The Decision Tree: Wide trees = more decisions, deep trees = more situations. Complexity is proportional to the size of your tree, and in most cases, the skill ceiling should be proportional to complexity.

Fundamental Limits: First, no matter how big your trees, there are clearly a set of moves that are the “best” moves. Your game is only as complex as the subtree of viable actions. Second, you can only offer so many decisions before it becomes overwhelming for a player; big trees = analysis paralysis.

SHMUPs and Go in the context of trees: SHMUPS = wide trees, clearly optimal actions, the good actions are physically hard to do. Go = deep tree, with an equally large viable tree.

Stretching the Complexity Budget:Ultimately, there’s a limit on your complexity based on the kind of game you’re making. How do we build the most interesting tree for the player? Some ideas:
Bad Choices: You need bad choices in a game (otherwise, how can you have better players). Make the most out of the bad choices added:
- bad choices should also be good choices in other situations
- the consequence of bad choices show up deeper in the tree.
- bad choices appear to be locally optimal
- bad choices should be rewarding (i.e. taunt kills)
Randomization:
- Randomizing the situation: forces players to both correctly identify their situation and understand the viable response. Can be employed both in the initial phases as well as during the game (L4D)
- Randomizing results: Obscures viable decisions, as they still may lead to a non-viable result. Increases the types of situations that will occur.
Situation Dynamics:
- Counters: The presence of counters increase the value of information. Counters encourage people who can analyze an opponents play. Counters will make your viable tree smaller. Counters force cycles of counters
- Hidden Information: Allows for deception and opponent reading
- Team Coordination: Will increase the frustration level
- Prisoner’s Dilemma: If cooperation is a choice, betrayal should be viable.

“On the other hand, the *speed* of improvement is, IMHO, equally as important as the amount of room at the top.”

I agree. I was thinking about this recently. I think it would be very hard or impossible to make a game in which all types of players improve at the same rate. Some people improve at different games at different speeds simply due to varying inherent aptitudes.

However, you could partially alleviate this by offering different play styles that people can choose to improve on. For example, I know you have trouble with rapid targeting in MW2. If the game had a strong engineer role (TF2 style) which was about building/managing strategic assets instead of shooting, it might allow some people to spend their time improving aiming and movement, while others improve their strategic building skills, but both are still playing the game. You might be able to hold onto a wider variety of players, as long as both the strategic and shooting skill paths were as deep as MW2 is now.

It would be a very different game, of course, and probably harder to design due to complexity.

IW obviously decided that they had enough players that they didn’t want to risk alienating them by broadening/unfocusing the experience. In their position, they were right (see sales numbers).

On a purely technical level, I agree with this statement.

On the other hand, the *speed* of improvement is, IMHO, equally as important as the amount of room at the top. I fairly early reached a point in MW2 where my skill growth over time flattened significantly. I continued to improve, but the degree of improvement per unit time was very small, and not very gratifying.

Another interesting measure is an individual’s degree of improvement *relative to the player pool*. I can improve my raw performance, but unless I put in a greater-than-average amount of time, my average opponent is improving faster than I am.

I take issue that you need to have a mixture of modes to have the best games (your implication being all of the best competitive games have some micro?). However, there are compelling examples for a mix…however, twitch-gaming (micromanagement and the games you listed there) are possibly not the best way of having ceilings and you start to get ceiling only pushed higher by people who literally learn all the muscle memory needed to play…(I take less issue with games having more combinations since many allow specialisation for a purpose; team based play, or similar).

Then again it’s a tough call. I’m young enough to have a reasonable amount of success in fast games :) yet I deplore the thinking that’s a necessary component to make it the best type of game.

Accuracy can also come in more forms then just picking the best action in the shortest amount of time after all. Micromanagement might be in fact an detriment in some games.

For instance Civilization 4 or the Total War series are perhaps good examples.

Civ4 is definately “Go” style, but the time limitations are based around turns and not real time combat. It has “micromanagement” down to the picking of individual cities worker’s task assignments…It also has apart from too many combinations of strategy to ever have a perfect game, randomisation in the process too (you can’t learn the map, thus the ceiling is higher for learning more about combinations and real estate then choke points etc.). Something added to the mix that Starcraft and CoD (actually, 95% of RTS and FPS games) have.

Total War adds in a second game mode – you can perhaps excel at the real time combat, but not the turn based parts, etc. The turn based part is much less dense then Civ4 and therefore is probably purely “go” with little reaction/action planning any more then moving large armies around. The teal time part is not micromanagement based I think (large formations need more cohesion then micro control) but succeeds more in the area of time-limited thinking and “accuracy”. It’s more interesting how it merges, in many ways in great ways, RTS and TBS.

In any case, this is as you said only with competitive games or goal-based ones. There are a large amount of games that can’t fit into that definition well (apart from The Sims :) ). Or ones which generally are great in one or the other category. Some people even do like Quicktime Events purely because they have a low ceiling (or as far as I can see) – but if the intention is to have replayability (as the examples all tend towards) this is a fruitless area.

I need to play MW2 if you say it is as “go like” as you say it is. However the fact one of the successful strategies actually is using a knife, I do wonder if they just added too many combinations to make it worth trying to get to the higher ceiling levels. Only one way to tell; play it myself, once it is cheaper.

In any case, I love your definitions/explanations of terms, more, more!