Reframe Upkeep So You Can Reward Players For Their Work

Upkeep in games feels tedious partly because it does not reward the player. Setting up the game board, shuffling cards, and restocking markets are the cost of playing. Rewarding players for these tasks feels strange. Should the Monopoly banker earn a salary? One way to justify rewarding upkeep tasks is to reframe them as choices.

Physics is an example of a burdensome upkeep task in tabletop games. In games about spaceships, we expect to see things like conservation of momentum. Unfortunately, tracking ship momenta in a tabletop game is tedious. X-Wing miniatures found a brilliant reframing: each ship has a different movement pattern. Some patterns cause stress to the pilot, and others relieve it. This models inertia through incentives rather than an analog physics engine. You can choose any movement pattern you want, but the game rewards you for obeying physics.

Video games can have upkeep too. Hunger in survival games creates urgency to keep moving. Unfortunately, it often becomes an annoying box to check off a list. Valheim innovates by reframing food as temporary equipment. Your character has three stomach slots and cannot equip the same food item more than once. Each type of food increases your health and stamina while active. Food is not a healing item; you still regenerate health slowly after eating. Starving won't kill you directly as in many survival games but makes death more likely. Ignoring food also makes everything more tedious due to reduced stamina.

In both cases, reframing a task as a choice allows the game to reward the player. In X-Wing, obeying physics relieves stress. In Valheim, a varied diet makes work and combat easier. People expect rewards for their work, but it is strange to reward purely upkeep tasks. Reframe them as choices to justify compensating players.