One of the most hazardous unquestioned assumptions of game design is that a game should be balanced. Don’t get me wrong, it certainly can be an issue if one tool is too strong, or many tools too weak, particularly in competitive settings. However, it isn’t inherently so: An option can be seemingly useless and still provide tactical value, or evidently overpowered but still have vulnerabilities — or, perhaps more interestingly, be provided to players for reasons beyond the merely tactical.
What does “balance” even mean in the context of game design? This term is far more confused and has more assumptions built into it than many seem to realize. For instance, while many would state that weapons in a competitive shooter should be balanced, that statement often quietly disincludes starter and fallback weapons like fists and knives, which everyone accepts should be relatively weak. Many fighting games specifically include taunt moves, and sometimes entire “joke” characters — no one cares if these are weak or useless, though sometimes they can be surprisingly potent. Similarly, while one might design a strategy game such that many approaches are viable, few would argue that one should balance all approaches to be viable — for instance, never inputting any commands and simply letting turns progress wouldn’t be considered a good strategy, and trying to “balance” it against other approaches would be meaningless. A truly perfectly balanced game would be one in which no action matters because each choice is equally likely to attain victory.
This all may be a bit pedantic to dwell upon — after all, no one advocates for the kind of total balance where all choices are truly equal — but I think it’s helpful to establish that this is kind of an odd term in the first place. The real concern is that the game be living and developing, that the player stay engaged and thinking about how best to navigate each situation as it comes rather than automatically choosing a known best option. The game degrades when there is a paucity of viable choices — either because one is obviously optimal or many are virtually useless. However, what is necessary to create this healthy ecosystem of choice is not balance, but nuance; not a system where all options are equally viable, but a situation where the ability to discern an option’s viability requires careful insight into the system rather than rote memorization.
Much of the time this is effectively what people mean by saying balance, but it’s important to clarify the actual intent. If we thoughtlessly decree balance to be a desirable (or even achievable) goal, it has some odd effects on the game’s design. For instance, it means that anything we choose to include has to be useful — even if utility has nothing to do with the actual intent of its inclusion. As an example, if you’re making a historical war game and you want to accurately represent that war — or even represent war in general — there are a host of horrible things you might include, war crimes and atrocities of every flavor, particularly if you want the player to be able to recreate a given historical moment and its impact. However, if you’re particularly vulnerable to the poison of game design, you might decide that these have to be balanced — that there has to be a gameplay reason to massacre civilian populations, kill surrendered enemies, deploy chemical weapons, and so forth, on and on… it is a long list.
To balance these game design mechanics is to forward an argument on the wisdom and viability of atrocity. Sure, they might be ugly, but they get a specific kind of result which might be desirable under a specific circumstance. Certainly, there must have been commanders who believed this about the atrocities they committed, who told it feverishly to themselves, but I don’t think it’s a worthy pursuit to reify their worldview by generating a systematized representation of it.
“Okay, ” one might argue, “but we only have so many resources to put into a game, and if we add a mechanic that’s never an actual good idea to use then isn’t that just a waste of effort?” Not really! There are several ways for an included option to be interesting completely aside from whether it’s ‘good’ or not. Even if a tactic is terrible, it could still provide a unique challenge — avoiding every upgrade in an action game is a terrible idea in terms of achieving victory, but plenty of players enjoy doing it for that exact reason. Players interested in recreating historical events, in exploring thought experiments, or in role-playing can all find interest in a clearly suboptimal option. Even solely from a tactical perspective, if a move is terrible in every situation then as long as it’s meaningfully distinct from other options it will probably still find itself occasionally used — for the element of surprise if nothing else.
Thus, what is necessary to make a choice viable and interesting is not to make it balanced but to make it meaningfully distinct. I’m not a military strategy enthusiast, but to me the most interesting part of including repugnant options in a game would be to attempt to represent why these morally and logistically terrible actions might seem appealing to a commander in the moment, why these things keep on happening despite a clear trend of them making everything worse for everyone. The pursuit of balance, as an end in itself, all too often takes us away from the truly interesting possibilities — it pushes us towards a numerical game, where everything must sum up, even if the most interesting effects, and the most poignant lessons, seldom can be neatly evaluated in that way.
My argument is a little all over the place here. I’m making an argument both that it is immoral to blindly attempt to simulate atrocity as though it must be, in one light or another, justified, while at the same time arguing for a system where anything might be justified emergently due to unexpected systemic confluences. Very well then, I contradict myself — these are both excellent reasons to avoid the idolization of balance, and together form the meta argument that it simply makes things more interesting to build a system where balance is not only impossible, but unthinkable, where balance doesn’t even make sense as something to desire. Of course, at some point you’ll need to make certain options weaker and others stronger, need to ensure that some choices are less viable to make others more viable — call it balance if you must, but never forget that your goal is to make the play space open to possibility, not to make all things equal, to argue for idiocy’s practicality.
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