This has been a topic on my mind for a while, but in a lot of games, especially PvP games there is a much touted idea of “skill” that gets thrown around as a measure of worth. Certainly I think that there is meaning behind this phrase, as balance changes to PvP games revolve around this idea nearly all the time.
Twitch Functionality – This is the most obvious one, but depending on the game it’s not always available. This is a gameplay element that only provides a very small window to execute the correct command, usually as a reaction to something else happening on screen. While fighting games and shooting games use this type of gameplay to great effect it’s not always available depending on the genre and your audience. Guild Wars 2 dropped the notion of twitch interrupts for the most part because it’s not practical in an MMO with so many players at the same time (interrupts still exist but they rely much less on twitch reaction). Twitch functionality as far as I can tell is almost always a high-level skill that while available early won’t be something that beginning players will use much. It’s just generally not practical to require fast reflexes for beginning players.
Best Use Cases – A skill or ability that is more effective when used in a certain “optimal situation”. You have to be a little careful with designing these skills though since it’s easy to add optimal situations that don’t add to gameplay. These types of abilities usually manifest themselves as conditionals “if you meet X condition you get Y as a bonus”. The best designed skills of this type typically reward the player for using them at all, but provide a much larger reward for using them correctly. Occasionally there are abilities in games that give no benefit when used improperly, though I feel that these types of abilities tend to be much more niche and harder to apply in normal gameplay. General use should come first before playing with conditionals if you can.
Clutch Use – A skill with a relatively large disadvantage (like a very long recharge or large weakness at the start or end of activation) that is intended to be used at a certain time for a large effect. This type of skill is about reading the opponent usually and responding properly. In BlazBlue and other fighting games the super attack usually fulfills this role. It’s very skillful to turn a match around with a super, and on the other hand, it’s very skillful to read your opponent’s super and avoid it. These are actually great tools when designed properly as they make the player feel very powerful and generally have eye candy associated with them to get observers into the game.
Team Coordination – A game element that requires coordination between more than one player is a less common form of “skill” in games. Because most games want to appeal broadly, it’s hard to add these elements without restricting your gameplay to all but organized teams. Most of the time when I see elements like this in games, the functionality is ignored by most players except those at the highest level. It’s okay to build a game with these types of elements though and still have it appeal to a broad audience though. Left 4 Dead requires coordination to heal allies and avoid team damage, but for the most part it’s okay to have the occasional friendly fire as long as you aren’t playing on the hardest difficulty. Because the rewards for good team coordination scale up with difficulty, these elements can exist without alienating beginning players.
Of all of these functionalities I think that “best use case” is probably the one I think is the most important. To some extent it’s already a generalization of the other three. Twitch use is just finding the “best case” when the window is very small, and clutch use is “best case” when the window only appears infrequently. Similarly, team coordination is a function of syncronizing “best case” with the “best case” of an ally. In order to make a game element skillful, I think this is probably the first step to look for.
Now I didn’t really get into other elements like hard and soft counters or tactics versus strategy, which I think are also important elements to designing something “skillful” but I think this post is long enough as is. I’ll save these topics for another day.