A Course About Game Balance

In this 2016 GDC session, game designer and educator Ian Schreiber presents a summary of his college-level course in game balance, examining the major topics covered in the syllabus and a set of assignments that can be used to further build balance skills by putting the theory into practice.

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[petersmythe]

Imagine the first chess players "are two knights worth more than a rook?"
"I dunno. Guess we need to wait hundreds of years for more people to play this game."

[jordanzish]

I love what he said about math being a learnable skill. I never considered myself good at math, but when I finally found a need for it outside of high school, I learned what I had to. I think a lot of people also think being good at math means being able to calculate things on the spot in your head, but really it's just knowing what mathematical tools to use and when. Much like Excel, it can be a tool that with a bit of setup, does a lot of the work for you.

[petersmythe]

"players being buggy."
Simply delete the player and allocate a new one.

[helloofthebeach]

This video is basically the syllabus for an amazing class that I'll never get to take. 😐

[Tomixk]

9:57 I thought a game that lies about probability to the player would be hard to find, but the GBA Fire Emblem games instantly came to mind.
When the game says you have "99 hit", you intuitively think that your chance to hit an attack is 99%, but the game rolls two numbers between 0 and 99, then compares their average to 99, resulting in a 99.99% chance to hit.
This discrepancy is more noticeable near the extremes, with "10 hit" being 2.1% chance to hit.
All this goes along well with the players thinking "90% never misses" and "10% never hits", which sounds like a fallacy when I write it like that, but that's really how we video gamers think.

[TheEcoolarg]

Omg love how fast he talks, Like the exact speed to never stop paying atention

[MisterKidX]

16:20 "In reality the data is always trying to trick you, they're very mean"
Respect Ian, been following you for a while now, and a lot from my teachings is based on your wonderful, free, courses.

[noxabellus]

Now this is a class that would be worth buying on udemy. The ones that are out there are awful and usually just cover how to use Unity

[thethgaming]

I wish my college had this course. This is the kind of stuff as i child went through my head and now as an adult i try to piece together. Amazing talk thank you so much for this.

[TheBaptisteD]

I've now been in the industry for 8 years, and your blog Game Design Concepts has been decisive in building my skill Mr Schreiber.
I'm happy to find you here now that I understand how much I lack a thinking in Game Balance. Thank you 🙌

[FelixIakhos]

This guy talks as if he's constantly consuming Mario stars, great stuff!

[emberizumirose]

The disconnect between actual probability and intuitive probability is well known in X-Com....any shot with a hit chance of less than 90% only hit 10% of the time.

[nerdierthanthou]

His voice and mannerisms remind me so much of Dan from the classic Extra Credits show. I love it!

[TrailBlazer]

I love his point about "good" and "bad" at math being cultural. Along with so many other things in our society

[tensevo]

I love the idea that someone's mind could be so entrenched in low level programming that they would start programming tools that could be achieved with a simple spreadsheet.

[CheFisher]

I want this person to whisper sweet game-balance-design-nothings in my ear every night before I go to sleep. Amazing.

[Tara]

This class is masterfully crafted. I look forward to seeing what Ian creates in the future. So happy he is making a textbook so more students can benefit. Brilliant!

[robertadavies]

I'll be heading for your website and snaffling up your materials before you change your mind about making them available! I already know a reasonable amount of probability and statistics, but have been looking for good information on balance. Thanks! Will keep an eye out for your book as well.

[seanzhang]

The name of this video should be "An advertisement for a course about game balance". I was expecting to see at least a summary, not a syllabus as it provides no useful data or information about "Game Balance" at all. And it somehow got 2k likes.

[verbran]

He's right — I'm the living proof that math can be learned.
For more than 30 years I could only do basic operations in my head and would literally have headaches when looking at a spreadsheet, but then I've caught myself in a situation where balancing a game demanded I knew more than my intuition allowed.

I took an online course and changed my life. Not only I learned lots of things I deemed impossible, I even got somewhat addicted to math and sheets! As I work with game formulae, it often feels I'm cracking a puzzle or something, to the extent I now have more fun tweaking the sheets to find out solutions than going into the game to test them.

Do not fear math. If you have a real purpose to it, you will come understand all those abstractions; the problem with math is not that it doesn't make sense (because it obviously do), but that we often don't make sense of it. When facing a game problem, all those numbers and letters will feel as natural as any other game mechanic for you.