Theory: Why Players Concede–and Why Their Opponents Hate It

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Why people do people concede–or why, on the flip side, they object to others doing it? Answering those questions will provide us with guideposts for addressing concessions as a design problem. If we know what leads players to concede, we can try to avoid those situations; if we know what makes concessions objectionable, we can design the game to make them less so.

The definition from last time will guide the discussion here. We aren’t going to talk about concessions that are explicitly a form of cheating, because those raise different issues and need to be addressed separately. We will, however, call on forms of concession that feel bad or are unsporting. Minimizing bad feeling among players, after all, is an important design objective.

So, what leads people quit?

The rest of the game doesn’t matter: A player decides that the result is inevitable and that there’s no point in continuing to play. I’m pretty sure that this is the most common reason for conceding, and the least likely to be found objectionable (but some people still hate it; see below). It’s seen in games ranging from chess to Magic to Little League baseball games decided under a mercy rule.

It’s important to recognize that there can be reason to continue even if a player is sure to lose. In card games played over multiple hands, for example, it can be useful to stay in just to get as many points (or as much money) out of a losing hand as possible, so as to stay in the overall running. One also sees this frequently in car racing; even if a driver is sure to finish behind the leader, it’s worth finishing the race to accumulate points toward the overall championship. When a player concedes because the game is no longer meaningful, it’s a statement that there’s no substantial incentive even to play the game out.

The game has stopped being fun: Fun is always tricky to quantify, but there’s no denying when it’s not there–and its lack makes players walk away from games. Often a lack of fun is tied to the rest of the game not mattering; if it doesn’t matter what one does then the game’s decisions probably aren’t very interesting anymore. However, a game can stop being fun for other reasons as well. Perhaps the decisions were interesting once, but the game has gone on too long and the player wants to be done. Maybe there’s a situation the rules don’t handle well, and it’s led to an argument that sucked the joy out of the experience. The opponent might simply be a jerk who’s not worth tolerating any more.

Conceding leads to long-term advantage: Some tournaments are designed in such a way that losing a match has the ironic effect of increasing one’s odds of winning the whole event. The 2012 Olympic badminton debacle grew out of this; the gold medal favorites, among others, threw their first-round games so that they would face weaker teams later in the tournament. While those players were caught (it was hardly difficult) and ejected, sometimes players can manipulate the tournament.

A variation on this theme is the concession that protects what someone already has. One sees this in Magic all the time, as players at the bottom edge of the cutoff for prizes agree to draw their match rather than risk a loss that would push them lower in the standings. Television game shows feature this brand of concession as well, with players deciding to stop with what they have rather than risk it all on one more question.

Stated by themselves, all of those sound like fair reasons to walk away from a game. A bit underhanded, in some cases, but logical. Why, then, do people dislike concessions?

Taking away the climactic move: Some players don’t just want to figure out how to win, they want to actually do it. Concessions deny these players the final moment in which they knock over the opponent’s king or otherwise demonstrate their victory. This is especially galling when the victory was very hard-won and involved a brilliant final sequence of plays; cutting such a game short can feel anti-climactic.

Reducing the time spent playing: I see this reason cited frequently by players who don’t get to play their preferred game often, or who have traveled a long way to play in an event. These players want to savor every moment of their games. Conceding necessarily denies them some of those moments. It doesn’t matter that a concession means they win; these players value time spent playing more than the victory.

Others are affected: Conceding can impact others in the tournament, as it did in the Warmachine event that inspired these articles. When Adam concedes to Beth, it can affect Charlie’s strength of schedule (he played Adam earlier, and will place higher the better Adam does), or Dani’s odds of winning (she has a good matchup against Adam, but a poor one against Beth). It can even, in unusual cases, have more direct effects. The Warmachine tournament’s result was controversial in part because the player who conceded was ineligible for the grand prize; had he played his game out and ended up in the finals, his opponent would automatically have gotten the big-ticket stuff instead of, as actually happened, going home with second place.

The list of people who can be impacted extends beyond the players. Consider professional sports: paying fans would be livid if a hockey team decided that the game wasn’t worth bothering with and left the ice at the end of the first period. Among the complaints leveled against the ejected Olympic badminton players was that they had wasted ticket-holders’ money. Shoeless Joe Jackson had to wonder what the kid who asked him to “say it ain’t so, Joe” learned about sportsmanship from his decision to tank World Series games.

