Emo Game Design Pt.1: Bark and Bite

How does dodging a fireball in Mario make you feel?

When we’re designing the challenges that players overcome, game designers often focus on strictly mechanical concerns; balance, timing, difficulty. But, ultimately, I’d argue, demonstrating mastery over a game system, particularly in a non-competitive game, isn’t really a virtue in and of itself. Getting good at Mario or Dark Souls doesn’t make me a better person. And in our role as game designers I feel we have a responsibility to ask what we’ve left the player with when they put down the controller. Distracting players momentarily from the difficulties of their life has some value, but if we don’t leave a lasting emotional or intellectual impact, our game will be subsequently be replaced in their mind by the next fleeting distraction. And, as distractions - like social media - become more able to constantly push out content to distract, types of experiences start to lose their value.

Along those lines, some games are purely mechanical challenges. When I play Picross, or do a crossword, I’m not looking to emotionally engage with the content, really, just going through a rote process that distracts and calms me. But I don’t remember specific Picrosses or crosswords that I played through. They are designed to flow in and out of your mind with ease, which is why you usually buy them in packs of hundreds.

But Mario and Dark Souls aren’t those kinds of momentary distractions because they aren’t about the mechanical challenges, they’re about what the mechanical challenges make you feel. A Mario level or Dark Souls environment is about taking you through an emotional ride and leaving you with the memory of those emotions. I don’t really recall the geometry of Blighttown but I absolutely can recall the emotional dread of moving through it.

But, more importantly, how do we create these emotions? What techniques can we use? I wanted to outline some that I’ve found particularly effective. I’ll start in this article with something I’ll call “Bark” and “Bite”.

Bark v. Bite

When presented with a new challenge, players often are unsure of what exactly they’ll need to do to overcome it. But the initial visual presentation of the challenge is often a clue; I’ll call this it’s “bark”. Does this look scary? Does it seem hard when you first encounter it?

On the other hand, there is the actual, practical mechanical actions required to overcome a challenge. I’ll call this the challenges “bite”. This is contrasted to the bark in that, sometimes, something that seems quite easy can in fact be subtly quite difficult and something that seems difficult can be easy.

I’ll use Mario for two examples.

All Bark, No Bite: Auto Levels

An Auto Level, in Mario Maker parlance, is usually a level that looks impossible, but in fact is won just by holding right for the entire level. The experience is exciting both in kind of the “safe but seems unsafe” way that rollercoasters are, and also just in seeing how the level creator put together this machine to let you get through.

All Bite, No Bark: Kaizo Blocks

Maybe the exact opposite example of an Auto level is a Kaizo Block - an invisible coin block in a Mario level that exists specifically for the purpose of surprising you by killing you when you make a jump a certain way. You don’t even know that a challenge exists there until it kills you the first time. These kinds of sucker punches (the Soulsborne games frequently use these) create a sense of caution, surprise, and (in the right player) humor. They are, basically, pranks.

Balancing Bark and Bite

However, outside of these niche Mario Maker levels, these concepts have a lot of value too, and learning to balance them as a designer will make you much . A common way to make a player feel powerful as they learn is to increase the “Bark” of a mechanic, without necessarily increasing its “Bite”. For example, a common trick I’ve used is to fire a large number of projectiles, having one target a player’s location directly and other scattered randomly at a distance. The player only really has to dodge the one aimed at them, but the other projectiles give the attack a sense of realism and provides the player with a greater sense of power and accomplishment for overcoming the challenge. Increase the missiles - which are from a gameplay point of view essentially just noise - and increase the sense that the player is overcoming overwhelming power to succeed.

On the other hand, increasing “Bite” without increasing “Bark” is a great way to signal to players that they need to be more cautious, or think harder about a challenge. For instance, if you’re making multiple levels of difficulty of a single piece of content, an effective way to highlight the changes is to specifically design to foil a simpler strategy employed on lower difficulties - which allows the player to discover naturally through the course of their attempts on something that their old strategies won’t work. It forces them to take a step back and think through the entire challenge again, to reevaluate old decisions. And, if you made it overly obvious up front that their old strategy wouldn’t work without letting them see it fail for themselves, the emotional moment of reckoning of seeing their plan fail wouldn’t have the punch it would have otherwise.

The critical point here, which is going to be a theme whenever I write about Emotional Game Design, is to put yourself in the shoes of a player who is engaging with the mechanics for the first time, rather than just designing for the specific challenge you want players to overcome. Look at both the actual mechanical difficulty as well as the presentation of that difficulty to make an experience not just challenging, but memorable.

I could go on forever about designing for emotions, but I want to actually post something so I’ll cut this off here. Stay tuned for more!