[video=youtube;C2NU98NZF8o]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2NU98NZF8o[/video]
Winning.
Charlie Sheen can tell you all about what that feels like. You probably know the feeling to, as someone who plays games. We’re not just talking about the rush of happiness you get from coming out on top, either. That’s great, of course, but easily controlling something or winning only by luck can wear thin quick. We all know how much better it can be when that success feels truly earned. When you struggle, endure, give it your all, and, by the skin of your teeth and by dint of your prowess, you manage to emerge on top, the feeling is leaps and bounds above getting accolades for putting your pants on the right way. It validates your skill. It reinforces your exceptionalism. It satisfies your inner narrative.
That feeling is called fiero.
It's one of Ekman's basic emotions, meaning it's something very much grounded in the biology of our human experiences. It is this feeling that we seek out when we try and do something that is difficult for us -- we know it will feel good to face that challenge, and overcome it. Whatever that challenge is. It is the feeling the salesperson feels when he or she lands that big customer. It is the feeling the football player feels when he grabs the Heisman. It is even -- perhaps surprisingly -- in a lottery win or a gambling payout.
It is something that we feel in our games. It's a type of fun we can have, but it's a specific, distinct type of fun, and so it can be compared and contrasted with other types of fun. There are certain traits of fiero that make it stand out from the crowd.
Goldilocks and the Three Difficulties
One of the hallmarks of fiero is that it requires a challenge. It makes you work for your victory, to concentrate on it, dedicate yourself to it, and actually try, putting forth a great effort in earning your accomplishment. Fiero isn't the just the feeling you get from winning, it's the feeling you get from earned triumph.
So if there is no challenge, there can be no fiero.
This can be a difficult line to ride, especially if you're designing an experience from the outside. If the challenge is too easy, there's no fiero. There might be other emotions, and it might even feel good to win, still, but it's not the same feeling as the feeling you get from overcoming a challenge -- whatever other emotions come about, it ain't fiero. Simultaneously, if the challenge is too hard, there's also no fiero. Even if you eventually win, you might be so battered and beaten down by your losses that it's not even really fun to win anymore. I talked about loss aversion in the previous article, and that comes into play here as an amplifier. If the risk involves something you're not willing to give up, it's just not fun to risk it. On the other hand, if there's no risk whatsoever, it might not be enough of a challenge for you -- there's nothing at stake, after all.
Different people find the same obstacle to provide different levels of challenge, of course. A prize for walking down the street doesn't really challenge me, but that same prize for someone who is learning to walk after an accident can be a tremendous source of fiero! So the optimal kind of challenge for each person to generate a feeling of fiero is going to be very different for each person. Because we all have different skill sets, "one size fits all" isn't going to work. Not too hard, not too easy, but juuuuust right. And what's just right isn't going to be the same from person to person, or even from day to day with the same person.
I Have The Power, I Have The Control
So, fiero comes from having your skills challenged in just the right amount. It then follows that fiero is, to a large extent, about you being able to apply your skills, to measure them against something, and even to get better at them over time. A corollary to this feature of fiero then becomes that to seek fiero is to marginalize randomness.
Those who have followed my articles might be able to see this link coming: Fiero is a big "left-brain" kind of feeling. It is about doing the precise actions to get the designed outcome of your own triumphant victory. It demands control, codification, and rules. Too much randomness, and the feeling is obliterated: if you win, it wasn't a true measure of your skill. And if you lost, it wasn't because you weren't skilled enough, but because the dice just went against you.
Randomness is never completely removed from the equation, even in real life, but because humans are pattern-seeking animals, we are primed to see agency and control even when there's actually a lot more randomness than we're willing to admit. Fiero is, in part, the brain telling itself that it is awesome, so it needs to be able to effectively convince itself of that. Too much randomness, too much chaos, and your fiero gets killed right quick.
