Slipper slope in single player games
I am really eagerly anticipating X-Com Enemy Within and have been thinking about the original game's mechanics and what makes it so interesting (to me).
One of the more interesting things to me is that X-Com has severe slippery slope, especially when compared to other single player games: If one of you soldiers die, not only do you obviously lose that solder, but another is likely to panic (so you lose two) and that panicked soldier may fire at and kill a third. So one mistake (or not even a mistake!) might cost you 3 of your soldiers. I think this is fairly unique? Or are there similar games? Plenty of wargames have a morale mechanic which achieves much the same.
It seems like an absurd thing to put players through, so why include it? I think, X-Com is at its best when you have your back against the wall, and recovering from a position where you have multiple soldiers down/panicked and successfully completing a mission can be the most satisfying part of the game. The game also seeks to create unpredictable/unique scenarios to test your tactical mettle (hence shots also not being deterministic) and the game greatly encourages you to have one or more contingency plans.
I think the technical term for this would be 'positive feedback' - from Sirlin's blog: "Slippery slope is another name for positive feedback, a loop that amplifies itself as in a nuclear reaction." (http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2012/7/18/a-discussion-of-balance.html), though he focuses mostly on the phenomenon in multiplayer games.
Neutral feedback would have been if you only lost the first soldier and continued on with that. This is the most common obviously, standard health systems and strategy games work like this most of the time.
Negative feedback, or rubber banding is common in more casual games. Mario Kart (disregarding that it is balanced as a multiplayer game) has this, and I think regenerative health systems are also an example of this.
Which do you prefer? What games are good examples of each? When should each be used?
One of the more interesting things to me is that X-Com has severe slippery slope, especially when compared to other single player games: If one of you soldiers die, not only do you obviously lose that solder, but another is likely to panic (so you lose two) and that panicked soldier may fire at and kill a third. So one mistake (or not even a mistake!) might cost you 3 of your soldiers. I think this is fairly unique? Or are there similar games? Plenty of wargames have a morale mechanic which achieves much the same.
It seems like an absurd thing to put players through, so why include it? I think, X-Com is at its best when you have your back against the wall, and recovering from a position where you have multiple soldiers down/panicked and successfully completing a mission can be the most satisfying part of the game. The game also seeks to create unpredictable/unique scenarios to test your tactical mettle (hence shots also not being deterministic) and the game greatly encourages you to have one or more contingency plans.
I think the technical term for this would be 'positive feedback' - from Sirlin's blog: "Slippery slope is another name for positive feedback, a loop that amplifies itself as in a nuclear reaction." (http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2012/7/18/a-discussion-of-balance.html), though he focuses mostly on the phenomenon in multiplayer games.
Neutral feedback would have been if you only lost the first soldier and continued on with that. This is the most common obviously, standard health systems and strategy games work like this most of the time.
Negative feedback, or rubber banding is common in more casual games. Mario Kart (disregarding that it is balanced as a multiplayer game) has this, and I think regenerative health systems are also an example of this.
Which do you prefer? What games are good examples of each? When should each be used?
Comments
I'm a big fan of slippery slopes when they are part of actual gameplay. City builder games like this usually have a strong slippery slope effect to them. In Pharaoh I feel like it's actually part of the gameplay. It's the player's responsibility to manage this slippery slope to ensure that the city survives. If there is one oversight then the whole infrastructure could collapse.
I've also played Rome : Total War on the easiest and hardest difficulty, in general the game is the same. The major difference between the two difficulties is the morale. On hardest your troops have significantly less morale. Morale is the slippery slope of Rome. The problem though is that it feels extremely unfair.
I think that slippery slopes are a very hard thing to get right though. It can easily make a player feel that they are being punished twice(or three times) for one mistake, or (as in Rome) can make the player feel helpless.
I'm not sure that I like the term "positive feedback", it sounds a lot like the "positive feedback" you get in casual games. As in, rewarding players with positive feedback (which is sensory in nature as apposed to the positive feedback being discussed here which is mechanical in nature). I think using negative feedback to recover from a negative event is a little more confusing than the terminology should be.
That said...
