monopoly.
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  Finding the right balance between challenge and advancement in games requires trade-offs between danger, time, and story progression, while also understanding the impact of small, frequent rewards and random reinforcement schedules.
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  Creating a metrics plan for a game can help determine its balance, even for small passion projects like a simple board game, by recording data from playtests.
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  Game theory is a powerful and fascinating tool that can be applied to analyze games and solve real-world balance problems.

Ethics and Impact of Game Design

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  Game designer Sid Meier shared his experiences with players finding probability in games to be wrong, highlighting the controversial nature of this issue.
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  "Should we be honest with our players and do the probabilities of the way they we say we're going to or should we you know fudge our die roles to conform to and reinforce our players' flawed understandings of probability?" - Ethics of game design and whether it's okay to lie to players is a thought-provoking topic.
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  The use of reward schedules in social and mobile games, as well as the gambling industry, raises the question of where the line is drawn between ethical and unethical behavior for game designers.