The latest blog entry on Designer Notes, a game-design journal by Soren Johnson, is called "water finds the crack". It is an insightfully academic look into the behavior of games and gamers that looks at home games create a balance of risk vs. reward that appeals to the essential desire of most people; what's the greatest reward for least risk? This is also called an optimization puzzle, and it is Johnson's theory that designers must create safeguards against players that will optimize the fun right out of the game. They call this, "water finds the crack".

     A member of the Civilization development team, he uses an example of "water finds the crack" in Civilization III, which is why I found this blog post in the first place. I recently had gone back to Civ III on my PC more out of nostalgia than anything else, but I inevitably ended up using a fairly well-known "optimization" for producing hammers (for non-Civers, hammers are production points to build stuff in your cities) of harvesting forests by planting and chopping them down ad nauseum. The "ad nauseum" is important, because it makes Johnson's point. By doing this around a player's cities in the game, it creates an infinite amount of production, but is also mind-numbingly tedious, and a major fun-sucker.

     Another example of this is the use of glitches and mods to beat a game's challenges. A quick to download or insertion of code and suddenly your character is walking around a demigod at level 5, smashing and bashing through what would have been a carefully leveled set of challenges but now are all equally minute. The reward is the ultimate character for no risk at all. Technically, you don't even need to play the game for them!

    Of course, not every example of "water finding the crack" over-optimization is, in a sense, beating the system. Johnson mentions the MMO Ultima Online, and their class-hybridization module, allowing characters to mix and match classes. Of course, one of the primary combinations is the tank-mage; a character that is almost indestructible defensively and can cast enemy-wiping crowd-control spells at the same time. (Think Magneto, comic-con'ers) The result is that you build a character that tops out early and, although in the dick-swinging department you may think you have it made, further challenges and payoffs are mostly lost. Johnson refers to this as the tank-mage effect.

     He also points to the undervaluation of time as a form of over-optimization. In other words, players finds way to benefit from many small rewards with little or no risk (but with larger time requirements) than for taking bigger risks, for bigger rewards, with significantly less micromanagement. Johnson's example is, once again, from Civilization. He points to the creation of science (beakers) in towns working toward the development of advanced technologies. As a technology is purchased with beakers, any left over beakers after the purchase are gone. However, if a player goes through each city tweaking their tax rates and production, they can actually make fewer beakers so that when the technology is purchased none are wasted. What would have been beakers will be tax money. This is undervaluing one's time, as a player spends so much time micromanaging their cities that they are not working toward bigger rewards.

     Designers are often very picky in what player exploits they leave in. The game reload exploit is a common feature among games (reloading a game that produced a bad result in order to do it differently), but when designers attempted to remove that possibility, creating randomized loads, gamers got pissed and demanded they change it back. The Civ III team, for example, decided to make it a settings option at the beginning of the game for players that liked the change. Ultimately, designers attempt to please the gamer, and that often means allowing the gamer as much control as is possible without allowing an exploit that, in effect, breaks the game. Designers try to close the cracks necessary to preserve the challenge and fun of a game, while allowing gamers a few to exploit and feel they've somehow mastered the system.