01
Elimination games, commonly referred to as Matching Tile Games, translate to Chinese that is, matching bricks.
The originator of this type of game is the famous Tetris.
Designed and written by Soviet engineer Alexei Pakytenov, the game was released on June 6, 1984.
At the beginning of this year, the well-known game media IGN released the best-selling game sales list in history, and Tetris ranked first with more than 500 million copies of sales, which is almost the sum of two, three, four and five.
In addition to Tetris, there is another ancestor of the elimination game, called "Chain shot!", which is a Japanese game, which was later renamed "SameGame", which should be called a game of the same color in translation.
The rules of this game are very simple, a 20x10 square of four-colored bricks. As long as there are more than two blocks of the same color connected together, you can click on them to eliminate them. But individual bricks cannot be eliminated. After elimination, the bricks above will fall, and the purpose of the game is to make the bricks of the same color as close together as possible.
Both games lay the foundational mode for eliminating the game:
Batch elimination occurs when elements (bricks, colored balls, etc.) meet certain common conditions.
But the two games also have a lot of game rules design differences, probably these four dimensions.
1. Time Pressure: Tetris gives players similar countdown pressure through constant drops, but in many versions of Chain shot! players can have unlimited time to find matches.
2. Operation object: The player in Tetris is operating the newly emerged bricks, and the player in Chain shot! needs to operate the bricks already in the panel
3, elimination method: Tetris is peer elimination, "Chain shot!" is the same color elimination
4. Freedom of operation: Tetris allows players to operate freely, and does not require that each operation be eliminated once. But every operation in Chain shot!must lead to elimination.
These four dimensions have great guiding significance for later games, and since then, a large number of elimination games have emerged.
For example, "Doctor Mario" launched by Nintendo in 1990 combined the two elimination methods of peer (column) elimination and same color elimination of the above two games, achieving a generation of classics.
For example, in 1989, a game called Plotting adopted a gameplay that introduced shooting elements in the elimination game. The shooting class was eliminated, and later there were also big players, that is, "Bubble Dragon" and "Zuma".
Also in 1989, the Japanese-developed game Sichuan Province: Female Liao was launched, which introduced the gameplay of connection elimination, which was later called "Lian Lian Kan".
There was also a 1994 game called Shariki, which added the transposition elimination gameplay to create the classic match-3 gameplay (Match 3), which was later carried forward by Jewel Maze and became one of the most classic gameplay.
But regardless of how the gameplay changes, it can be seen that none of these elimination games escape the "merge similar items" model laid down by Tetris and Chain shot!, and the rule design is a continuation of these two games.
02
So, why are elimination games so popular?
First of all, the elimination of behavior can indeed stimulate positive emotions and make people feel happy.
Mention should be made here of a term called "Processing Fluency" of information.
The term refers to an individual's experience of how difficult it is to process information. The same information, when we use the more easily discernible the expression, the more concise the expression, the higher the fluency.
For example, in the same sentence, you can say "I love you", you can also say "Tonight the moon is so beautiful", the former is more concise than the latter, it is easy to get, and the processing fluency is higher.
Psychologists have found that when fluency is at a relatively high level, it triggers a weak, short-lived positive emotion, which is fluency - the emotional connection model.
And things that are neat and regular will always look particularly "simple" and have high fluency.
So we will always find that when people see clean and tidy, orderly items, it is indeed easy to become comfortable and get a sense of pleasure.
The mechanism of eliminating the game is to let the player constantly arrange the game elements according to certain rules.
So, when we complete an elimination, we complete a process from disorder to order, from complex to simple, fluency- emotional connection model will give us a little weak, short-term positive emotion.
Essentially, the pleasure we get from playing elimination games is the same as the pleasure we feel when we watch the video GIFs of "Cure OCD."
On the other hand, "obsessive-compulsive psychology" does exist in the design of elimination games, and even all games.
