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Game Study #1: Bushnell's Law

Blogs > hydezyne
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hydezyne
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
United States38 Posts
Last Edited: 2011-01-19 12:55:10
September 24 2010 22:18 GMT
#1
GAME STUDY #1: Bushnell's Law
game design simplified, analyzed, and applied

History

Bushnell's Law is arguably the most important concept in game design. The law simply states that games should be “easy to learn and difficult to master”. The axiom is first attributed to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell who, in 1971, said:

"All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth."

Bushnell's quote was referring to arcade games although the concept extends beyond and before arcades. The founder of Parker Brothers, George Parker, spoke of this idea almost a century earlier:

“Each game must have an exciting, relevant theme and be easy enough for most people to understand. Finally, each game should be so sturdy that it could be played time and again, without wearing out.”

Bushnell's Law has been put to practice long before anyone put it into words. Games like Go, Chess, Othello, and Poker are great examples of the law put to use.

Bushnell's law has been adopted by Blizzard as their design motto and implemented to great effect in their games.

Easy to Learn

How do you make a game easy to learn? This depends a lot on the player. However, there are a few things that can be done to make a game easier to learn:

Keep it simple

When Atari first released the Pong arcade game the only instructions on how to play were summed up in one line: Avoid ball for high score. Simple instructions make a game more accessible.

Model real life

Pong is modeled after table tennis and the gameplay is more intuitive because most players can draw from real world experience.

Model other games

Starcraft II is not first real time strategy game and because so many people are familiar with the genre it makes the gameplay more intuitive because most players can draw from past gaming experience.

Layering

The first mission in the Starcraft II campaign only uses marines and then as the missions progress more units and buildings are slowly added to make the game less overwhelming.

Difficult to Master


How do you make a game difficult to master? The content and objective of a game determine how difficult it is to master. Adding more content is the only thing to do to increase how difficult the game is to master. Content may be graphics, challenges, buttons, units, abilities or even AI which requires more lines of code.

The objective of Starcraft is to destroy all of your opponent's buildings. The ability to master that objective depends on the amount of content. More units, abilities, buildings and maps create more skills and strategies that need to be perfected in order to master the game. Therefore more contect makes it more difficult to master.

Conclusion


Often times games that are easy to learn are easy to master. If a game gets more difficult to learn it may or may not get more difficult to master. This can lead to games that may be difficult to learn and difficult to master, or worse, difficult to learn and easy to master.

It is very challenging to add content to a game to make it more difficult to master yet easier to learn. This is the reason Bushnell's Law, while very valuable, is so hard to implement.


[image loading]

*****
There is Power in Simplicity
GreatFall
Profile Blog Joined January 2010
United States1061 Posts
September 24 2010 22:20 GMT
#2
Bushnell was a genius and at the same time a user much like Edison... I agree a good game is easy to learn but hard to master.
Inventor of the 'Burning Tide' technique to quickly getting Outmatched Crusher achivement :D
Vinnesta
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
Singapore285 Posts
September 24 2010 22:48 GMT
#3
Adding more content is the only thing to do to increase how difficult the game is to master.


You also used Go as an example of a game following Bushnell's Law. Can you explain this contradiction?

It is not easy to pinpoint the reasons why a game is hard to master. A criterion I think to be important is that the game should not be easily solvable. Comparing tic-tac-toe and checkers, both are played on grids and involve territory control, but obviously checkers is much harder to master. Using SCBW as an example, the game has been played repeatedly for a dozen years, but it still has room for innovation of strategies, ie. unsolved game.
Same difference is not an oxymoron!
HCastorp
Profile Blog Joined March 2010
United States388 Posts
Last Edited: 2010-09-24 23:54:11
September 24 2010 23:42 GMT
#4
As Vinn noted, while much of what you say is true, your argument about content is misguided and indeed contradicted by your own examples.

I would also argue that your argument about the races of Starcraft 2 is flawed. You seem to want to say that Terran is easy to learn and easy to master. the Terran race may well be easier to learn than the others, but I don't think being a master of TvT is any easier than being a master at any other mirror matchup.

Or to be more logical about it, if we define "mastering" a race to mean playing a race to the full potential that is possible, I don't think Terran is easier than Protoss. It may well be easier than Zerg, but even if it is, it is still difficult enough that the peak remains out of reach, which is all that is necessary for balance and a fun game.

Or, to abstract things one step further, one could say that it is easy to imagine a hypothetical situation in which the races are equally difficult to master using the above definition, and yet remain terribly imbalanced. While more difficult, It is also possible to imagine a situation in which the races are not equally easy to master, and yet are balanced. Perhaps Starcraft BW is an example of the latter situation.

I am not arguing that there are not balance issues in Starcraft 2, I'm just saying that I don't think that what you're talking about here is really a useful way of looking at them.

hydezyne
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
United States38 Posts
September 25 2010 00:01 GMT
#5
I'm not using this as an argument of starcraft 2 or any parts of it.
There is Power in Simplicity
hydezyne
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
United States38 Posts
September 25 2010 00:03 GMT
#6
Let's say you take Go in it's current form and wanted to make it harder to master, what would you do? Answer: add more content. Therefore, adding more content is the only way to make a game harder to master.
There is Power in Simplicity
hydezyne
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
United States38 Posts
September 25 2010 00:06 GMT
#7
The objective of Starcraft is to destroy all of your opponent's buildings. One might argue that a master of starcraft is someone who can destroy all of their opponent's buildings 100% of the time. A more realistic master is most likely someone who can destroy all of their opponent's buildings more often than anyone else.

You need statistical data. Saying someone "plays a race to it's full potential" is subjective. What do you consider to be their full potential. I don't even mention races. It's clearly all about achieving the objectives better than anyone else.
There is Power in Simplicity
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