Mechanics Analysis: Building Blocks

One of the key things that makes a game “a game” is that it uses mechanics.  A mechanic in soccer is to move the ball without using your hands.  A mechanic in go is to place a white or black stone on the board to represent your territory.  All games use mechanics, and how the mechanics interact with each other is one of the dynamics of the game.  Without mechanics, an RPG is just a book or people telling stories.  There’s no “game”.

Therefore, when you want to create a game, you have to think about the mechanics.  Not only that, but you have to think of how the mechanics interact with each other if you want to write games more complex than tic-tac-toe.  We’ll get to how mechanics interact with each other dynamically in another topic, but for right now, let’s start with the basics.

The key to a robust mechanic, even if it’s not necessarily good, starts with a question: “What do I want to accomplish?”





Let’s take an example.  In Dungeons & Dragons, TSR and later WotC wanted to figure out how easy or hard it would be to hit someone in combat.  That’s the answer to the question that led to Armor Class and To Hit bonuses.  They asked how they could mechanic the slow guy in full plate not being fazed with getting hit with broadsword as well as the nimble gal dodging the same sword.  From there, they could take AC and To Hit and balance them against each other so that both scenarios made sense and were equally viable.

That’s not to say that there was only one way of implementing this.  There was THAC0 and now the modern system.  Both are different enough that there are arguments about what’s the “better” system (despite the fact that THAC0 makes you keep implementing sign changes to calculate in the middle of battles), but they both have the same answer to the question of “what do you want to accomplish?”  The fact that people still like THAC0 decades later and after an alternative mechanic has been developed just shows that it is robust.

“What do I want to accomplish?” is sometimes a hard question, mostly because people make it hard.  They have an awesome idea for a mechanic (“I will make the player race chocobos for shinies!” [1] ) and focus in on making that mechanic slick and polished.  They’ll pour time and effort into it.  

And then they will be confused when the player a) doesn’t even touch it, or b) hates it.

How could the player not see the genius in the mechanic?  Because the player never saw a reason to use the mechanic (“eh, I don’t need an ultimate weapon to beat the game”) or hates it because it’s not fun (“I have to win this race in negative time?!”).  In both cases, the mechanic didn’t answer the question.  The player had no idea why they want to do this, or what it’s supposed to accomplish.  And when I say “accomplish”, I do not mean the reward.  

This is another key point.  In this sense, the goal of a mechanic is never the reward that comes out of winning.  That’s what “winning” is.  To go back to our earliest example, what the mechanic in soccer is trying to accomplish is “move the ball around the field”.  The “winning” part of soccer is “move the ball into the opponent’s net for a point”.

Win conditions are always slightly separate from the mechanic.  Mechanics should help you achieve the win conditions, but the win conditions should not necessarily dictate the mechanic.  This is because win conditions are generally based on the interplay between mechanics.  If it rests on any one mechanic, that leads to imbalance.  We’ll cover this topic more in-depth later.

There are some great mechanics out there that do some really amazing things and are incredibly innovative.  Some of them are brilliant in their elegance.  Some of them less so.  And some mechanics exist where you can see the bones of a great idea, but fall short in the execution.  But they all share one thing in common: a mechanic that has some meat to it should always start from the question of “what do I want to accomplish?”


[1] I don’t actually hate Final Fantasy X.  I do, however, think the chocobo racing for Tidus’s ultimate weapon could have been rethought.  Especially since I beat the game with an Ice Sword I got at level 20.