I’ve noticed that when I get frustrated with playing a game, there’s usually a very specific way it happens. When I play, I keep in my mind a model of how the game works, what optimal and interesting play is, and how to achieve that. I attempt to play using that model: If I succeed, then great! I’ve made progress. If I fail to execute on the approach I have in mind, that’s also fine, since I just need to try again. The point of friction, though, comes when I succeed in doing the thing I had in mind, but the thing I had in mind completely fails to work – because that means the entire mental model I had of the game is skewed somehow. There’s a desync, somewhere, between the game I’m playing and the game that actually exists. This is a dangerous moment, because now it’s very easy to come to the conclusion that the game that exists is just an inferior version of the game I’m trying to play in my head, one which fails to account for being played in the way I expect this game to be played.
This point of friction usually emerges sooner or later, to lesser or greater degree, even in games I love. With Dishonored it came when the game provided me no avenues to non-lethally disable an opponent once they were alerted to my presence (a lack thankfully rectified by its sequel). With XCOM 2 it came with the realization that flanking tactics were sometimes far more dangerous than they were worth simply because the cost of accidentally revealing an enemy unit could be so high. At some point, inevitably, the actual design of a game tends to diverge from what I believe the most beautiful, elegant, or intuitive way to play that game to be – and, being a stubborn person in certain very bizarre ways, I still try to play it in the way that I perceive it should be played, even in the face of the actual designers of the game obviously disagreeing with me.
I may be a bit of a standout in how stubborn I get about these things, but I’m hardly unique in my initial approach. Everyone has an idea of what ‘good play’ is supposed to look like in a game they play – whether it’s based on other games they’ve played, movies they’ve played with similar theming to the game, or just on the way the first couple of times they played went, very quickly they build a mental model of what’s desirable and what isn’t. Hypothetically, that model could even line up perfectly with the game’s systems – more often than not, though, there’s a disconnect here. The ‘right’ way to play the game, from the player’s perspective, is not the same as the way most likely to actually achieve success. In order to do well, they might have to do something that feels wrong, incorrect, suboptimal – that can be a bitter pill to swallow.
In this way, it pays to be aware of what baggage players are likely to bring to your game. This is why the history of similar game designs matters to your game design, because the expectations fostered by those games are going to affect how people see, understand, and play your game. This is why understanding what your art style conveys about the nature of your design is important, because people who find the style appealing are going to come in with certain expectations about the gameplay. This is why it’s important to ensure your player has some way to understand the breadth of the design, rather than just giving them one sample encounter and leaving them to infer that the rest are pretty much like that one.
When a conflict between the player’s conception of the design and the realities of the design occurs, it can only be resolved by the player changing their mental model of the game, and not everyone’s going to be interested in doing that. There’s an art of persuasion to it: The game has to, by its design and theming, forward an argument as to why its way of doing things is better than the way the player has in mind. Does it make more sense? Is it because the opponents have some special countermeasure grounded in the narrative? Generally, players are going to be more accepting of their approach not working because they haven’t accounted for other factors in the game (such as not defending adequately against a new technique) than because the game doesn’t reward, or even punishes, their approach (such as not having an old technique work when one would expect it should).
There’s a sense, as designer, that the design of the game should stand alone, should contain all the context it needs to make it make sense to the player, and that everything they learn about how to play the game should come from the game itself. Even someone who has never played a game before, though, comes to a game with some conception of how the game should be played. If you want people to learn the game, to stick with the game, then it is your job to, no matter what these preconceptions are, guide them and endeavor to reshape them to align with what the design of the game actually is.