I think most strategy games have slippery slopes by default. Like chess where losing a piece also means fewer options to defend protect from subsequent losses or to make gains. Some take it further with mechanics like morale (that further reinforce losses).
In competitive multiplayer this serves to end conflicts faster (and different players enjoy differing amounts of positive feedback, but no-one wants to play a competitive multiplayer game with a lot of negative feedback).
But yeah, a lot of strategy games I've played (like Starcraft) actively seek to mitigate the slippery slope in single player, like lobotomizing the AI so that it doesn't press advantages. So the design choice to make morale so potentially punishing in single player in the 2013 XCom even on normal difficulty is a bold one.
Some criticism of XCom's decision: This mechanic does not synergize with save scumming. In XCom 2013 they allow players to save scum, and so making a negative event so very negative just means auto-game load for many players. I think the stats at the end of the game show that most players lose fewer than 3 soldiers in their entire games.
At the same time, measures in single player to make slippery slopes more subtle (in other games) sometimes puts the player in a position where they have been losing for a long time without realizing it. Like harvesting all of the resources in Starcraft and only realizing afterwards that your situation is unwinnable. So maybe making mistakes so punishing in single player is a way to avoid long frustrating wastes of the player's time.
Obviously I like the flavour of my soldiers panicking and possibly shooting each other in Xcom, and the high stakes narrative it creates (and I think that might be more important than the relative player-opponent strengths), but I gather we're trying to talk about this from a purely mechanical standpoint.
I think also, from a mechanical standpoint, the reinforced punishment means that players have to be constantly evaluating their risk overhead (like @raithza mentioned). I think it makes every decision in an XCom battle more meaningful(even at normal difficulty).
Whereas in single player Starcraft (or any RTS) there are a ton of decisions that are made that have zero risk at normal difficulty.
Though it isn't only the severe mistake punishment in XCom battles that make the decisions so agonizing. XCom is also an opponent information deprivation game, and enemies can become known and do damage in a single turn.
But I think without the severe punishment in XCom the battles would feel a lot less threatening. And I don't think I could overcome the slow plodding pace if that were the case. I don't think that those mechanics are as necessary in faster games (but I think I'd enjoy them).
Personally, the big thing that drives player attention in games with positive feedback loops is that it reinforces player agency: The game will continue to behave more and more this way unless you do something. If that behavior is a thing the player doesn't want to happen, then players can feel really empowered and impactful when they manage to overcome the strength of a positive feedback loop.
Conversely, games that only put negative feedback loops in your way don't really require you to do anything to change the game state towards something you'd prefer as the player. That's not compelling at all, which is why we ridicule how you can win a race without actually steering in that Kinect racing game, or how you don't actually need to shoot at all to complete BLOPS (or whichever COD-variant it was that had that problem).
I don't think it's accurate to say a slippery slopes reinforces agency. I think they can though (as @Raithza experienced in XCom).
Your Starcraft example is a lack of awareness of options for agency available to you as a player. The system isn't at fault for containing positive feedback loops with adverse player outcomes, it's at fault for not telling you what you could do to change the paths of those loops.
That's very different to a slippery slope in a game - usually a slippery slope system involves small actions now having large adverse repercussions later. A slippery slope might start a positive feedback loop, for instance, but often that slope wasn't noticeable by the player when they started the chain of events in motion... I guess there are interesting things to think about regarding slippery slopes that are strictly started by player-responses (like not expanding in a game of Starcraft is the start of a slippery slope towards being under-developed and eventually trapped and starved) compared to automatic slippery slopes, like what happens when units attack on their own because they got baited out by an enemy, that happens without your intervention - and it's your intervention as a player there that prevents the slippery slope being disastrous.
I think the X-com approach is to make the slippery slopes unavoidable, but survivable if you ride them out and make it through to the stairs at the bottom.
I'm actually not too sure what you mean about "lack of awareness of options". It sounds like you are arguing that a play dynamic being potentially avoidable through teaching players better means it isn't a slippery slope. (which is obviously not what you meant)
I agree that slippery slopes can provide "opportunities for players to exercise meaningful agency that impacts the simulation." But just as it is possible to reach an effectively unwinnable disempowering situation early on in chess, so too can it happen in a single player video game (and then the slope doesn't necessarily reinforce player agency but rather removes it).