It’s unsportsmanlike: For some players, trying one’s hardest is integral to honest gameplay. Choosing not to pursue victory with all one’s strength is just inherently wrong under this view, regardless of why one might do it. By joining a game, they feel, one commits to try to win it until the very end. The circumstances have no bearing on this moral obligation.

(As a side note: listing these, I feel, helps make clear why discussions about concessions so often involve people talking past each other. The reasons to concede are all about the game’s obligation to the player: when the game stops making play worthwhile, they posit, the player does not need to continue. By contrast, the arguments against conceding are about the player’s obligations to others: they want the player to keep going, even given that the activity is voluntary and no longer rewarding, because doing so benefits those others. Since the two sides value entirely different things, it’s hard for them even to engage with the opponent’s arguments.)

Looking these over, I think that they represent a fairly comprehensive statement of why concessions happen, and why some players would prefer that they didn’t. Next time we’ll try to put this knowledge into practice, discussing how games can be designed to minimize the impact of a player conceding.

Theory: Defining Concessions (and Rules for a New Print-and-Play)

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(First things first: I’ve been working on Trust Me’s follow-up. The print-and-play file isn’t ready yet; the pieces are still very much in flux. However, you can find the rules here–Lines of Questioning – Rules – 10-3-14–as a preview.)

The recent blowup about conceding Warmachine tournament games highlighted the issue concessions pose to game designers: some people approve of them, other people think they’re monstrous, and it’s hard to please both groups at once. Nevertheless, concessions are a fact of gaming life and games need to deal with them as effectively as possible. It’s a designer’s responsibility to catch bugs, and a player dropping out is a situation that needs to be handled just like an incorrect key press or a rules corner-case.

Managing concessions is an area where I feel that a lot of games fall down, so I’d like to spend a few posts hashing out the issues involved. We’ll start with the fundamentals: what counts as conceding? From there we’ll move on to why opinions of the practice are so divided. Then, with groundwork laid, we’ll get into how to handle concessions as a design matter.

I hope you’ll join in and leave your thoughts in the comments. All of these are big topics, and there’s room for differing views. If you think I’ve missed something, or that my analysis is off, let me know.

To talk about concessions, we first have to agree on what we’re discussing–and what we’re not. “Conceding,” as I’m using it here, is a decision to take game actions that the player expects and intends will result in a loss. The archetypal form is the player who pushes the “concede” button in Hearthstone, or who says to a real-world opponent “I’m going to lose, so let’s call this early and do something else.”

However, my definition also includes intentionally playing badly so as to lose the game. In other words, it includes throwing games. I feel that to be useful from a design perspective, a definition of conceding has to encompass that kind of intentional loss. While formal concessions and informal tanking may feel different, they raise the same design issues: winners who feel cheated out of competition and threats to tournament integrity.

Concessions can occur negatively through inaction as well, and this definition allows for that. The player who stops submitting orders in a game of Diplomacy, knowing that this will result in an automatic surrender, creates all of the problems that someone who explicitly announces an intent to leave the game does. (Indeed, this player might have even more of an impact, since other players may continue for a time under the mistaken impression that the conceding player is still involved.) Again, this might feel different from other forms of concession, but its effects are the same.

This definition excludes losses where there was no decision–and thus, no intent–to lose. Playing badly does not raise the same issues as conceding, so long as the player’s goal is to win. Concessions can raise questions about whether a tournament was fair and honest; having a lousy day does not call the event as a whole into question.

Also excluded are situations where a player forces an inconclusive result. The legitimate version of this is playing for a draw in a tournament, expecting that the draw will enable the player to advance where a loss would not. Illegitimate versions include things like DDOSing the League of Legends servers or pulling one’s internet connection while playing Street Fighter, both of which tactics have been used to shut a match down before a loss has been recorded. When done legitimately, an effort to draw gives rise to a proper game that doesn’t undermine the tournament or take anything away from a winner who overcomes the strategy. Done illegitimately, forcing a draw is simply cheating. Either way, the issues posed are entirely different.

My feeling is that this definition captures the situations that are logically related and separates out those that aren’t. Next time we’ll get into why conceding (as defined) is so controversial . . . and why the controversy probably won’t end.

