Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Scarcity and Tension!

There’s a rule in games, occasionally spoken but mostly tacit, that video games shouldn’t contain fail states. Period. End of discussion. If your video game has a fail state in it, you’re doing something wrong. If a player needs an item and they can’t get it because of some pre-existing condition within the game, you’ve made a bad game and you should feel bad.

This often manifests itself in the elimination of a sense of need in games. In Call of Duty, I never want for bullets, even though I’m shooting fucking hundreds of them. I also never want for health: I can just chill and regenerate my health behind some sort of incredible cover if I choose to. There are games that take this even further. Fear 3, much as I loved it, lacked even the most remote sense of want, especially while playing as Paxton Fettel, a crazy ghost who blasted enemies with psychic energy and took their bodies at will. So long as you were alive, you never wanted for a way to attack people.

Other games layer the scarcity of elements through supply mechanics. In the original Halo, if you want to use a particular gun you’re likely going to have to conserve ammo at one point or another in the game. But if you choose to just use whatever’s lying around, you’ll never really have a problem finding something to hit your enemy with. It allows players to establish some tension within the game, if they want to, by making each bullet count. This is a very inelegant solution, though: you can abandon it in a heartbeat, and enemies in Halo drop guns like its gun Christmas. You should never really have trouble with ammo in Halo.

Other games cap your ammo supply at a fairly low level. Far Cry 2, for example, never let you carry more than three clips for any given weapon. Even if you upgraded your kit completely, you’d never be more than a hundred rounds away from being totally bullet-dry. And while ammo stockpiles were interspersed through combat heavy areas, they were pretty finite. Along with a reward system which kept enemies from dropping substantial amounts of ammo, it made for some tense gameplay, where a gunfight could turn against a player quickly if they didn’t watch their ammo.

Tense is a good word to use here, because that’s what I’m interested in: tension, and how mechanics emerge to reinforce it. Because tension, contrary to contemporary development values, it often feels, is good. Tension feeds conflict, engages players and gives them challenges to overcome more often. Far Cry 2’s tension is a big part of its play: you’re always making choices about how best to address situations in Far Cry 2. Another game with some shallow clips for most of its guns, Just Cause 2, presented players with a bevy of choices and forced them to choose between none of them, effectively undercutting any sense of scarcity that might’ve existed within the game.

So tension isn’t simply a matter of supply: it’s a matter of tying supply to making important decisions. Think about Resident Evil. The original Resident Evil, not the new run and gun Resident Evils. Back in the day Resident Evil asked you to make tough choices about how and when to fight. If you tried to shoot zombies at the wrong moment, you’d lose all your ammo. If you refused to shoot zombies at the wrong moment, they’d murder you horribly. Managing your limited resources, in this case bullets, correctly was key to succeeding in the game. And there was no exact science to it. You made a choice and you dealt with the consequences. Simple as that.

Traditionally this mechanic appears in survival horror games, but it often raises the stakes in other genres in some inventive ways. Far Cry 2 and Bioshock, for example, only presents players with a finite amount of currency throughout the game. This means that you have to make choices constantly: do you want to upgrade the weapon you’re using or unlock a new toy? Do you get a support tonic or that plasmid that lets you shoot bees out of your hand? Your decision, once it’s been made, will have consequences, and cannot be undone. All sales are final.

Metro 2033 took this mechanic one step further, making ammunition and currency the same thing. You literally traded bullets to acquire equipment and weapons, bullets that were incredibly useful when you actually shot them at enemies. The end result was a decidedly non-horror game (that had some horror elements in it, I’ll admit) that infused itself with a constant sense of tension. Every shot became a choice. Do you use one of your precious military grade bullets to take out that bandit in one hit? Or risk missing him with a pneumatic weapon that does less damage, fires much more slowly and won’t impact your wallet?

It’s worth noting that the tension instilled by these games isn’t the tension that comes from generating a fail state if you make a wrong choice. It’s a tension that derives from having to deal with real consequences for the decisions you make in a game. If a resource needed to do something important is scarce, your decision on how to use it matters. A lot. And if there’s no right decision, dealing with consequences, oftentimes unexpected consequences, that stem from just playing the game, rather than interacting with a moment in the game that presents an explicit choice, is that much more engaging.

This revelation came to me when I was thinking about why Amnesia just didn’t really work as a horror game: there was no sense of tension or stakes within it. There were no resources to manage, and the consequences for failing to deal with a situation were always just a hard reset. There was never a moment that required me to make a choice that would have immediate and enduring consequences that changed the shape of the game. So developers, consider how tension works in your games and how scarcity works, not as a potential fail-safe generator, but as a means by which to force players to make tough decisions. Don’t fear frustrating your players so much that you fail to present them with meaningful challenges.