Game Design: Positive and Negative Feedback
I'm gonna talk about positive and negative feedback in game design. I'm not talking about feedback players give you about how much your game sucks - but feedback that the game provides the player that either reinforces or counters their actions and skill. Normally, I'm programmed to think of "negative feedback" as being a bad thing, but it's not. And a "positive feedback loop" might not be a good thing in many games, either.

In psychology, folks talk about feedback being things that reinforce a person's behavior, but in a game, feedback can permeate everything in the player's environment, and can affect the player's on-screen persona / avatar directly.

Positive feedback reinforces the player's current performance, whether good or bad. It acts as a positive multiplier. Whereas negative feedback tends to push the player towards the middle ground, becoming more challenging for better players and giving a boost to the players who are struggling. It is, in effect, a negative multiplier on the player's efforts and success.

When you have a loop, the positive or negative feedback multiplies itself even further. Poorly performing players might find themselves in a "death spiral" in a positive feedback loop situation, and successful players may find the same game "too easy." On the flip side, negative feedback loops can cause a sense of frustration that their exceptional efforts OR their failures have no effect on the game.

Both can be powerful tools in game design. And powerful weapons to ruin a game if used incorrectly.

So with a positive feedback loop, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The dude who is losing in the RTS has an increasingly more difficult time making a comeback. The guy with the mad skills in a scrolling shooter gets all the power-ups necessary to make the rest of the level even easier for him, while the player who is struggling faces a tougher time of it without the advantages of getting the right power-ups.

Is this desired behavior? Maybe.

This was a good thing back in the days of the coin-operated arcade machines. Designers wanted players to fail quickly once they hit the limit of their abilities, and the positive feedback loop made better players seem all the more glorious. The poor Defender player found himself in empty space surrounded by ultra-fast mutants while the better player on the same level was still cruising around rescuing astronauts and racking up points under normal difficulty conditions (which, for Defender, was still still pretty insane).

However, if you ever watched a competitive game of Daytona USA, you might have noticed that the losing player overtaking the lead, in spite of his speedometer reading a slower speed. The game was applying somewhat subtle negative feedback (through cheating) to encourage a closer competition - which would encourage more players to feed quarters into linked machines in competitive mode.

In most RPGs the player is allowed to progress at his or her own pace. Here, a positive feedback loop isn't such a bad thing. Optional quests (if they truly are optional) generally reward you by making the rest of the game a little easier due to the cool magic sword or extra progress towards leveling that you made - which allows players to manage their own difficulty level, in some ways. Even a little extra grinding on the side rewards the players effort by making the game just a little bit easier than it had been before. The extra gold finances extra healing potions for use against that boss that was kicking your butt before.

The "treadmill" feeling is negative feedback in action. Done correctly, this is a fairly addictive game mechanic. Done incorrectly (like the very obvious scaling done in Oblivion), and it's just plain frustrating, destroying all feelings of progress.

But a positive feedback loop can be a problem in role-playing games, too. Kat Bailey is grumbling right now over at 1Up about having , missed an event in Persona 4, expressing frustration at feeling that she is now permanently behind the power curve and unable to catch up (she's not, from my experience playing the game). I pulled the plug on D&D Online for similar reasons - it felt that the game had a positive feedback loop that caused people who started falling behind to KEEP falling further behind.

The trick for a designer is not only to recognize and use positive and negative feedback tools to optimize the fun for players, but also to manage player expectations. As in Ms. Bailey's case above, players who believe they are in a positive feedback loop situation find it difficult to tolerate a single failure even if it's not an obvious game-ending scenario.

And most hardcore gamers always expect the positive feedback loop. The designers of the original Wing Commander game discovered this the hard way. They built a broad campaign with built-in negative feedback. Those who failed on the "winning track" would find themselves in a set of missions on the "failure track" which seemed (to me) to be a bit easier and would lead them back onto the winning track again. Up until the final mission sequence, failure was fully recoverable. And this losing path represented somewhere around a third of their mission design efforts.

But only a small fraction of players ever explored the failure track. The majority would simply re-load and re-fly the missions until they achieved success. The development team recognized this, and that their efforts to provide a non-linear series of missions was largely wasted effort, so future installments of the series were extremely linear. No more negative feedback with easier alternative missions. Instead, they'd just take the same amount of effort to make a longer campaign for everybody. That seemed to meet with player expectations, as very few people complained about the loss.

'Cept me, but I'm weird that way.

As a player, if you are interested in "mastering" the game, you may need to meta-game a bit and discover where positive and negative feedback is being applied so you can best take advantage of it - either to optimize your gameplay, or to optimize your own enjoyment, or just get through a rough roadblock in the game. In a simple case, if your RPG has scaling encounters, you may be wasting your time doing any grinding for level. But a cool, uber-powerful magical sword (if it's not somehow level-limited) might not figure into those calculations, so that may be the edge you need to circumvents the negative feedback loop.

Just stuff to think about. But most importantly, as always, have fun!

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:02 AM (Permalink)