It Doesn’t Work With Starburst Because They’re All Nice

Imagine a set of scales. The bowls at each end hang in equilibrium. The scales are balanced.

That’s how we can see our favourite online shooters. The balance is there, and it holds. All the different aspects of the game level out into an experience that’s both progressively challenging and fun.

Let’s consider Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Look in the bowls of the imaginary scales. They’re filled with Skittles. The fruity candy. In the left bowl, we have the delicious red and purple Skittles. It’s full of them. They represent the good times. The long distance headshots, the last-gasp melees when defending an objective, the suppressive strafing runs from an attack chopper.

The other bowl is filled with the sharp, slightly bitter, green and yellow Skittles. They represent the mistakes, the failures. The miscued explosives, the mistimed melee attacks, and the disappointment and anger you momentarily feel when someone sneaks up on you, or out-aims you. Those moments are necessary to keep the scales on an even keel. Remember though (and this is an often-overlooked element of Skittle game design), that a better player might have fewer yellow and green Skittles here because they make fewer mistakes, but the mistakes they do make hit them harder. So, the few greens and yellows in question end up being much denser. A Halo master might only make one mistake in a session, but that one little citrus Skittle weighs on their mind as much as all the glorious red and purples, and balances the scales out. For the sake of further imagination, if you were to eat that one incredibly dense green or yellow Skittle, it would be so sharp and bitter that your face would fold in and upon itself until you resembled Nora Batty being sucked into a vacuum cleaner, while frowning.

If you bought a packet of Skittles that contained only the yummy red and purple flavours, you’d think it was neat the first few times, and then you’d get pretty bored. The smooth needs the rough. Success is sweetest when it’s bookended by failure, and so games need the yellow and green Skittles to keep people coming back.

What of the middle of the road Skittle, orange? In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, we see that some of the orange Skittles are sprinkled in a line along the centre of the main bar of the scales, and the rest are dotted around the scene, adding to proceedings but not really affecting the balance. They represent little orbs of fortune. They’re the wildcards. Grenades are the classic Skittle game design textbook example. They’ve been carefully rationed and organised in Bad Company 2’s balancing. They sit there quietly and don’t tip the scales.

In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s case, someone appears to have fired an orange Skittle gatling gun at the scales with wild abandon, most likely whilst laughing maniacally. The whole scene is covered with them. There is evidence of an attempt to balance things quite nicely underneath the sheer weight of grenades, sorry, I mean orange Skittles, but nonetheless all you can see is orange Skittles. Halo 3’s scales look similar, but on closer scientific analysis in our lab we’ve discovered that a good portion of the orange Skittles have been mushed up, as if a Spartan has won a seemingly arbitrary and ultimately unfulfilling battle of who can melee first, crushing them mercilessly under the butt of his assault rifle. In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s case, the orange Skittles are just as ubiquitous, but almost all smashed up this time, and with tiny tattoos reading either “Commando perk LOL” or “Double shotguns LMFAO”. In all, the scales wobble and lean disconcertingly, but they just about stay upright. Patches are launched bravely at the issues, reaching an arm towards the scales and flicking the orange Skittles out of the way, but often even more orange Skittles fall out of the arm’s sleeve on to the scales and so the arm has to retract and go off to think harder about what to do.

In game design (rest assured, this is exactly how games are designed), the orange Skittles are added to inject that little bit of chaos into the action. You have to chuck curveballs at the player, on top of the balance between their skill and their opponents’ skill, to keep things fresh and compelling. People want some orange Skittles to wash down the purple and reds with. If they’re in their groove, playing at a level they’re happy with, they still need some surprises. They still need the odd grenade lobbed merrily into their vantage point, or a shotgun raid in and around their face, just to keep them guessing. Put too many orange Skittles in though, and the chaos starts to take over. Players get frustrated as they are continually metaphorically cracked over the head by enormous orange Skittles, bashing them, arms helplessly flailing, into the path of those bitter green and yellow Skittles they so want to avoid. Soon, even experienced players find themselves buried together under a mountain of yellow and green, trying to eat their way out in a futile attempt at clawing back any shreds of dignity that may remain, and they get bored and go off to play Farmville or write their memoirs, or whatever it is other online shooter players do when they’re not playing online shooters. Bowling maybe.

So, it’s difficult. Developers of online shooters probably go to sleep each night picturing enormous fruit flavoured candy violently bouncing off players’ heads endlessly, until they move a spawn point or tweak the class loadouts the next day at work, causing the dreams to cease temporarily.

Spare a thought.