Explain your game

written 2026-10-02

If I introduced someone to Chess without saying the knight can jump over pieces, then foiled their plan by doing this, that wouldn't be a fair match. I would owe them an apology for failing to explain the rules. But many video games don't even try to explain their rules.

This problem is very common in RPGs. Maybe I can spend skill points on learning a fireball spell or a heal spell, but I can't see how much damage the fireball does or how much the heal spell heals. Without that information, it's impossible to evaluate which is better. All I can do is guess.

Of course, that's less bad if the game lets me refund the item, but still, why should I have to buy it and go die with it to find out it's not worth buying? Just give me the information up-front so I can make a meaningful decision; hiding this information adds nothing to the game.

One might argue that players don't need quantitative information because they can decide from only qualtitative information, based on which item is most *suited* to their situation. For example, choose the fireball spell if I plan to fight many enemies at once so I can reduce incoming damage faster, and choose the healing spell otherwise. But this assumes all items in the game are perfectly balanced. All games have items that are accidently too strong or too weak, so they're worthwhile even when they don't make sense, or not worthwhile when they do.

And even if they are perfectly balanced, hiding quantitative information removes an interesting aspect of gameplay: evaluating that. In games that show quantitative information, players are equipped, and challenged, to decide whether the item most suited to their situation is actually best. Without quantitative information, all they can do is trust the creator.

Basically, the more information players have, the more they have to think about, and the deeper the game. There are no problems with information overload or anything like that: if there's too much information to consider, players can decide on a subset. This itself - prioritizing attention, deciding how important things are - can be an interesting part of gameplay.

Keep in mind that different players can process different amounts of information, so information that's overwhelming to some can be important to others. This is especially true if your game is at all replayable, since players will start to factor more information into their decisions as they get more experienced. For example, maybe a first time player doesn't care about the difference in casting time between the fireball and healing spell, but an experienced player doing a challenge run will want all the information they can get. The first time player won't be hurt by this information being available.

If there's information that no players think about, that just means your game is too complex. In other words, the problem isn't that the game gives too much information, it's that it has too much to give, and the solution isn't to hide information but to remove some mechanics. After all, why have a mechanic if players won't think about it? Seriously, answer that question. And if you can't answer it, remove the mechanic.

Sometimes, game creators leave the entire existence of a feature secret. This is even worse because players don't know they're missing information, so they can't guess or try to learn it through trial and error. For example...

Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition creators added a feature where you could hold Control while clicking to make units follow your command more exactly. But they didn't document this anywhere other than patch notes, and no one reads year-old patch notes. So for players who weren't active at the time and don't hear about it from someone who was, this feature doesn't exist. It's sad because they did the work to implement it but not the much lesser work of documenting it somewhere.

Slay the Spire 2 creators tweaked certain items that generate random potions so that they can't generate *certain* potions if used during combat, supposedly to discourage stalling fights. But again, they didn't document this anywhere, so it doesn't actually give most players a reason not to stall fights. Clearly, these creators don't understand incentives.