Design Room: Player Behavior Control

Game designers get into a mentality of designing 'control systems' - which are rules that control a player's or referee's actions. The rules are in place to set down a controlled path of behavior. This runs counter to the game design theory in sandboxing, which assumes a lack of control and focuses on rules made to control how the world reacts to player chaos.

World of Warcraft is about the best modern example of a sandbox system degenerating down into a series of controlled paths for players to follow. In the beginning, there were limited opportunities to raid and get good gear, so what did the players do? Raid the hell out of each other's towns and sides. World PvP was king, and the world was dangerous and alive - there were places you could not go without an escort and other players on your side.

Later on, World of Warcraft adopted a strict, hierarchical system of 'raid finders' and 'dungeon finders' and organized arena PvP. They did not want sandbox PvP anymore, so they organized the reward system to punish free PvP and highly reward organized PvP. As a result, the main game world turned into a waiting room style lobby where you sat around waiting for the next fight or instance.

In short, they designed a rules system to control player behavior, and they are still at that today. They even get into designing rules systems to emulate old-style open world PvP in some zones, but it isn't the same. Those areas are just like any other instance, and the desire to be in them is in constant competition with the other systems they designed that give better rewards faster.

Eve Online is a counter example. There, they designed a 'game world' that has a base set of rules of how it reacts to PvP, and gradually phase away any control in the most desirable star systems. Uncontrolled psace is the most dangerous, because anybody and attack anybody. It's up to the players how they react to each other, and the world's 'rules of engagement' are designed to get out of the way after a while.

Part of the danger in game design is getting too cute with controlling player actions, and as you design, you are creating 'virtual mouse mazes' of rules for your players to navigate through for no other reason than to control their behavior. Mostly these 'player behavior control' systems are a waste of space and time in pen-and-paper games that could have been spent on higher value content.

Why? Players know how to play role playing games. It's like coming up with behavior control in Monopoly with rules of how to pick up the dice one at a time, formalizing the turn structure with negotiation phases and trading phases, having a property upkeep phase, and also formalizing an end-turn accounting phase for each player. For some players, yes, these steps may be a help to them playing, and it may "clean up play" in a game designer's eyes. But people know how to play, they figure out the ways they like to play, and it takes away the freedom of playing the game your own way.

Now some games are so complicated they need 'mouse mazes' to control behavior with formalized turn structures, and most of the time those games can benefit from simplifying things. If you find yourself developing behavior control systems for complicated rules, you may want to look at rules complexity first rather than making the game more structured.

Other games that are simple also put mouse mazes in place for areas they think players need help understanding, they create structure around concepts and force players down preset paths. It's like D&D 5's characteristics system for our group that instructs you what mechanical benefits you get from roleplaying your character correctly. For us, we know how to roleplay, and our DM knows how to reward good and creative roleplaying, so we don't need a system that forces people down a maze of behavior controlling statements for character motivation. For some, yes, it may help, but we know how to do this and we don't need such a large and formalized system of behavior control for the referee and players.

For us at least, I would have loved seeing rules that promote character freedom and options rather than limited random charts of a couple basic and limiting motivations - characters will make the ones they want up anyways, so other than new player help, these charts seem of limited use for experienced players. There is a danger in this character motivation system too we will examine later, as it is an easily exploitable system that can be marginalized with a couple simple choices.

So think twice about making 'mouse mazes' for players to run through in your rules. As game designers, we can come up with all sorts of cute systems and make players jump through all sorts of hoops. That time is better spent supporting player options and freedom, because mouse mazes limit freedom and choices, so it's often better to support player choice than it is to direct it down limited paths.