Game balance

    From Nielsen’s “Understanding Video Games”, we have covered some of the important chapters in depth, such as, the game industry, history of game, and narrative. Now we are learning one of the most important sectors of video game, the beauty of video game aesthetics. This chapter explicitly covers rules, geography and representation, and number of players. Nielsen talks about Jesper Juul’s three levels of rules: game state rules, outcome valorization rules, information rules, whereas, a rather different typology is suggested by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman: operational rules, constitutive rules, and implicit rules.  Juul’s three rules allow us to consider another important aspect of game system, in which the amount of information is given to players about the game. Whereas, the three levels of Katie Salen and Eric Zimmermans describe the rules of non-digital games. Then Nielsen talks about the geography and representation. According to the reading, geography, representation, and gameplay are interrelated and to see this more clearly let us look at the way in which games have developed over the years. Examples are 2D and 3D game engines.  He uses Age of Empires II: Age of kings to talk about game play; he defines gameplay as: the game dynamics emerging from the interplay between rules and game geography. Like what I mentioned earlier, geography, representation, and gameplay are interrelated. Age of Empire employs and requires players to come up with successful strategies, depending on given resource, race, and location within the game.

Similar to what Kevin Koo wrote in his blog, I also want to talk about Starcraft as an example of a game with successful game balance. In Starcraft they have three different races that are very distinct from one another. Although these races are very different from one another, each race has its own advantages. Zerg is fast and cheap, but weak. Terran is hard to control, but strong. Protoss is expansive and slow, but very strong with more health compare to other races. Despite the fact that they are all different, when it comes to an actual battle, it is impossible to say which race is stronger than other races. Starcraft employs the most perfect in-game balance and player-player balance in comparison to any other strategic games.  Creating a game with an excellent game balance is extremely hard and complex, but Blizzard has successfully achieved it; this is why Starcraft gained so much popularity in Korea.

Besides Starcraft, do you think there are any other games with a successful game balance? What if a new game came out with a terrible game balance, how will it be in terms of game play?