Again, much like an "easy victory," you can still have other kinds of fun with randomness. Wonderment, excitement, even amusement. But fiero isn't among those emotions you're experiencing. If a coin-flipping robot could achieve the result, then it's not something you earned, and fiero is absolutely, biologically, a self-interested kind of emotion. It cannot happen when you cannot give yourself credit for having done something.
It can happen when you can falsely credit yourself with having done something, however. That's why it can still happen in lotteries and with gambling. The illusion of our own control is very difficult to disbelieve, and, because fiero feels so crazy awesome, it's something we actively want to feel, even to the point of some good-natured, if occasionally destructive, self-delusion.
Enough introduction! You're probably already pondering the parts of your game that might inspire this emotion at this point int he article, so I may as well get there already.
A Short Chronology of Triumph in Our Make-Believe
One might think that the most obvious place to find fiero in our RPGs is in our combat rules. After all, they're the most obvious part of most games where you're directly in the path of losing, and they're the most codified in rules, so they're also the place where we get to show off our skills the most.
However, the early days of RPGs, in D&D, actually started somewhere a little different. Combat was there, but it wasn't a great source of fiero -- too swingy, too random. A high roll or a crit or a well-placed spell effect could turn a combat into a rout, making it too random to really give a rewarding challenge. The main place to find fiero in the early days of the game was actually in the dungeon exploration.
It was here that the "skilled" players were separated from the "unskilled" players. Those players with 10-foot poles, who listened at the doors, who made sure to keep plenty of disposable hirelings around, they were the ones experiencing the fiero in the early days. Those skills of using the in-world tools to confront the threat of the dungeon and emerge, alive, with a big pile of gold, were the ones tested by nefarious dungeons. Monsters were really just another kind of trap, another way to die while exploring the dungeon.
You can see early signs of differing emotional goals with D&D in the different reactions to this style of gameplay, some loving it, some wanting something else. In 2e, all the advice praising story over dungeon exploration and narrative creativity over traps and tricks downplayed the fiero that came from dungeon exploration, earning no small degree of ire from those who sought out that kind of fiero specifically. As the game became less deadly during its history, it also reduced the price for failure, reducing the level of challenge. In the eyes of those who wanted to get high fiero, more powerful characters and more talk about story trumping rules and more talk about in-depth combat rules and more reducing of exploration rules were all just killing their buzz.
However, D&D didn't so much get rid of fiero, as relocate it. By the advent of modern D&D, the difficult thing that lead to a sense of accomplishment was often not found in the combat or exploration anymore, but was rather located most reliably in creating an effective character.
Can Pun-Pun Be Fun?
You can see the trend of finding fiero in character generation early in D&D's history, but perhaps the best place to witness it in action is with the “system mastery” that 3e encouraged. There were poor choices, and character built with poor choices might not fare well in the game’s challenges, ending up if not dead, at least a drain on the party. But, as you did the difficult task of mastering the system, hidden gems and combos emerged that would let you ultimately perform even BETTER than a baseline character.
4e contained elements of this, too, in how characters could be optimized for a given role. The spread was significantly less extreme (it’s possible to get quite weak or quite powerful characters, but it’s not something you’re going to blunder into, and it’s not as dominating or as ineffective as a 3e character could be), but the challenge of designing the best Controller or the most effective Leader is still part of the fiero of the game, the feeling of accomplishment you get when you deliver tremendous buckets of damage as a striker showing your triumph over the rules of character building or even the rules of party-building.
So those character optimization threads that designed characters that were nigh-invincible or insanely mighty? It was the internet version of a victory dance, a display of pride in an accomplishment of system mastery. Those people who blow their time on CharOps boards are seeking the same thing that those people who searched every 10-foots square, twice, have been seeking: that thrill of displaying your skill against a challenge. In the case of D&D classic, that challenge was the dungeon. In the case of CharOps, the challenges were the monsters and, to perhaps an even greater degree, other players. Character optimization is almost a competitive exercise.
