In the MMO world, the shorthand term for this predicament is the “tank-mage” – a reference to Ultima Online, in which certain hybrid class builds could both wear heavy armor and cast powerful damage spells. One of the dangers of players looking to optimize a game is that a single dominant strategy will emerge that drowns out all others. However, the process itself is tedious and mind-numbing, killing the fun for players who wanted to play optimally. This set of rules encourages players to have a worker planting a forest and chopping it down on every tile within their empire in order to create an endless supply of hammers. However, forests can also be replanted once the appropriate tech is discovered. Chopping down a forest gives 10 hammers to the nearest city. The greatest danger is that once a player discovers such an exploit, she will never be able to play the game again without using it – the knowledge cannot be ignored or forgotten, even if the player wishes otherwise.Ĭivilization 3 provides a simple example with “lumberjacking” – the practice of farming forests for infinite production. Often, designers don’t even understand their own games until they finally see them in the wild.Ī phrase we used on the Civilization development team to describe this phenomenon is that “water finds a crack” – meaning that any hole a player can possibly find in the game’s design will be inevitably abused over and over. Games, however, are so complex that it is difficult to anticipate exactly how players will optimize a game until after release, once thousands bang away at the game and share their ideas with each other online. What gives the most reward for the least risk? What strategy provides the highest chance – or even a guaranteed chance – of success? Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game. Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.”

Phrased another way, the destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. They teach us things so that we can minimize risk and know what choices to make. The following was published in the March 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine…

Infinite tanks crack