Week 1: A complaint about balance is a prediction

Nobody has written it down yet. This week you write down three predictions of your own, each with a number, about a game you may not play until week ten.

23 February 2027

Is it me or is it the game? There is no answer until someone says how many runs out of how many. Once counted, “you can skip the upgrades and still get through the first boss” was wrong in all 15 runs.

Open the slides

“The boss is too hard” is not an opinion. It is a prediction that nobody has written down yet.

The claim#

Every balance argument hides a number. “Too hard” means fewer players get past this point than the designer meant to let through. Until someone says how many, and out of how many, the argument cannot be lost, and an argument nobody can lose is not worth having.

Written down, it can be wrong. That is the whole point of writing it down.

The specimen#

This course has one game in it for twelve weeks: Close Quarters, a survival game where a run lasts 120 s, the first boss arrives at 40 s, and it has to be dead 26 s later or the run ends. That link goes to its rules, not to the game. You will not play it until week ten, so that what you predict comes from its rules and not from a first impression you then spend the semester defending.

Here is an opinion about it: you can skip the upgrades and still get through the first boss.

Here is the same thing as a prediction: a player who takes no upgrades is still alive after 66 s in at least 1 run out of 15.

Measured: 0 out of 15. The fifteen runs took 63 ms between them. The opinion was wrong, and finding out cost less time than reading this sentence.

Reading for weeks 1 and 2#

Mark J. Nelson, Game Metrics Without Players: Strategies for Understanding Game Artifacts (AIIDE workshop, 2011).

Nelson argues that a game does not have to be treated as a black box that only players can open. Read it across these two weeks; it is the reason this course is allowed to exist.

What you leave with#

Three predictions about Close Quarters, each with a number, a unit and a run count. Week two builds the thing that tests them. The one the room thinks most likely to be wrong is tested in week three. All three are still on paper when you play the game for the first time in week ten, and the final asks you to open with a prediction written before you measured.