A positive feedback loop is a self-reinforcing state. A slippery slope is the start of a self-reinforcing state, but a subtle one that's barely noticeable. That doesn't tell us anything about how that slippery slope happens - it could be rooted in player action or player inaction, it could be an inherent part of the simulation (panic in X-com) or it could be an emergent property of a few simple rules working together in unforseen ways (vulture micro in Starcraft). It's up to us as designers to understand these tools and notice where and how we might be able to use them.
So I was talking about Starcraft because it's a system I know a lot about, the unearthing of that knowledge and the ability to judge the emergent likelihoods of outcomes of the simulation (basically, the ability to detect slippery slopes earlier) is really enjoyable (for me at least). That means that in a single player situation against AI, I'm going to respond differently to how you would: I might be able to predict that my forces aren't sufficient to attack yet and thus not engage and lose them, avoiding a slippery slope; I might start my own slippery slope towards a positive feedback loop around resource gathering and mass production by noticing that the AI can't damage me early so I might invest in an expansion much quicker than a player who can't see the same systemic clues and thus needs to feel safe by building lots of essentially superfluous static defense (until the AI attacks after ages, at which point the player feels justified in that static defense, even though they built it all 40 minutes ago and only needed it 30 seconds ago) turning that resource investment into a larger force AND more static defense later.
So I'm not saying that a game has to teach you everything about it, only that the process of discovery has to be fun for players, so it makes sense to focus on positive feedback loops and systems that move away from equilibrium points, forcing the player to play the hand of balance. I feel that it's more rewarding being at the mercy (or the helm) of positive feedback loops than it is to be merely poking at negative feedback loops in the hope that one of them turns positive somehow.
Sometimes a positive feedback loop might exist in a game, but players constantly mis-diagnose it for a negative loop, like creeps in MOBAs seem like a negative system - but they're actually a positive feedback loop in terms of resource earning potential.
I err far more on the side of enjoying slippery slopes than Sirlin (who @raithza linked). In fact I enjoy Street Fighter far less than a game like Guilty Gear precisely because there is very little slope in Street Fighter (whereas Sirlin prefers Street Fighter for the same reason).
I was trying to express that a slippery slope is such a high level / abstract dynamic that it describes a whole range of things, only some of which are really great in single player, only some of which reinforce agency. Which isn't to say that none do.
I think that was the point of @raithza's thread was that really treacherous slippery slopes are quite often avoided prematurely and that he was surprised to be enjoying a single player game with a slippery slope.
More slippery slope is something we want more of in our game Death Smashers (for instance).
Well... we don't actually want a slippery slope for the sake of a slippery slope. What we want is the decisions to mean more, and a lot of the ideas that we'd like to implement to make each decision have larger and more interesting consequences might entail building a more slippery slope as a side effect. No debate here : )
I find the resource depletion mechanic to be one that discourages playfulness and encourages save/loading (which breaks agency). Since you only get one chance or a couple chances at something, and worse than that (but not slope related), it breaks the fantasy. Though I appreciate it in multiplayer (where the fantasy isn't important and the depletion mechanic limits the effectiveness of turtling).
To be clear: I was singling it out as an example of a slippery slope that I didn't enjoy for reasons other than that it was a slippery slope. Just like panicking troops in Rome is positive feedback, but the nature of the feedback is inherently disempowering.
It'd probably be easier to find a bad game and point to it's slippery slope and talk about it... but success bias.
I don't have a problem with slippery slopes in theory, but I think the implementation that produces that slope has vastly more to do with whether the slope provides agency than the slope itself. Games with a lot of positive feedback tend to produce foregone conclusions, this alone should indicate that the relation slippery slopes have to agency in games is variable. And I think the examples I gave demonstrated that to a degree (and I'm certain I could find a lot more).
(This was all in response to your point that a slippery slope reinforces agency. To which I replied: Not necessarily, some things that a slippery slope describes don't)