Helplessness Kills Fun

I was going to continue this post in the vein of crowdsourcing which I started talking about last post, but I think I’ll save that for next post. Instead I want to talk about something that’s been affecting me recently. As you may have read in my post [On What Makes Gamesaddicting], I’ve been playing a lot of League of Legends lately. I still haven’t reached silver (though I’ve gotten tantalizingly close before falling way back down into the depths of bronze).

But these last few days especially, I’ve been incredibly frustrated with the game. I’ve actually been getting really mad at the game, at the other players, at myself. So I’m going to put on my game designer cap and try to figure out exactly what’s happening here. See, I’ve definitely lost other games before, and I’ve definitely felt bad or sad when that’s happened. But I don’t usually get mad when I lose.

Obviously, some part of it has to do with the ranked system. I really want the “recognition” of not being bronze anymore. It’s been a goal of mine, and I keep failing, and every time I lose, I get a little madder.

But there’s definitely more to that. As an example, two of the games I was really big into in highschool were chess and soccer. I would have multiple soccer matches every week, and my team was god awful. We would lose almost every game. And while I was much better at chess (I played in USCF tournaments pretty frequently and placed pretty highly), I of course wasn’t undefeated. In both of these cases, I was emotionally invested in the outcome, but I never (or almost never) got mad when I lost.

So what gives? Here’s my theory. It’s about the feeling of helplessness. See, when I play a ranked game of LoL, I am playing with 4 other strangers on my team. And I can’t control them or their actions. So one of them keeps going deep into enemy territory by themselves and dying, despite my requests to not do that, I feel incredibly helpless. And note, I’m not saying I’m in bronze because I always have a bad team. I’m just talking about the idea of playing with 4 strangers, and trying to coordinate with pings (not clear) or text (not quick). When that invariably fails, the player just feels a sense of frustration. And I don’t think it’s just me, because the LoL subreddit seems to always have posts about players complaining about the frustration.

This theory would explain why I didn’t get nearly as frustrated in soccer or chess. In chess, I couldn’t feel helpless because I was the only one playing. The game is a nearly symmetrical game with complete information, so there’s no chance and no other players to blame. If I lost, it’s because I messed up or the other player was simply better than me. I still enjoyed the game. And with soccer, the team as a whole could learn from our mistakes. I knew the other players. We could communicate, and we could go over the game in practice to get better. I didn’t feel frustrated in the game even when I didn’t have the ball because I would be yelling at my teammates (“Man on!” or “Look left!” or the classic “Shoot!”) which would give me some influence on the outcome (as little as it was).

So there it is. Helplessness kills fun. It’s not a super-revolutionary idea. But it’s good to have it written down explicitly. If you game has a lot of chance or a super tough boss or anything that makes the player feel helpless, they will not have fun. And if the point of your game is to have fun, you should change that immediately. Maybe Riot could consider that, and try to allow more communication in the game (an in-game voice chat would be heavenly). Or even a better reporting system for toxic players would diminish the feeling of helplessness.