Playing a game is learning a set of habits, a set of reactions, and trying to tune and optimize those habits and reactions towards those that most frequently successfully achieve the game’s goal. Calling it a strategy might, sometimes, seem a bit grandiose, since we make a lot of these decisions through habit and muscle memory, but the decisions we wire into our brains are still strategic constructs. However, the approaches we take must shift with the situation the game puts us into: Depending on the circumstances, a good habit may yield bad results, or a foolish strategy might win big.
Weak players tend to rely too much on the general case best strategy, where more experienced players recognize the situational nature of tactics. A case I recently saw was a game where you have three dice, a number you’re trying to beat, and have a single reroll of as many dice as you choose. Now, the obvious best strategy for trying to optimize your roll for high numbers is to reroll every die that lands on 1, 2, or 3 and to keep every die that lands on 4, 5, or 6 – this will yield the average highest result. However, when the goal is not just to roll high but to specifically reach a threshold, the strategy must change to suit the circumstances. As an extreme example, let’s say the target is 18: You now need to reroll any die that comes to something lower than 6 to have even a slight chance of winning. Or, if the target is something else relatively high, like 16, even if it’s possible to keep a 4 and still win, that would mean you’d need to roll 6’s on the other two dice, which is significantly less likely than rolling 16 on three dice – though both are a bit of a long shot.
Of course, that’s quite an edge case, and I can’t see any scenario short of trying to roll an 18 where you’d want to reroll a five, but there are many examples of when the necessity of trying to reach a particular success threshold affects the strategy. An extremely common example, and one I’ve talked about before, is balancing attacks that do damage quickly in small chunks vs attacks that do damage more slowly but in bigger chunks. The faster attacks usually need to be significantly more effective in terms of damage rate to balance out, since strong single-hit attacks have the advantage of allowing hit-and-run tactics, of defeating a weakened opponent more quickly (potentially preventing a devastating counterattack), and of being more difficult for the opponent to effectively react to. Not only does how close you are to the success threshold of defeating your opponent drastically change what attack is most effective, so does the opponent’s mobility, preferred range, and their own most effective attacks.
A particularly interesting example of being forced to adapt your strategy is in heads-up collectible card games like Magic and Hearthstone, where how many cards your opponent is currently holding is a tremendously important situational modifier to your strategy. The more cards your opponent has, the more likely they are to have something that immediately counters whatever your general-case strongest available move is: This means it’s often worthwhile to lead with a generally sub-optimal move just to draw out your opponent’s countermeasures.
On a more meta-gaming level, there’s a curious kind of balancing that takes place in many competitive games. The stronger the move, the more players have learned how and prepared to counter it – and, commensurately, the weaker the move, the more unexpected it will be. This sort of self-balancing can only go so far, and it of course only works under circumstances where the weaker move is distinct enough from the stronger move that the same countermeasures aren’t effective against both. Unfortunately, these strange automatic balancing mechanisms don’t really work in single-player games – even if you could make an AI that chose its strategies in a manner indistinguishable from a human player, if the players knew it was an AI they would probably feel it was behaving arbitrarily and erratically – after all, why would it ever pick the obvious ‘worse’ move?
Despite that limitation, this principle isn’t restricted to competitive games. Often what separates a good game from a bad game, nearly irrespective of genre, is how much you have to pay attention and adapt your strategies to the situation the game puts forth. As I noted a couple of days ago, part of the role that difficulty plays in game design is in raising the stakes and responsiveness high enough that you have to adapt your strategy from your default in order to succeed.
How can we build to enable situational decision-making? There are two pieces: First, a system that generates diverse situations; second, a set of tools that gives a number of discrete ways to approach these situations. Many games present essentially the same challenge over and over – such as a room full of guys that need shooting. Under these circumstances, the player is likely to figure out one tactic they like and use it over and over again, which gets dull sooner rather than later. Many games present the player with a set of tools that are essentially identical – weapons with different attack animations and damage numbers but the same underlying mechanics. Now, no matter how diverse and interesting the situational challenges presented the player, they’re all just nails to be hit with a hammer.
These requirements may seem basic, but a lot of games honestly don’t do an amazing job of meeting them. Of course, a game can have many other fine traits, can even be fun to play – but if you want the systems of the game to be enjoyable on their own merit, there has to be something there for the player to react to. Without that reaction, that decision-making process, they’re just working an assembly line.