Every time you play a game, part of the fun is getting better. But, the definition of “better” is trickier than I first thought, and there are some interesting implications for game design.

How do you measure your skill in a game? The obvious answer is to just measure your success. If you can beat skyrim in 2 hours, get to level 30 in tetris, or beat competitive chess players, you know you’re good. However, that’s not all there is to the story. In some sense, you can get significantly more skilled at a game, before feeling the corresponding success. I’d argue there’s value in drawing an explicit distinction between your skill and your success. The correlation between these is the degree to which your game rewards skill, or what I’d call skill leverage.

So if skill isn’t just success, what’s the obvious alternative? Well, you can always break the game down and measure success in small chunks of the game. For instance, in Super Mario, you could track your progress in making precise jumps. Or in tetris, you could see how long you can keep a combo going. Usually these correlate well with actual results, but not always. In the worst case, you could imagine a game in which the only task is to press a spacebar after ten seconds with microsecond precision. On success, you’re rewarded, on failure, you’re simply told you failed, with no other feedback.

Obviously a pretty bad game, partially because you’d never know how good you were. There’d be no in-game reward for working your way all the way up from pressing the spacebar at 9.5 seconds to pressing it at 9.99 seconds, and in fact, no actual way to tell that you were better at all. It’s hard to imagine a more frustrating experience. Once you can see the clock, and know how close you are to winning though, it’s actually a pretty fun bar game. Real humans have payed money to try it.

Once you start thinking in terms of the distinction between skill and results, there are all sorts of game machinery that suddenly make logical sense. One that used to confuse me is mechanics that reward players for already being good, like the doors in Dead Cells that only give you extra loot if you can make it through a level without ever taking damage. When I first saw them, I thought “why help players win even more?”. You’d expect it to be more useful to help struggling players, than to help ones already good enough at the game to get through a level unhit.

But, loot with a win-condition actually just makes the skill -> performance slope a little steeper. A reasonable improvement in skill (dodging well enough to no-hit a level) gives you a direct bonus in the game. The effect is that when you get a little better, you do a lot better, which feels pretty good. And the alternative, in which you get bonuses to help you when you’re bad, actually goes very wrong. You end up in situations where improving actually has a bit of a negative impact on your result, which is obviously frustrating.