In the game, obsessive-compulsive psychology is mainly presented in these ways:
The concept of compulsion is mainly reflected in the player's perfectionist pursuit of game details. It can be subdivided into modification compulsion, appearance compulsion, and finishing compulsion, such as equipment backpacks must be neatly aligned, and the formation of playing Plants vs. Zombies must be symmetrical.
Obsessive emotions are mainly reflected in the player's fear of failure, the need for safety is very high, and everything is based on the principle of winning in stability. Compulsive emotions will bring high score compulsion, cheating compulsion, preemption compulsion and other performances, such as brushing high scores and full star achievements in the game, daily card points online to receive quests and resources, and even use plug-ins to win.
Obsessive intent is mainly reflected in the player's curiosity about everything, and the sense of dissatisfaction drives them to explore and collect. Compulsive intent includes adventure compulsion, collection compulsion, download compulsion, and players will be keen to clean up all mobs on the map, collect all achievements, explore all map corners, and all branch plots.
Finally, there is the forced action, which is mainly reflected in the player's continuous repetition of certain actions in the game, and even the formation of habits that cannot be changed. Forced action can be divided into destruction compulsion, archiving compulsion, combo compulsion and other performances, subconscious continuous archiving, bullets in the magazine must be empty, destroy all the destroyable items in the screen, all belong to the forced action.
Most of these compulsive psychology exist in the player in a compound state, with a degree of light or heavy.
It should be noted here that obsessive-compulsive psychology and obsessive-compulsive disorder are different.
Medically, obsessive-compulsive disorder is a disease that makes people anxious and painful and affects the daily life of patients. The obsessive-compulsive psychology mentioned here exists in the vast majority of people, not only far from reaching the level of affecting normal life, but even because the compulsion is satisfied, a certain sense of pleasure is generated.
The game design will be optimized for compulsion psychology, providing players with a lot of pleasure.
03
Go back to the elimination game.
Eliminating the act itself is interesting, you can say it's a tidying up or you can say it's a disruption. And most of the elimination of the game has a scoring mechanism, and a level mechanism, which can always attract high scores to force players and collect forced players to challenge again and again.
It can be said that eliminating the game is to play the compulsive psychology clearly.
Interestingly, while also the originator of elimination games, Tetris was much more influential than Chain shot!.
This also influenced the development path of later elimination games. For a long time, elimination games followed the same countdown mode as Tetris.
The so-called countdown has different performances depending on the game. Some rely on the increasing number of bricks and constantly increase the speed of falling to give pressure, such as Tetris, some are constantly raising the threshold to give pressure in a limited time, and some are countdowns in the true sense.
For a long time, this countdown pattern was mainstream, and the infinite time mode brought about by Chain shot! was left out in the cold.
The advantages of the countdown mode are very obvious, it is challenging and more exciting.
It is based on the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed flow theory "immersion theory", also known as "flow theory", the main factors affecting immersion are challenge (challenge) and skill (skill), too high a challenge will make people anxious, too low a challenge will make people feel bored.
Immersion, or flow, occurs in a state of balance between the two.
Later, Chen Xinghan, the producer of "Wind Traveler", brought this theory to the field of games in his master's thesis "Flow in Games", proposing that the best experience of games often occurs when challenges and skills are balanced.
But in 2000, things changed when Baokai Games launched the classic match-3 game Gems Puzzle.
Not only is Jewels Maze a classic in the history of puzzle games that may be second only to Tetris, but another huge impact is that it has a built-in game mode of infinite time.
This was considered a decision against the ancestors at that time, and peers also despised it, thinking that this unchallenged game mode was too boring.
But after the game was released, the unlimited mode was very popular. Since then, a large number of elimination games have been revisited: Do we have to add a countdown? It doesn't have to put so much pressure on the player.
Since then, more and more elimination games have begun to introduce gameplay without time pressure, as well as a more gentle step counting system.
In a way, this change represents the direction of casual gaming.
My idea is that game designers in the past tended to give players a higher challenge and allow them to enter the "flow".
