UC Santa Cruz

Game balance is a term widely used among players, researchers, and designers of games. It is a concept that feels vitally important to how we make and play games, but when we try to define it or implement it, we seldom get the same definition twice. Balance appears differently to whoever is judging it, but as researchers and designers, we still must translate this element of game design into technical practice. It is also an expensive and time-consuming subject, one that requires a constant loop of playtesting and design iteration through nearly the entirety of the game development process. This work seeks to focus our understanding of balance while offering procedural methods to increase speed or improve quality when performing balancing tasks in game design and research. It accomplishes this by offering a taxonomy of balance along with a generic design framework that can be used to apply balancing strategies in any game context. In addition, it provides a catalog of balancing methods, allowing designers to use common patterns to apply procedural balancing to their games. Finally, I offer three technical examples using the taxonomy and framework, putting theoretical knowledge of balance into concrete technical systems. Balance ultimately helps us design games that make us feel fairness in our play. By sharpening, optimizing, and improving our understanding of the term, we improve the games we make and open new doors in game system design.