Why, It's Adam, Madam

Our readings for today covers a substantial amount of material in game mechanics and game balancing. We can easily view the readings as continuous and building on the same umbrella topic.  Game mechanics are the fundamentals blocks of games, they are what determines the basic functions and feel of the game.  Game balancing, on the other hand, is the fine-tuning of pre-existing mechanics to maximize player enjoyment.

Adams breaks game mechanics into 6 aspects.  4 of them are: Space, Objects/Attributes/States, Actions and Rules.  The other two were mysteriously not included in our provided readings.

In terms of game balancing, Adams immediately sets the precedent that there are differences between balancing for PvE (player versus environment) and PvP (player versus player) games.  One of the recurring themes throughout the article is avoiding dominant strategies--strategies which trump most other tactics.  The point to game balancing is to create a system where no specific strategy or style/race/class is more powerful than the other.  He says that balanced games seldom result in stalemates, are perceived to be fair, are forgiving to those who fall behind early on, provide meaningful choices, and does not let chance make skill irrelevant.

Later, Adams goes into difficulty types.  It seems as though he favors the idea of dynamic difficulty adjustments; games which adjust their difficulty depending upon player skill.  This makes sense because it naturally fits itself to make the most comfortable experience for whoever is playing.  By riding the line of "just challenging enough", video games will be able to engage their players in that spot of flow for a much more effective amount of time than rigid, static difficulty levels (which can frustrate players).