In order to develop a sense of balance, you need to understand how your brain works. You have an Orbito-Frontal Cortex; It’s called that because it is located behind your eyes, but it’s really your Gut.  When you learn something new, it goes through a process where it builds a model of the world and makes predictions about that model.  If it is right, it releases Dopamine, which cements the model a little bit.

If you are a designer, you need to familiarize yourself with how this process feels, because your ultimate goal should be to get the game inside your head.  You want the model in your gut and the game in the world to be the same.  You should be able to predict how the game will play in a given situation before actually picking up the controller.

Ok, back to Halo 2.  We had to patch, even though we didn’t want to.  Patches are risky and expensive.  Luckily we had network bugs, so we were going to have to patch anyway.  (I’m not sure we would have gotten to patch Halo 2 strictly for balance changes; I’m glad we didn’t find out.)

Choosing what to patch was harder.  You want to tweak everything, but you can’t because then testing gets out of hand.  Games that have the ability to easily change the gameplay often over-patch fopr precisely this reason.

Choosing what NOT to patch was hardest.  We didn’t change the Sniper Rifle because it was right below the line of what we could safely re-balance

Which brings me to my final theme:  Make the hard choices.  Balancing is hard because it requires you to do things you don’t want to.  And it is tricky because there are so many ways to confuse or talk yourself out doing it properly.  But the worst thing you can do is leave the decision up to chance because you can’t make a tough call.

Why are these choices hard?  Again, the answer is your brain.  You also have a Pre-Frontal Cortex.  It’s called that because… Who knows?  We call it your brain.

It is a poor tool, but it’s what we have.  You can’t reason out everything, in fact you can’t reason out very much at all.  There are so many ways that your logical mind has to trick you.  You must confine yourself to reason on the detail scale.  You just can’t hold enough factual information in your brain to make rational decisions about very complex situations.

Radiolab is a great show on New York Public Radio.  They have a podcast, you should subscribe!  In an episode called “Choice” they describe this experiment where psychologists give people a number to memorize, 2 digits to 10 digits.  Then they send them to another room to repeat their number.  On the way, they have someone interrupt them (All good psychological tests are about fooling the subjects) and ask them if they want an Apple or some Cake.

The people with short numbers pick Apples at a high rate; Apples are better for you, fewer calories, watch your waistline.  Those trying to remember longer numbers more often choose Cake.  They are so busy with numbers, they make the decision emotionally.

That’s right, 7-10 numbers are enough to completely fill your rational brain!  My high school calculator had more horsepower than that!

So when you have to think rationally, think about details or you will get hopelessly lost.  And fat.

Ok, here are the four themes of my talk:
– Balance is longevity
– Balance in passes
– Develop your sense of balance
– Make the hard choices

I am going to use these themes to explore the Detail.  Now let’s get to the Sniper Rifle!

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