Behind-the-Scenes Updates

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I’ve been working on the latest successor concept to Trust Me. The current prototype is so appallingly ugly that I’m reluctant to take a picture; I think it will be tough to discern what’s going on. 😉 Very early proof-of-concept testing has been promising, however, and I expect to have more for you on Friday.

Prototype aside, I’ve been doing some behind-the-scenes work on the site. The links page has gotten a minor update, there’s now an @lawofgamedesign Twitter for those who prefer to get updates that way, etc. As always, let me know if something’s broken or if there are features you’d like to see.

Videos?

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I got a suggestion to start up a video wing of the blog. It’s a neat idea, and I’m curious as to what kind of content people would like to see. Off the top of my head, I could:

Record playtests. A lot of this blog is talking about current prototypes and how they work. Showing instead of telling could be neat.

Stream games. I’m no professional Hearthstone player–this season I’ll probably end up at rank 15–but I’m good at explaining my thought process. Would it be interesting to hear about why I’m doing what I’m doing?

Discuss specific games. There are some design issues that are more easily demonstrated than explained. Videos could be used to show how problems play out, and how good ideas work in practice.

What would you like to see?

Theory: How to Tell If a Concept Is “Valid”

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When I first became seriously interested in game design a little less than a decade ago, I often struggled with the question of whether a concept was a “valid game.” I wasn’t trying to figure out whether the concept was good–I knew that most ideas wouldn’t pan out–but whether it had the potential for fun play. Now, all these years later, trying to figure out why the prototype in the previous post wasn’t as much fun as I had expected gave me the way to analyze that question. To decide whether your concept can produce a valid game, you need to determine what kind of decision the player will make and why that decision will be interesting.

By what kind of decision I mean more than just “the player will try to shoot the bad guys.” Will the player test her dexterity by aiming with a mouse? Maneuver his limited resources on a map? Select a number of chips to bet against a roll of the dice? Strip the game’s theme away, and ask what the player will physically do during the game.

When deciding why that decision will be interesting, think through how that decision (again, the physical thing the player does, not the conceptual activity represented thereby) will work in practice. Is the player going to have multiple possibilities to choose from? What will prevent the player from detecting and picking the right answer every time? After the decision’s consequences have played out, will the player feel like the choice mattered? How long will it take for those consequences to emerge? Is that fast enough for the player to recognize the consequences as feedback, or will they just seem random?

My last prototype failed because I didn’t finish the second question. It looked like there were going to be lots of options, but in practice there was only ever one or two–and only one of them was ever reasonable. Had I really thought the problem through, I would have recognized that I was going down a dead end.

What kind of decision will the player make? Why will that decision be interesting? If you can answer both of those satisfactorily, you have something at least worth considering.

Theory: How to Make Losing Fun

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Part of the reason why we have so many sayings to the effect that “winning isn’t everything” is that winning is closely tied to having fun. Yet, it’s possible to make a game fun for players who are currently losing–even for those who have no hope of victory. Providing measurable goals losing players can meet separate and apart from overall victory enables them to walk away from the game with a sense of satisfaction.

The recent poster child for game design that’s fun even when the player is failing is Dark Souls. For those who haven’t played it, Dark Souls is an action game. A very, very hard action game. “Prepare to Die,” its ad copy declares, and die the player will. Many times.

Yet, Dark Souls can be a very satisfying experience even as it clobbers its player. Progress in Dark Souls is easy to measure; monsters are always waiting in the same places, and so one can always tell when one has gotten a little further. Last time the ghoul waiting in the hallway beat me; this time I beat it. Those tiny but clear bits of advancement let players put the controller down with a sense of accomplishment, even if the end of the game is still very far and many deaths away.

Dark Souls’ puzzle-like form–enemies are always in the same place, paths always lead in the same directions–allows for concrete sub-goals. However, there are other ways to introduce objectives that are satisfying even though they are short of winning. Role-playing games, for example, use story for this purpose. Winning might be tens or even hundreds of hours away, but the next chunk of plot and character development is much closer. If the player is enjoying the game and its story, reaching that intermediate point is a powerful incentive and satisfying when it happens.

Games that call heavily on player skill also have this dynamic going for them, although they approach it from a different perspective: they encourage the player to create her own goals. Fighting games, for example, involve a tremendous number of skills. Being good at fighting games is incredibly difficult, so much so that most players will never achieve it (myself included; I top out at a journeyman level). In other words, the vast majority of fighting game players will never “win.”

