Why Some Game Mechanics Feel Flat

Games are most fun when you are still learning and the possibilities are endless. The parts of our brain responsible for reward and motivation respond more strongly when the reward-to-effort ratio exceeds expectations, leading to a desire to repeat the behavior. When learning a game, we are constantly surprised by our own success, creating powerful dopamine hits. As we learn to predict the payoffs of different strategies, this reward signal tapers off and the game's initial magic fades into comfort or boredom.

One problem I often see with prototypes is that they feel flat. By “flat,” I mean not just boring, but boring because the relationship between effort and reward is predictable, denying the player any chance to outperform expectations. A great example is games where you can earn at most one point per round, and the question is whether you earn that point. Such games are flat because it is impossible to be pleasantly surprised, only disappointed.

The opposite of flatness is texture, so I find it useful to adopt “texture” as a term describing how a game or mechanic varies the rewards players receive for their efforts. Texture belongs alongside other design descriptors such as balance, complexity, or ergonomics. In a flat game, the same effort always leads to the same reward. In a game with a strong texture, the same effort may produce small or large rewards depending on the context. For example, “Action: Gain 2 VP” has a weak texture because the same effort always produces the same reward, whereas “Action: Gain 1 VP per cow you own” has a stronger texture because the rewards vary according to how many cows you have.

There are many ways to create texture. Some examples:

• Any competition that rewards players relative to others creates texture. It is possible to win large rewards if nobody else competes, or both players might waste resources trying to outperform each other. For example, in 7 Wonders, military cards give points if your military is larger than your neighbor’s, which could be free points if they don’t try to build a larger military.
• Tile placement mechanics that let you score from tiles other players placed create texture. Depending on placement, you can benefit from their work without extra effort. For example, in Carcassonne, another player can build a large city over multiple turns, and you can swoop in at the last minute to connect your small city to theirs and share the points.
• Set collection mechanics that reward you for a full set of items create texture because the reward for acquiring each individual item is low until you get to the last one, at which point it soars. For example, owning one property in a color group in Monopoly gives you a small amount of rent, but owning all properties in the group doubles the rent and allows you to build houses, further increasing the rent.
• Combat games with HP mechanics that do not weaken units as they take damage create texture because an attack that kills a unit is much better than an attack that deals non-fatal damage. In Heroscape, for example, attacking and wounding the dragon Mimring still allows it to attack you back on its turn, whereas attacking and killing it removes any order markers left on the card, potentially skipping your opponent’s turn multiple times.
• Threshold-based costs create texture because if you're already meeting the cost, the reward is basically free. For example, in Spirit Island, your innate powers require having certain elements, and so do some unlockable thresholds on major power cards. If you find a major power whose threshold matches the elements you are already collecting for your innate power, then there is no additional effort needed to take advantage of the more powerful effect.

Strong texture is critical to fun and replayability because it signals to the brain via positive prediction error that there is more to explore in a system. Since games are designed to be fun and replayable, genres tend to converge on certain mechanics that provide texture. Most combat games, for example, have HP mechanics that do not penalize units for taking damage. Most tile placement games let you capture value from previously placed tiles. Most area-control games do not award points proportionally to the number of units in an area and often only reward the player with the most, regardless of how many they have.

This leads to two important design questions when working on any game:

1. What are the characteristic textures of your game’s genre? If you can identify mechanics that most similar games use to create texture, it gives you a big head start.
2. Which mechanics are flat, and can you add texture to them? Flat mechanics bloat games by adding gameplay that quickly grows stale.