However, with the popularity of game terminals, more and more people become gamers, and this group has become less "hardcore", especially puzzle games, as the most popular game classification, in the balance of "challenge" and "skill", the challenge must be reduced to match the decrease in the average "skill" level of the player group.
Moreover, modern people's time is showing a trend of fragmentation, and puzzle games that use "passing the time" as an important selling point must also be adjusted accordingly.
Compared with the countdown mode, the unlimited time mode is more suitable for playing and walking, and it is more popular.
Since then, the elimination game has introduced online battles, entered the mobile phone platform, and added many elements such as RPGs, cards, and wargames.
In recent years, the small games "2048" and "Synthetic Big Watermelon" that have set off a boom in China have also eliminated the variants of the game, jumped out of the restrictions of brick and stone elements in creativity, and played the attributes of "merging similar items" to the extreme.
And relying on viral spread, people see that there is still great potential for eliminating games in social terms.
It can be seen that although the elimination game is simple, it has been constantly evolving itself for many years.
This is the most terrifying, and it is also the most addictive for players.
Eric Zimmerman, author of the game research classic Rules of Play, defines the game this way:
A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.
A game is a system that allows the player to interact with a man-made conflict, solve a problem, and get a quantitative result under the constraints of rules.
This set of definitions contains four elements: rules, problems (conflicts), problems, problems, and results.
The rules in the game are certain, the problems are obvious, the way to solve the problem is inevitable, and the results are quantifiable.
But real life is much more complicated than games.
04
In real life, we have to face unclear rules, and many people can't find the most important problem in their lives, let alone solve it. The process of solving the problem is long and complex, and the results may not be as we wish.
Compared to games, reality is like a giant black box, full of uncertainty.
Therefore, the joy of the game lies in the joy of certainty, and we know what kind of problems to solve will bring what kind of gains.
Eliminate the game and pull the path of "solving the problem to getting the result" to the shortest.
Repeatedly solve problems, you can repeatedly get the happiness of elimination.
Such a high-density sense of acquisition is the most scarce in the real world.
Especially when we enter such a postmodern society, we use the Internet to work, use mobile phones and computers to participate in labor, and use bank card accounts, Alipay and WeChat to harvest the fruits of our labor.
The exhaustion of hard work is real, but the results and rewards are unreal.
The sense of gain has become the most scarce part of contemporary people.
To some extent, we like to watch fishing on the short video App, watch the sea, watch the three rural areas, and watch handicrafts, which are essentially to make up for the sense of gain that daily life cannot give us.
The same is true of playing elimination games, when the bricks are connected in a line, the sense of gain brought by the visual and sound effects of the explosion is also scarce to us.
But the real question is, when we close our phones, close the computer, and walk out of the house, how do we make up for our missing sense of gain? That's what we need to spend more time thinking about.
Instead of telling you that eliminating the joy of the game is unreal, as I did, I told you that it was unreal to take the game to more than 700 levels.
Tube game, save the curator!
Resources:
"Research on the Application of Incentive Mechanism in Elimination Game Design" - Yan Lili
The Influence of Fluency on Aesthetic Appreciation ——— From Processing Fluency Model to Aesthetic Pleasure and Interest Model" - He Xianyou, Chen Yajue, Yang Dani, He Dexian
"The Effect of Perceptual Fluency on Individual Cognition and Emotion" - Zhao Qian
"Research on Mobile Game Design Based on Obsessive-Compulsive Psychology" - Lei Ting
"Neat and tidy things, why does it look so cool?" - Simple psychology
After playing Tetris for so many years, do you know the "Tetris effect"? 》—Miles_KLONOA_Kye
Game Psychology: The Psychological Effects of Tetris – One Psychology
"A Brief Discussion on My Thoughts on the Nature of Games" – Lea Liu
《Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three：A History of Matching Tile Games》——Juul, Jesper
《What Are Match3 Games》——The N3TWORK
《A Brief History of Match-Three Games》——Consumer Acquisition
Flow in Games – Chen Xinghan
"Chen Xinghan: The Application of Flow Theory in Games - Flow in Games" – Lu Jiaqi