Executive Summary
WHAT IS FUN AND WHAT WINS GAMES ARE OFTEN DIFFERENT THINGS
THIS IS AN UNAVOIDABLE CONSEQUENCE OF GOOD DESIGN
DO NOT TRY TO REMEDY THIS IN ALL CASES
WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHY THIS TENSION EXISTS, YOU CAN REDUCE IT
MAKE EITHER THE FUN THING MORE OPTIMAL…
… OR MAKE THE OPTIMAL THING MORE FUN
BUT DON’T THINK YOU CAN FIX IT WITH OUT-OF-GAME MISSIONS
Core Thesis: The Frustration of Fun vs Optimal Exists
In competitive games, the set of actions that are commonly viewed as fun and the set of actions that are likely to win the game are often different. For instance, you should be pushing the cart, but you want to shoot the enemy over and over. You should be picking Scout and grabbing the enemy flag from the basement of their fort, but you want to pick sniper and have a 3 hour sniper duel across the battlements of 2Fort. This is a Team Fortress reference. Ask your grandparents.
An argument can be made that foregoing what is fun in favor of what wins games is a form of skill expression, and to be sure, this is true. But we need not embrace all forms of skill expression equally, and at the end of the day when we take off our academic designer hats and put on our empathetic player hats, it sucks to feel the frustration of wanting one thing and knowing one should be doing something else. Games are escapism; let’s minimize instances of forcing the player to pick the salad over the ice cream.
In some games, this tension arises naturally. It is more fun for many novice players, myself included, to play chess looking for the big captures and forks and traps. It is probably more optimal to develop an understanding of openings and position and pawn structure.
But usually, this tension exists because someone made it so.
This Tension Exists for a Reason
In most modern video games, this tension arises from conscious design choices. We could design every PvP shooter as a Call of Duty Multiplayer style team deathmatch without objectives. (Note that there are many CoD modes with objectives, such as Hardpoint, Domination, Control, and so on; but anecdotally, most players just want to play Team Deathmatch). In fact, it would be far easier to design every PvP shooter as a simple deathmatch with a kill target and a maximum round time. It is remarkable that this is overwhelmingly not what we do, designing instead Battle Royales and Extraction Shooters with an inventory layer and a complicated information game layer, or else we make Overwatch-style games based around capture point or payload modes.
Designers tend not to choose to do the hard thing for no reason. Aside from creating the tension of optimal vs fun, these objectives add structure, narrative, pacing, replayability, and watchability to games. I could go into detail why and how this is, and there are two deleted versions of this post where I did just that, but let’s just say you don’t want to read 7k words on structure and predictive vs reactive gameplay. (Or maybe you do? Find me on bluesky and let me know, and I shall inflict all the words upon you.)
So while adding a pushable payload to a map allows you to centralize the action and dictate along which path most encounters will happen, it also introduces a verb to your game that your players might not find fun: to push the cart. What, then, can be done about this?
How do we reduce the tension?
Once you have satisfied yourself that to remove the source of the tension would do disproportionate harm to the game (think of turning Team Fortress 2 into a team deathmatch game for but a moment and you’ll see what harm I mean), you can still take steps to reduce the tension.
For one, you can bring the two states–fun and optimal–closer together in either of two ways.
You can make what’s fun more optimal. For instance, killing enemies could adjust the match clock to favor your team. Assuming a pure attack/defense model, kills could give the attacking team more time or, for the other team, shorten the time the defending team has to defend.
Or else, you can make what’s optimal more fun. In TF2, the payload already heals the pushing team and refills their ammo. You could imagine other buffs affecting the selfish power of the player who plays the objective that might make it more desirable to players–push the cart and be rewarded with extra power which you can then use to go and do what you actually want to do: kill people (in the game).
What not to do
I’m sure a lot of you jumped to “well just make winning more important and more people will care about winning.” This can go wrong very easily.
The best way to do it probably is to see if your game can afford to have some kind of a ranked mode. This isn’t appropriate for all games. You need to have a large enough playerbase so that you can support healthy populations for multiple queues (or make ranked the default, which is a whole other subject) and your game has to be the kind of game that can withstand the pressure of people playing hard to win. This isn’t true or even necessary for most competitive games.
So if ranked cannot be the answer, could the answer be achievements or challenges or quests? They cannot.
Extrinsic motivation subsumes intrinsic motivation.
Which is, you guessed it, a subject for another time. But in short, the more you get players to focus on out-of-game reasons to do things–for instance, “push the cart for 2000m”–the less they pay attention to and ultimately enjoy what they do in the game.
Actions in the game should mostly be incentivized by in-game payouts.
Crossing the in-game/out-of-game line is always dangerous. This is a subject I don’t fully understand because I haven’t worked enough on extrinsic motivation structures; the two systems I designed haven’t shipped (yet). But in short: drawing the player’s attention to a longer-term out-of-game layer of motivation and away from in-game fun eventually makes the player have less fun. I mentioned the main danger above but it warrants restating: extrinsic motivation subsumes intrinsic motivation. Or put in a less verbose manner: when you’re paid to do a thing, the thing becomes less fun. Paid, of course, can mean a million things, from simple kill trackers to unlockable cosmetics.
Summary
Sometimes games make us do things that we don’t find fun. There’s usually a good reason. As designers, it’s our duty to understand what that reason is and then to take careful steps in reducing that tension. You can do so by bringing fun and optimal closer together. Sometimes you can position what’s optimal in such a way that it becomes more fun as well without changing anything in-game (that’s usually ranked modes in games that are compatible with that concept.) But giving the player out-of-game reasons to do things in-game usually backfires.
Reduce what friction you can reduce without causing harm, and accept the rest as a necessary trade-off.