Game Design Curriculum

I would argue that there's a big class of games that have an educational purpose. E.g. Minecraft, TIS-100, and many more. Even an arbitrary game that's not in your native language is helpful, I learned English mostly from gaming.

The “8 kinds of fun” have been a huge help to me as a D&D DM. It’s a great framework for running adventures that players will respond to and give everyone a chance to find their fun.

It also helps answer micro, nuts and bolts like what kinds of rewards your players will respond to. For example, a player really into challenge might only care about the stats on a magic sword they find, but a player more into narrative or exploration will dig a sword with a mysterious engraving on the hilt even if it isn’t necessarily an upgrade. Real life people usually respond to multiple categories, but if you pay attention during the game you will see this at work.

I got onto this via a post at theangrygm.com, who I really recommend. He’s super opinionated, and the “angry GM” schtick gets old, but he knows what he’s talking about.

I would agree with you IF you take traditional view of 'balance' in the way that LoL and other simpler games do. I would call that ideal a 'symmetric' balance, where they want each element in its category to be compared to all other elements in the same category. LoL definitely strives for this, as do many other games. Each champion is balanced against other champions of the same role. Items are relatively inflexible and augment the already present abilities of the champion. Each champion is essentially a complete package and each uses items to enhance what they already have. But when you have such rigid categories, power creep and best-in-slot champions will naturally appear, as whatever is best able to maximize their item's stats will be meta. My first competitive game was LoL back in its beta, and I was hooked, but what opened my eyes to what balance could be was DotA's approach.

DotA takes a systemic approach to balance. Each hero is a tool in the team's toolbox. Most heroes have very specific strengths and weaknesses, and their powerspikes are very pronounced. When you draft a team, you are specifically drafting a set of capabilities that you want to exploit against the enemy. This also leads to heroes having very hard counters. But I think the real beauty in DotA is it's item system, which allows you to patch holes in your team's composition and allow a huge amount of flexibility for each hero. I can keep going forever, as I really love its game design. But the most important thing that DotA does in terms of balance is its holistic approach that allows heroes to be individual components to a team, and have items to augment strengths or patch holes that the draft was not prepared for. (DotA's design and metagame sparked my interest in Complex Adaptive Systems, so I just nerd out about it any chance I get).

So to your point, I think the whole need to create imbalance is caused because of the way Riot balances their characters in the first place. I think it is fundamentally flawed from a design perspective, but it obviously makes them a ton of money. They really mastered monetization of multiplayer games. They also made their game very approachable for noobs, and that I have to commend them for.

> But what most games don't do is provide extrinsic utility. Playing a videogame does not pay your mortgage, fix your leaky sink, cure your halitosis, or get you an A in class. (Ignoring professional game playing for money, of course.)

Games can help you practice interpersonal communication skills, teamwork and coordination, problem solving, and fine motor skills. These may very well help you with your work or leaky sink in the future. Games can also help inure you to failure, and provide some perhaps necessary escapeism to improve your mental health (perhaps more important to work on than your halitosis!). Or help provide that social connection that turns into a job offer.

Playing cow clicker all day - sure, that's probably not all that extrinsicly useful. But you're painting with an overly large brush IMO. And there's perhaps a reason you'll have a damn difficult time finding anyone playing cow clicker all day ;).

> Your electricity company's website can be a slow, bug-ridden heap of PHP 1.0 garbage and you will still use it because it lets you pay their bill and keep your lights on.

Or I might pay by mail or phone instead. Or use my bank's auto-pay setup. It's less a matter of utility, and more a matter of competition.

Games have a huge entertainment industry they're competing with - lots of choice. It wasn't always this competitive - people enjoyed playing Pong on the Atari back in the day. There's plenty of "extrinsicly useful" software I avoid - yes, even when I'm earning $$$ to pay that mortgage - in favor of better alternatives. Your electricity company's website probably has few alternatives, but even then there might be some.

agree on mobas (I was one of the devs on dotabuff for a year and think LoL ... has many opportunities for improvement) but ... try Valorant, it's imho much, much more interesting than cs:go or overwatch. It's a brilliant game.