This is no accident. Some of the best sources of fiero are competitive games, which pit people against each other, testing their skill out against each other, until a victor emerges. In basketball, it looked like Michael Jordan. In CharOps, it looked like CoDzilla, or Frostcheese, or the Morninglord.
There can be game design issues with this approach in play. If character building is competitive, it's no longer enough to build your character to match the story that's in your head. When optimization becomes involved, you also need to build your character to be good -- not just effective, but the most effective. Limiting the spread like 4e does can help keep a lid on it, but it's easy, when playing in a group with a player like this, to get the feeling that you're failing at a contest that you didn't even know you were playing in.
Not that it's a problem for everyone, of course. Some people love getting their fiero from making their characters, and even when you have one in your group, it isn't always the case that they turn into a killjoy. It's also true that not every group includes anyone interested in fiero, or at least not interested in it enough to derail other kinds of fun. CoDzilla is a theoretical possibility, but many 3e and Pathfinder groups have never seen one in action, simply because they never met anyone who plays like that, who gets fun from making brutally effective characters, or who at least keeps that stuff on the message boards and doesn't bring it to the table.
Fiero By Fiat
There's another major way that we find fiero in our RPG's, and it's actually completely independent of game system. Unfortunately, it's quite dependent on the individual.
So far, I've been talking about fiero as something that comes from a display of skill by you, by the player. But in RPG's, we have our avatars, who also can display their own skills and abilities, and who can also endure difficult challenges and overcome them by the skin of their teeth. Because we feel empathy with this bag of game statistics, we can feel their triumphs as if they were our own, too.
You feel this when you’re reading or watching a movie, too: when the protagonist accomplishes something difficult, that they've worked endlessly for, you can feel the same fiero that the fictional character doesn't (but would, if they were real). You as the audience member didn't triumph over any challenge, but the character you identify with did, and you identify with them, and so it feels like you did, too. Empathy is magic emotion-transference power.
Someone with an earned or natural talent for storytelling can naturally produce a feeling of fiero simply with careful pacing and evocative description and strategic scene placement. Some of the “best DMs” probably do this innately, and there are (under-utilized) rules that can bring it to the fore, too. Additionally, it's not always exclusive to the DM, as many indie games have realized. If story is where you seek your fiero, you mostly would like a highly flexible, input-intensive system that gets out of the way. You want the players (including, but not limited to the DM) to be able to construct scenes carefully, with whatever they deem appropriate, because you want the feeling of triumph that can come only from a carefully curated experience. If you’re constructing fiero bit by bit, nothing is going to destroy it quite like a climactic battle that is won in a without much effort, or a pit trap that kills a character moments after their introduction. In the ideal system for this style, you mostly want rules that prevent someone from accidentally wrecking the tower of cards you've got going.
The fact that these skills are system-agnostic is part of their drawback, however. Aside from learning a few principles of storytelling (like three-act structure or how to have character development), there's not a strong way of encouraging this to happen in players who aren't naturally interested in it. The rules and devices you might use in designing a game that is great for this style might destroy the kinds of fun some styles value. I've mentioned how important control is for fiero, but a lack of control is important for other positive emotions that people might seek in their games, too: emotions like wonderment or amusement or excitement come, in part, from abandoning control. This makes them incompatible with a system designed to maximize player control over the scenes and events in the game.
Thousands of Fun Flavors
The fact is that people seek different kinds of fun, in different places in their RPG's. Fiero isn’t always important, and even when it becomes something you want, it’s not always welcome in the same place for every player. Our preferences are variable, our personalities are different, and our lemonade is, as always, local.
So now that we have a working way to distinguish fiero from some of our other positive emotions, and now that we have a few places we might look to find it, we can get a sense of how important it is to us, and to our players.
How about you? Do you find yourself turning to RPGs to experience fiero? Do you enjoy it primarily as dungeon exploration, character optimization, or empathetic fiero in the events of your game's storyline? Do you find some other source of fiero in your games? Where do you find it unwelcome?
