Given the chance, players will optimise the fun out of a game, so the designer must protect them from doing so.
Players pursue the winning strategy rather than the enjoyable one, and will grind a tedious optimum for hours if it is optimal. The design response is to remove the dominant strategy rather than to ask players not to use it, since asking has never worked.
In practice
- A quest with a repeatable reward is repeated until it is unbearable, by people who chose to.
- A bonus scheme with an exploitable clause is exploited by staff who would have described themselves as conscientious.
- Standing
- Compare Goodhart's law, which describes the same behaviour from the measurement side.
- Subject
- Play & Game Design
- Essay
- Small worlds with visible rules