I was at GDC over a week ago, and spent a while talking with a good friend about good game design. One of the subjects we discussed was the elegance of elemental design and how it translates into gameplay. Many games have three-element loops like “Fire, Water, Earth” in them where there is a clear “Water beats Earth, Earth beats Fire, Fire Beats Water” pattern that is easy for players to memorize. I have noticed that many really popular games have replicated this pattern, including Summoners War. They have a three-element loop that makes it really easy to manage strategy for your battles. The more astute among you might notice that while there are “Fire, Earth, Water” and “Fire, Air, Water” loops, there are in fact four basic elements that exist in canonically significant “elemental magic”. So what is so special about three elements?
I think it is because you can easily remember a linear rock-paper-scissors relationship among them. In fact, there are two extra elements in Summoners War—Light and Dark—and they have their own relationship to each other independent from the strengths and weaknesses of the Water, Air, Fire relationships of other monsters.
This is deliberate and important.
I once modified the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to play with my kids. We added a fourth element “wounded puppy”. The wounded-puppy move is to place your palm facing up and your fingers splayed like an animal’s legs are in the air and whimper like you are a wounded puppy. The rules get modified as follows.
- Rock beats scissors.
- Scissors beats paper.
- Paper beats rock.
- Rock beats wounded puppy.
- Scissors beats wounded puppy.
- Paper beats wounded puppy.
Of course, the only way to play this game with your kids is to keep picking wounded puppy over and over, looking surprised when you lose, and congratulating them on outsmarting you. If you need some cheap laughs with your young kids, this is about as good as it gets.
If you actually had to add a real fourth element to Rock, Paper, Scissors, the game rules suddenly go from a three sentence, easy-to-remember rule set into a frustrating look-up table.
If you are in the world of expert designers, you would nod sagely here and point out “players love depth, and not complexity.” Adding a new element to Rock, Paper, Scissors, that requires extending the game to one more set of victory conditions, makes it hard to remember. In fact, it is such a tedious chore to contemplate that I am not going to construct a real example of the rules for it—just thinking about it has made me tired.
When you are designing a game, it is important to make the core gameplay simple and to reduce complexity where possible. I once created a magic system with elemental strengths and weaknesses for a small, downloadable game called Spellblazer. Before every battle I tried to give the players a choice for what spells to bring into battle. I had hoped to give them an interesting decision, but after launch it was clear that for almost all of the battles, there was always one perfect answer. You had to remember the strengths and weaknesses of all the creatures you were fighting in order to choose the one spell to omit. This was needlessly complicated, and it was too easy to pick the wrong spells to start the fight.
If you take a look at some of the best games out there, you will find that the best of them have incredibly easy-to-understand strategies based around rule sets like Rock, Paper, Scissors. The less time you need to commit these kinds of strategies to memory, the more time you can spend enjoying the game.
And what better way to enjoy an amazing game like Summoners War than to purchase yourself some awesome merch like this clearly-Amazon-affiliated Funko Pop of a Summoners War Paladin? That’s what’s up, internet. Looking forward to seeing you next week, so I can talk about the deliciousness of sourdough bread and the tragedy of IPA beer.
