Theory About Games

Theory About Games

I have a theory about game play. When you first play a game, you're probably not good at it. You're just learning and figuring it out. Unless it's a lot like a game you've played before, your busy spending time just getting used to it rather than really getting good. This is why most computer games start out simple and get harder. Your skill at playing the game improves as you play.

Then, you reach a point where you have developed an idea for how to best play the game. You figure out a strategy. And your performance in the game, at this point, then actually gets worse. This happens for two reasons. One is that you're neglecting what you've learned up to this point about the play of the game in favor of focusing instead on your new (and so far untried) strategy. The second reason is that you're still new enough to the game that your strategy is either wrong or, at the very least, imperfect. It takes a while to work out the kinks in your idea. Then maybe--maybe--your performance once again continues to improve.

The interesting nature of this is that as a designer, you could attempt to predict this point, so you would know when a player's play is actually going to worsen for a bit. For a computer game, it's probably at about the 25% to 30% completion mark, I'd guess. For a traditional game, it's probably after the second or third play, depending on the complexity and length of the game.

You could also use this idea as a gamer in a competitive game to potentially gain an advantage on your opponents. You'd have to fine tune it to the game, though.