Let me know in the comments!
Winning.
Charlie Sheen can tell you all about what that feels like. You probably know the feeling to, as someone who plays games. We’re not just talking about the rush of happiness you get from coming out on top, either. That’s great, of course, but easily controlling something or winning only by luck can wear thin quick. We all know how much better it can be when that success feels truly earned. When you struggle, endure, give it your all, and, by the skin of your teeth and by dint of your prowess, you manage to emerge on top, the feeling is leaps and bounds above getting accolades for putting your pants on the right way. It validates your skill. It reinforces your exceptionalism. It satisfies your inner narrative.
That feeling is called fiero.
It's one of Ekman's basic emotions, meaning it's something very much grounded in the biology of our human experiences. It is this feeling that we seek out when we try and do something that is difficult for us -- we know it will feel good to face that challenge, and overcome it. Whatever that challenge is. It is the feeling the salesperson feels when he or she lands that big customer. It is the feeling the football player feels when he grabs the Heisman. It is even -- perhaps surprisingly -- in a lottery win or a gambling payout.
It is something that we feel in our games. It's a type of fun we can have, but it's a specific, distinct type of fun, and so it can be compared and contrasted with other types of fun. There are certain traits of fiero that make it stand out from the crowd.
Goldilocks and the Three Difficulties
One of the hallmarks of fiero is that it requires a challenge. It makes you work for your victory, to concentrate on it, dedicate yourself to it, and actually try, putting forth a great effort in earning your accomplishment. Fiero isn't the just the feeling you get from winning, it's the feeling you get from earned triumph.
So if there is no challenge, there can be no fiero.
This can be a difficult line to ride, especially if you're designing an experience from the outside. If the challenge is too easy, there's no fiero. There might be other emotions, and it might even feel good to win, still, but it's not the same feeling as the feeling you get from overcoming a challenge -- whatever other emotions come about, it ain't fiero. Simultaneously, if the challenge is too hard, there's also no fiero. Even if you eventually win, you might be so battered and beaten down by your losses that it's not even really fun to win anymore. I talked about loss aversion in the previous article, and that comes into play here as an amplifier. If the risk involves something you're not willing to give up, it's just not fun to risk it. On the other hand, if there's no risk whatsoever, it might not be enough of a challenge for you -- there's nothing at stake, after all.
Different people find the same obstacle to provide different levels of challenge, of course. A prize for walking down the street doesn't really challenge me, but that same prize for someone who is learning to walk after an accident can be a tremendous source of fiero! So the optimal kind of challenge for each person to generate a feeling of fiero is going to be very different for each person. Because we all have different skill sets, "one size fits all" isn't going to work. Not too hard, not too easy, but juuuuust right. And what's just right isn't going to be the same from person to person, or even from day to day with the same person.
I Have The Power, I Have The Control
So, fiero comes from having your skills challenged in just the right amount. It then follows that fiero is, to a large extent, about you being able to apply your skills, to measure them against something, and even to get better at them over time. A corollary to this feature of fiero then becomes that to seek fiero is to marginalize randomness.
Those who have followed my articles might be able to see this link coming: Fiero is a big "left-brain" kind of feeling. It is about doing the precise actions to get the designed outcome of your own triumphant victory. It demands control, codification, and rules. Too much randomness, and the feeling is obliterated: if you win, it wasn't a true measure of your skill. And if you lost, it wasn't because you weren't skilled enough, but because the dice just went against you.
Randomness is never completely removed from the equation, even in real life, but because humans are pattern-seeking animals, we are primed to see agency and control even when there's actually a lot more randomness than we're willing to admit. Fiero is, in part, the brain telling itself that it is awesome, so it needs to be able to effectively convince itself of that. Too much randomness, too much chaos, and your fiero gets killed right quick.