Fighting games are, nevertheless, deeply compelling, because even if a player will never reach the highest plateau she is constantly achieving things. The first time a player successfully does the forward-down-down + forward motion for a dragon punch feels great. Being able to do it consistently is even better. Comboing into the dragon punch from a standing close hard punch is better still. Pulling off Evil Ryu’s one-frame link to wipe out half of the opponent’s health in a single flurry of attacks is amazing! There’s a never-ending series of little goals fighting-game players can set for themselves, and they maintain players’ interest in climbing the next rung of the ladder even if the player knows its top will always be beyond reach.

These examples offer three different mechanisms by which players can have satisfying, engaging goals short of winning: a puzzle structure that allows one to see progress in concrete terms, a story that is doled out in limited amounts to leave the player wanting more, and a skill-driven model in which players take pride in each small accomplishment. What overall lessons can we derive from the examples?

First, a good sub-goal for keeping losing players engaged is measurable. The player can tell when she has met it. Achieving something isn’t as much fun when the result is in doubt, so there’s no uncertainty about the accomplishment.

Second, these goals are independent of winning. They may involve actions which are conducive to overall victory–hitting a combo contributes to winning a fighting game, and getting part of an RPG’s story is a step toward the game’s conclusion–but they don’t rely on reaching that lofty plateau, or even being ahead at any particular time. It’s possible to get the satisfaction of these achievements even if the game has turned severely against the player.

Third and finally, they’re desirable. None of these are mocking “most improved” awards. They allow one to progress along an interesting axis, even if it’s not the most competitive one.

It’s easy to make winning feel good. Getting losing to feel good is harder–but not impossible. The key is to provide measurable, desirable goals that can be achieved independent of beating the opponent.

Trust Me: A New Direction

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Last time we said that Trust Me has two issues: Player 1’s game needs to be more interesting without being more challenging, and Player 2 needs more satisfying gameplay without making it easier to win. The solution, I think, lies in going all the way back to the beginning of the design. Decoupling Player 2’s activity from Player 1’s opposition makes it possible to fix both problems.

Player 1 currently can’t be challenged because Player 2 is providing the challenge, and for thematic reasons it needs to be difficult for Player 2 to win. If Player 2 isn’t the opposition, however–if that role is filled by a hypothetical Player 3, or by the game itself–then Player 1 can be confronted with as many difficulties as necessary to make her game interesting. This is fighting the hypothetical, in some measure; we’re not finding ways to increase interest without increasing challenge, we’re just making it possible to increase challenge. Still, I think it’s a good solution.

With Player 2’s experience no longer directly opposed to Player 1, it becomes easier to measure Player 2’s progress on axes other than “how is Player 1 doing.” It will be easier to give Player 2 sub-goals that can provide satisfaction even if Player 2 isn’t winning.

I’m on my way out the door for a trip as I type this, so I can’t go into as much detail as I would like. On Monday I’ll talk about Player 2’s sub-goals: how they work and why they’re important.

Trust Me: Transitioning from Art Installation to Game

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There’s a classic legal ethics problem that goes something like this: the client is accused of a crime. He has an alibi, but he doesn’t want you to use it because it’s embarrassing. Should you override the client’s wishes in order to win, or does the client have the right to tank his own case?

Academics aren’t the only ones who care about the answer to that question. Disputes over control can poison the attorney-client relationship, especially when they’re mismanaged. I envisioned Trust Me as a simulation of these issues, an abstract demonstration of how  divisions arise in the partnership and why they can be difficult to address. The challenge of the design now is to make Trust Me into a game that captures the unequal and potentially conflict-ridden nature of the situation, yet is still a game people would want to play.

“Unequal” may seem like a strange goal for a game, but inequalities are a fact of attorney-client interaction. Lawyers have specialized knowledge that their clients lack. They are familiar with the legal environment and its processes, while the client likely finds them strange and even intimidating. Lawyers are repeat players, while the client is probably being opposed–and judged–by strangers. Ethics rules give the lawyer final say over many decisions, including some that the client may care very much about. The lawyer is even on familiar ground, in an office or a courthouse the lawyer has practiced in before, while the client feels like he or she is an outsider. Any game about attorney-client interaction needs to recognize and represent that inequality.

