[TIGD] Kingmaking (Common Problem #2)

I had the same idea, sort of... I think what Trasa is hinting at is adding kingbashing to the game mechanics themselves, because as I read these posts, (many good ideas btw) I seemed to see that keeping the game close is key to avoiding kingmaking. I was inspired with the idea of having "tiered" scoring. What this basically means is that different players get different point values for the same actions. Now before you say, "But what about when the leader is clearly a more skilled player? Wouldn't this just be a way to benefit poor players for their poor playing?" Trust me, I am 100% against giving incentives for poor play. However consider this example of what I mean.

In the trading game "traders" we'll call it, the basic way to score is buy and sell commodities. However, a rudimentary "economic" structure exists so that players with strong economies have higher prices for the goods they sell. At the same time, weaker economies sell the same goods for lower prices. This encourages players to buy from weaker players, thus making them stronger. It also brings the stronger player's prices down, as their demand drops.(To calulate simply, "if you have the most points out of everyone during the trade you get 1 pt, 2nd most pts gets 2 pts...least points gets 5 pts...etc") To curb the negative, give the stronger players the ability to invest in goods that are always high priced, but expensive initially, that way a "better" player won't simply find his/her hands tied until dropping to a lower rank, but will also be unable to leave others completely in the dust. You can also have a "shop" where all players must go to gain items that help them. The greedy game will ask a higher price of wealthier clientele. (The way U. S. income taxes would work if rich people weren't allowed to evade them...) This will help to balance out the overall available funds. At the same time however, side-missions a-b-c etc. exist, without tiered scoring, so while they are more difficult to get, the stronger you are, the better your chances of being successful. These "un-tiered" missions will be weighted to be more important to winning, so that a skilled player is checked by the game, not punished, as this would essentially just move the role of kingmaker from losing players to the game itself. You could even go a step further and restrict "helping" in the game by making trading with the same people less profitable over time. (1st time 5 pts, 2nd time 3 pts...etc)

Granted, this entire game is really just a very rough sketch of some possible solutions by making it harder to advance the better you play, but hey, I figured that since I've seen what kingmaking can take away from a game, I thought I'd take a stab. I dunno, maybe none of these ideas would work at all, but hey, this IS a public forum right? :^"

This doesn't address anyones problem directly, but I think Kingmaker Insurance mechanic would be an interesting concept (I don't know of any game that uses this. What if at the beginning of a game you could invest a certain number of future points for the kingmaking situation. If someone screwed you out of a victory because of a king making situation, you could cash in your Insurance points and move ahead whatever number you invested by. This of course should remain secret, so that the kingmaking player wouldn't know who his decision would benefit most. At the end of the game any player who didn't actually get to cash in his insurance will have to pay the premium they determined at the beginning of the game.

I think this sets up a false dichotomy. Of course the experience of playing the game may be fun, but we're speaking as designers here, not as players. If your game has a kingmaker problem, some players are going to be unhappy about that. You can't just tell them "don't worry about it, the game was fun to play" -- you have to fix it!

We don't play games solely to find out who the winner is, but the game itself does do precisely that -- it should reward the player who played most skillfully. The kingmaker problem takes the victory decision out of the skill realm and into the realm of the whimsy of one player. That isn't fair, and it's not satisfying. It's not just about who wins and loses; I'd rather lose a hard-fought game than win because of an arbitrary decision by another player. Does winning matter in the grand scheme of things? No. But what have we been doing these last three hours if not trying to harness the game's mechanics to achieve victory? There are plenty of fun ways to spend 3 hours that are non-competitive. Wanting a game to coronate a winner in a fair manner isn't asking something unreasonable; gaming is a competitive activity, and part of the fun is the build-up to the resolution when players find out which played the "best". If that resolution fails to deliver, then the build-up seems less satisfying in retrospect.

Here's a better analogy. You watch a movie whose first two hours are great -- they set up a riveting story which unfolds in a really exciting fashion. But then, the last ten minutes are totally lame -- the ending is totally predictable, it's formulaic, it's weak, and it leaves many unresolved questions. Now THAT is frustrating, and it DOES spoil the rest of the movie -- this thing that you've become invested in didn't give the exciting resolution that it seemed to be building up to. That's exactly what it's like when a game that has an extended development phase feels like when the game's end is decided arbitrarily. Such is my big complaint with Illuminati. Though it doesn't suffer from a kingmaker, its ending is quite arbitrary, and therefore anticlimactic. That's pretty much what the kingmaker situation is; a big anticlimax. It's worth trying to keep such a flaw out of our games if possible.

-Jeff

I was talking to Friedemann Friese about this issue a couple of months ago. He'd recently led a discussion on the topic at a game designer's meeting held each year in Germany, and had some interesting insights.

One of them is that lots of published games have a kingmaker situation, but that the designer has pushed it far enough back in time that players don't realize that's what it was. In a 10-turn game, one player can function as kingmaker in turn 6 or 7, but because it was so far from the end, no one connected that move with the game win, especially in games with slightly (or very) opaque scoring.

He suggested that one real option to a kingmaker problem is that if you can't get rid of it -- the structure of many games makes it impossible to remove -- then you can push it back in time. One turn helps, two turns helps more, and three turns can make it completely invisible.

For better or worse. :)

-- Matthew

We've already established that kingmaking can only take place in a multi-player game. Isn't one aspect of a multi-player game the social aspect, where you try to persuade other players to collaborate with you towards certain goals during the game? So if the game comes down to a kingmaking situation, the player who played a better social game may come out ahead. Of course, there are often stronger factors outside the game experience that will influence the kingmaking, especially if there is spouse or significant other in the game.