Again, much like an "easy victory," you can still have other kinds of fun with randomness. Wonderment, excitement, even amusement. But fiero isn't among those emotions you're experiencing. If a coin-flipping robot could achieve the result, then it's not something you earned, and fiero is absolutely, biologically, a self-interested kind of emotion. It cannot happen when you cannot give yourself credit for having done something.
It can happen when you can falsely credit yourself with having done something, however. That's why it can still happen in lotteries and with gambling. The illusion of our own control is very difficult to disbelieve, and, because fiero feels so crazy awesome, it's something we actively want to feel, even to the point of some good-natured, if occasionally destructive, self-delusion.
Enough introduction! You're probably already pondering the parts of your game that might inspire this emotion at this point int he article, so I may as well get there already.
A Short Chronology of Triumph in Our Make-Believe
One might think that the most obvious place to find fiero in our RPGs is in our combat rules. After all, they're the most obvious part of most games where you're directly in the path of losing, and they're the most codified in rules, so they're also the place where we get to show off our skills the most.
However, the early days of RPGs, in D&D, actually started somewhere a little different. Combat was there, but it wasn't a great source of fiero -- too swingy, too random. A high roll or a crit or a well-placed spell effect could turn a combat into a rout, making it too random to really give a rewarding challenge. The main place to find fiero in the early days of the game was actually in the dungeon exploration.
It was here that the "skilled" players were separated from the "unskilled" players. Those players with 10-foot poles, who listened at the doors, who made sure to keep plenty of disposable hirelings around, they were the ones experiencing the fiero in the early days. Those skills of using the in-world tools to confront the threat of the dungeon and emerge, alive, with a big pile of gold, were the ones tested by nefarious dungeons. Monsters were really just another kind of trap, another way to die while exploring the dungeon.
You can see early signs of differing emotional goals with D&D in the different reactions to this style of gameplay, some loving it, some wanting something else. In 2e, all the advice praising story over dungeon exploration and narrative creativity over traps and tricks downplayed the fiero that came from dungeon exploration, earning no small degree of ire from those who sought out that kind of fiero specifically. As the game became less deadly during its history, it also reduced the price for failure, reducing the level of challenge. In the eyes of those who wanted to get high fiero, more powerful characters and more talk about story trumping rules and more talk about in-depth combat rules and more reducing of exploration rules were all just killing their buzz.
However, D&D didn't so much get rid of fiero, as relocate it. By the advent of modern D&D, the difficult thing that lead to a sense of accomplishment was often not found in the combat or exploration anymore, but was rather located most reliably in creating an effective character.
Can Pun-Pun Be Fun?
You can see the trend of finding fiero in character generation early in D&D's history, but perhaps the best place to witness it in action is with the “system mastery” that 3e encouraged. There were poor choices, and character built with poor choices might not fare well in the game’s challenges, ending up if not dead, at least a drain on the party. But, as you did the difficult task of mastering the system, hidden gems and combos emerged that would let you ultimately perform even BETTER than a baseline character.
4e contained elements of this, too, in how characters could be optimized for a given role. The spread was significantly less extreme (it’s possible to get quite weak or quite powerful characters, but it’s not something you’re going to blunder into, and it’s not as dominating or as ineffective as a 3e character could be), but the challenge of designing the best Controller or the most effective Leader is still part of the fiero of the game, the feeling of accomplishment you get when you deliver tremendous buckets of damage as a striker showing your triumph over the rules of character building or even the rules of party-building.
So those character optimization threads that designed characters that were nigh-invincible or insanely mighty? It was the internet version of a victory dance, a display of pride in an accomplishment of system mastery. Those people who blow their time on CharOps boards are seeking the same thing that those people who searched every 10-foots square, twice, have been seeking: that thrill of displaying your skill against a challenge. In the case of D&D classic, that challenge was the dungeon. In the case of CharOps, the challenges were the monsters and, to perhaps an even greater degree, other players. Character optimization is almost a competitive exercise.