(As a side note: I am not saying that these inequalities are necessarily good or desirable. Scholars have struggled for years to find ways to reduce the paternalism involved in lawyer-client interaction without losing the value of the lawyer’s expertise. The topic remains one of hot debate, with arguments for many different solutions. Some have even argued in favor of the inequality. I have my own views on this subject, but Trust Me is not about whether or how the playing field between attorneys and clients should be leveled. It is evoking the inequalities that have existed in the past and that are still present today.)

In real life the issue of attorney-client inequality stirs up a pot already set to boiling by the fact that lawyers and their clients don’t always want the same things. Traditionally litigators have focused on winning the case. Clients usually want to win too, but they can have additional goals separate and apart from overall victory. They might want to punish someone who has harmed them, and hope the lawyer will really put the screws to that person on the witness stand. They may want answers to burning questions, and feel that the only way they’re going to get them is if the person who knows the truth is under oath. They may simply want to have as little to do with the situation as possible, and favor solutions that keep them far from the courthouse and the opposing party–even if that means a less-desirable outcome. A client may simply want to feel like he or she still has control over an important situation in his or her own life, and want something minor just for the satisfaction of influencing the case. The attorney-client relationship can become a tug-of-war, the attorney pulling toward a winning verdict while the client tries to move the attorney toward other objectives.

Trust Me succeeds, I think, in demonstrating the challenges of a building a constructive relationship despite these two problems. The players are unequally situated: Player 1 has more influence than Player 2, and is more likely to win. Each has different goals–Player 1 to reach the opposite side of the board, Player 2 to have markers collected–that sometimes align but often conflict. It’s possible to work together, but it’s also possible for only one person to get what he or she wants, or for the relationship to break down entirely. (I equate Player 2 boxing Player 1 in out of spite with a client firing his or her attorney.) As an art installation that exists to make a point, Trust Me works.

It falls down, however, when evaluated as a game. Player 2’s lack of control is thematically appropriate but frustrating. Having Player 2 manipulate the barriers captures abstractly the client’s efforts to get an attorney to take certain approaches, but interacting directly with Player 1 would feel more accurate. The game is too easy for Player 1, but in the current design the difficulty can’t be increased without giving Player 2 an unthematic amount of power.

At this point Trust Me is achieving its thematic ends, but no one would want to play it more than once. Turning it into a better game–and, perhaps, a more effective art piece–requires solving some design problems. How can Player 1’s experience be made more compelling, when it probably can’t be made significantly more difficult? How can Player 2 be given interesting decisions and opportunities for satisfying gameplay without making it easier to win? I have some preliminary ideas about the answers, and will get into them next time.

Trust Me: Rules Changes

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One nice thing about two-player games is that they’re a lot easier to playtest than five-player co-ops. I’ve been able to get Trust Me to the table, and have made some changes:

1. Player 1 now moves one barrier and then moves the mini one space. This allows more time for players 1 and 2 to signal whether they’re looking to cooperate or to compete. It also gives Player 1 more interaction with the barriers, which is the meat of the game.

2. Since Player 1 moves more slowly, the game is only played to the end of area 2. The print-and-play file has been updated to have the goal line in the correct place. This change also eliminates the need for area 3’s barriers, and they have been removed as well. Trust Me is now really, really quick to assemble. 🙂

3. As matters stand, it’s possible to rough out the optimal path for a Player 2 victory at the start of the game. That can lead to frustrating gameplay, either because it’s lengthy (in which case Player 2 is apt to feel like he or she can’t win no matter what), or because a player does something that appears sub-optimal (which can lead to confusing signals and ultimately post-game recriminations). There are two changes in the rules that are intended to make “solving” the board before turn one impossible:

– The game-end condition has changed: now, at the start of the 16th turn and every turn thereafter, the players roll a four-sided die. If the die comes up as a 1, the game ends.

– Most markers in area 2 are distributed during play, much like the barriers.

4. The number of markers has been changed to four in area 1 and five in area 2, with six markers needed for Player 2 to win. Having a greater percentage of markers in area 2 helps avoid situations in which Player 2 is “out” relatively early in the game.

I’m experimenting with a fifth change, in which barriers are distributed using smaller dice that place them in the middle of their areas. This avoids useless barriers that are way off to the sides, but having different numbers for distributing markers and barriers makes the board visually busy. A computerized version of this game would make setup a lot faster . . . .

Trust Me – 9-15-14