Barrier to Entry for a Game

Games are made to be played, so when making a game the question of ‘Why might someone not play this?’ is important. There are ways to hook a player: art, story, and so on that might entice a player but even when the player has an interest in the game there are additional barriers created via game design that can prevent players from playing the game.

The biggest self inflicted barrier is the huge burden of knowledge a game can place on a player. Even simple games require a great deal of knowledge to play. They have to know the controls, what their character can do, what enemies can do, what their goals are… By the end of pretty much any game, that game is going to be frighteningly complex due to the layers of mechanics the game has piled on to keep it interesting. New weapons, tools, enemies, moves.

That is at the end though, when you start you can lower the apparent complexity. They don’t need to know all the fancy moves yet, they can learn those later. The complexity is manageable if you introduce these elements slowly and one at a time. Mario doesn’t start you off going against Hammer Bro. or Bowser, they start you off facing Gombas and then slowly show the player more and more complexity. That way there is always something for the player to learn but never to much at once.

That kind of learning curve can only be employed for single player or co-operative games though, when you make a competitive multiplayer game there is a great deal of complexity you are exposing the player to at once and you don’t have the option to slowly introduce those mechanics when the player will be exposed to other players who can utilize any of the game’s mechanics.

While you can’t limit the abilities the players are exposed to, you can limit the ones they have access to. Introducing a leveling system where the player unlocks new weapons as they play not only doesn’t overload the player with too many mechanics before they can start to understand them but you prevent them from having to make a choice between weapons before they have any idea what you are actually asking them to chose between. If they don’t understand the weapons system asking them to chose between a AK-47 and a M16 is a useless question, just give them one and get them learning.

Weapons like those though are modular complexity, that is to say introducing a new gun for the player to learn doesn’t force the player to learn that gun in relation to all other guns in the game. As such, you can show the player each gun one at a time. That is not so for many kinds of complexity, some game mechanics can’t be understood in and of themselves and can only be understood in the larger context of how the game works. Magic: The Gathering, or Hearts has a large amount of knowledge you need to have before you can even play those games poorly.

You need to spends games watching and having it explained, maybe then you can be walked through the game. This is an enormous investment of time and unless the player has a reason to think it will be worth the hours spent learning how to play, why should they bother surmounting that wall of complexity? The larger that wall is the less people will play and enjoy your game by sheer virtue of the fact that they have no reason to think doing so would be worth it, even if it would be.