This is no accident. Some of the best sources of fiero are competitive games, which pit people against each other, testing their skill out against each other, until a victor emerges. In basketball, it looked like Michael Jordan. In CharOps, it looked like CoDzilla, or Frostcheese, or the Morninglord.
There can be game design issues with this approach in play. If character building is competitive, it's no longer enough to build your character to match the story that's in your head. When optimization becomes involved, you also need to build your character to be good -- not just effective, but the most effective. Limiting the spread like 4e does can help keep a lid on it, but it's easy, when playing in a group with a player like this, to get the feeling that you're failing at a contest that you didn't even know you were playing in.
Not that it's a problem for everyone, of course. Some people love getting their fiero from making their characters, and even when you have one in your group, it isn't always the case that they turn into a killjoy. It's also true that not every group includes anyone interested in fiero, or at least not interested in it enough to derail other kinds of fun. CoDzilla is a theoretical possibility, but many 3e and Pathfinder groups have never seen one in action, simply because they never met anyone who plays like that, who gets fun from making brutally effective characters, or who at least keeps that stuff on the message boards and doesn't bring it to the table.
Fiero By Fiat
There's another major way that we find fiero in our RPG's, and it's actually completely independent of game system. Unfortunately, it's quite dependent on the individual.
So far, I've been talking about fiero as something that comes from a display of skill by you, by the player. But in RPG's, we have our avatars, who also can display their own skills and abilities, and who can also endure difficult challenges and overcome them by the skin of their teeth. Because we feel empathy with this bag of game statistics, we can feel their triumphs as if they were our own, too.
You feel this when you’re reading or watching a movie, too: when the protagonist accomplishes something difficult, that they've worked endlessly for, you can feel the same fiero that the fictional character doesn't (but would, if they were real). You as the audience member didn't triumph over any challenge, but the character you identify with did, and you identify with them, and so it feels like you did, too. Empathy is magic emotion-transference power.
Someone with an earned or natural talent for storytelling can naturally produce a feeling of fiero simply with careful pacing and evocative description and strategic scene placement. Some of the “best DMs” probably do this innately, and there are (under-utilized) rules that can bring it to the fore, too. Additionally, it's not always exclusive to the DM, as many indie games have realized. If story is where you seek your fiero, you mostly would like a highly flexible, input-intensive system that gets out of the way. You want the players (including, but not limited to the DM) to be able to construct scenes carefully, with whatever they deem appropriate, because you want the feeling of triumph that can come only from a carefully curated experience. If you’re constructing fiero bit by bit, nothing is going to destroy it quite like a climactic battle that is won in a without much effort, or a pit trap that kills a character moments after their introduction. In the ideal system for this style, you mostly want rules that prevent someone from accidentally wrecking the tower of cards you've got going.
The fact that these skills are system-agnostic is part of their drawback, however. Aside from learning a few principles of storytelling (like three-act structure or how to have character development), there's not a strong way of encouraging this to happen in players who aren't naturally interested in it. The rules and devices you might use in designing a game that is great for this style might destroy the kinds of fun some styles value. I've mentioned how important control is for fiero, but a lack of control is important for other positive emotions that people might seek in their games, too: emotions like wonderment or amusement or excitement come, in part, from abandoning control. This makes them incompatible with a system designed to maximize player control over the scenes and events in the game.
Thousands of Fun Flavors
The fact is that people seek different kinds of fun, in different places in their RPG's. Fiero isn’t always important, and even when it becomes something you want, it’s not always welcome in the same place for every player. Our preferences are variable, our personalities are different, and our lemonade is, as always, local.
So now that we have a working way to distinguish fiero from some of our other positive emotions, and now that we have a few places we might look to find it, we can get a sense of how important it is to us, and to our players.
How about you? Do you find yourself turning to RPGs to experience fiero? Do you enjoy it primarily as dungeon exploration, character optimization, or empathetic fiero in the events of your game's storyline? Do you find some other source of fiero in your games? Where do you find it unwelcome?
Let me know in the comments!
