My favorite game, Path of Exile, expanded rather significantly yesterday, and as a result I’m not really capable of thinking about anything else. Fortunately, there’s an episode from the game’s past that I think illustrates something interesting.
Path of Exile is an online action-RPG notable for its depth and flexibility of character specialization. Abilities can be modified, empowered, repurposed, delegated to devices which will use the ability for you. One aspect of this specialization is an equipment system – 10 different item slots for weapons, helmets, boots, and so on.
One of the most fundamental assumptions in the game’s design and balancing is that those equipment slots are exclusive – a character can’t wear five hats. (This isn’t Team Fortress 2, after all!)
Players found a way to violate this assumption via an unintended mechanic known as “snapshotting” in 2013. After its discovery, players developed more and more convoluted ways of abusing it, until snapshotting was removed mid-2014.
Here’s a demonstration from Chris Wilson, Path of Exile’s lead designer:
I shudder to think how much cumulative time has been wasted doing this.
– Chris Wilson
This is how fun is destroyed in social games (to simplify enormously):
There are two ways of playing the game. One is more fun than the other, and one is more efficient than the other, in terms of producing more digital currency or bigger damage numbers or whatever. If the fun playstyle is also the efficient playstyle, all is well.
But otherwise, as in the case of snapshotting, the existence of the efficient playstyle destroys the fun playstyle. If the game has an economy, inflation driven by the efficient playstyle drives adherents of other approaches into poverty, destroying what fun may be involved in participating in the market.
If the game is competitive, efficiency-oriented players deny the satisfaction of victory to the fun-oriented.
If the game has cooperative aspects, funseekers are unable to contribute meaningfully.
And if the game is intended to be challenging, the designers have to balance that challenge around the most powerful approaches, leaving weaker, more fun playstyles unable to even progress through the game past some threshold.
But if the efficient playstyle is never discovered or disseminated, of course there’s no problem.
To put that another way: detailed knowledge of game mechanics can be an information hazard.
Carcinisation 
As in gaming, so in life?
“To put that another way: detailed knowledge of game mechanics can be an information hazard.”
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Eh. This piece doesn’t actually make any normative statements, but I can’t help but get the impression that it’s written from the viewpoint of, you know, “Oh, those damn competitive gamers, ruining our games!” So I think it’s worth mentioning here the alternative point of view, namely, that making sure the fun can’t be destroyed by memetic hazard — that what’s efficient is fun, that the game is actually deep instead of secretly shallow — is the game designer’s job, that they have not done it properly otherwise. See Playing to Win, etc., etc.
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I agree with you; I do not hold the viewpoint described.
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I figured you probably did (hence why I just described the viewpoint sketchily and assumed familiarity with “Playing to Win” 😛 ). I don’t think I expressed my point well, which wasn’t intended to be “I think such-and-such is what you think” but rather “Those who don’t know any better will take this as an argument for such-and-such”; that is, while it doesn’t say anything false, I feel like it’s misleading to those who don’t know any better.
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From the “philosophy” section of the manual for Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a single player game:
You don’t even need anything social here; players are plenty eager to destroy their own fun.
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I stumbled across this blog accidentally. I am not a gamer. But this particular post strikes me as an excellent analog of government and capitalism today (I live in the U.S.). Substitute “effective governance” or “functioning economy” for “fun”. Those who game the system for personal gain spoil it for everybody else.
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