Systemic design isn’t really where most of game development traditionally puts its effort. Instead, a word you often hear repeated, rather than “system,” is content. Yelled from the battlements and printed on the plaques.

I’ll quote randomly from comment threads, reviews and interviews to illustrate what I mean. Each of them grabbed from the first few searches I could think of but anonymised because the goal is to make a point.

“This is a good step forward for [game]. Hopefully they keep adding more content and anything that was lacking from initial release.”

“Not worth the price for how little content you receive. It should have been $4.99-$9.99 at most.”

“Most polished game of all time. In a league of its own in so many classes including story, voice acting, music, world building, detail and it’s [sic] incredible level of content“

“I can’t recommend the game due to the shear [sic] lack of content.”

“For the price, the amount of content just isn’t worth it.”

Content. It’s an expression that seems to permeate every kind of modern conversation. Even to the point that many streamers and game developers talk about their interactions with fans as “content.” If you’re not putting out content, you’re not being productive. Content, content, content.

But coming out of 2023, where systemic singleplayer games like Baldur’s Gate III and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom have made a noticeable splash, it’s important to try to objectively measure the difference it makes to build systems and not just more content. To make some effort to see what we’re actually making when we make content. Not to say that the two games mentioned aren’t filled to the brim with content—they definitely are—but to try to get at something else: the real tangible value of the things we decide make.

Let’s take a look at what content in games actually is, on a practical level, why we get on the content treadmill, and finally an experimental way to measure the concrete value of different kinds of content for people playing our games based on that content’s level of exposure.

Hopefully, it can help illustrate the reason you want to make systems and not just more of everything else.

The Content Treadmill

Michael Sellers, in his excellent book Advanced Game Design A Systems Approach, wrote about the standard mode of game development as the content treadmill. We get on this treadmill because it “makes for a more predictable development process.” Sellers even argues that a “content-driven” game is the production opposite of a systemic game.

Put this content treadmill on repeat for a couple of decades, and you land where we are now, with teams that can involve 2,000 people or more, pushing out massive virtual worlds with hours of cutscenes and intense closely directed set piece environments.

The polar opposite of systemic design.

“Designers can add more gameplay to content-driven games by creating a new level or other object, but the game is fundamentally content-limited because it is so directly authored by the designers. The creation of content itself becomes a bottleneck for the developers, as players can consume new content faster than the developers can create it, and adding new content becomes an increasingly expensive proposition.”

Michael Sellers, Advanced Game Design A Systems Approach

Why are we so bad at seeing the value of a smarter art pipeline, procedural tool, or emergent system? Why have we fetishised content to such a radical degree?

To illustrate why, let’s segue into blood spatter for a moment.

One-Hour Blood Spatter

In the Dark Ages (the year 2014), I was working on a spare-time project for my recently purchased Ipad 3 tablet. After optimising the game for some time I could have 100 simultaneous enemies and do lots of other fun stuff at 60 FPS at full resolution. The idea was some kind of mix between Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight. It had some promise, particularly after the help of a clever sound designer with really interesting Kabuki-inspired ideas.

Then, as now, I was completely useless at making graphics. So I went to places like Polycount searching for an artist that would be willing to help me for the sum total of no money. This had predictable results (no one cared), but it did lead to some interesting conversations.

I once showed videos from a tech demo to a prospective artist. Videos I was quite excited to share since much of the work was technically complex and held lots of systemic promise in its (I thought) obvious ingenuity.

The artist’s response was, “I thought you’d have come much farther by now,” or something to that effect. I was a bit stunned at first, since I had overcome some serious hurdles to be able to do what I was doing and had probably secretly expected validation. It admittedly didn’t look like much, but that was why I was searching for artists in the first place.

Spurred on by this response, the next thing I did was start implementing some visual effects. Blood spatter, to be specific. As you killed enemies, it would spawn blood, and blood would stick to the environment. It took less than an hour to add, but since I was on parental leave while working on this project it was a couple of weeks before I showed it to the skeptical artist. The response was, “now it’s starting to look like something!”

This stunned me even more. Plugging standard content into an existing game in an established third-party engine was no big deal at all; it was a trivial undertaking. Getting 100 3D-animated AIs to run at 60 FPS at native resolution had been a huge deal! Systemic complexity seemed to be of very little value for presentation purposes.

Measuring Value

This experience has stayed with me ever since. It serves as a reminder that it’s hard to get people excited about technology. No one gets excited by the description of a system, and no plan can provide estimates for emergent effects or lists of player-facing features that are based on emergence rather than forward planning. It’s just not possible to measure such things. It’s even counterproductive to measure them, since listing expected synergies will turn them into features rather than means of discovery. They’re the kinds of things that must come from combinations of systems, and systems take time to build.

In the words of Tom Leonard, from his Thief: The Dark Project postmortem, while describing the methods and philosophies of Looking Glass, “[I]mmersive gameplay emerges from an object-rich world governed by high-quality, self-consistent simulation systems,” which I have explored in detail before. “[This] requires a lot of faith, as such systems take considerable time to develop, do not always arrive on time, and require substantial tuning once in place.”

Many stakeholders will want you to prove the work you do and will require proof they can relate to on their own terms. Systems and tools pipelines are not that kind of proof. Same as 100 AIs on an Ipad wasn’t, but a one-hour blood effect was.

As is also talked about by Leonard, the clash between building the systems and proving them often causes serious problems for developers. When external stakeholders start demanding specific things, rather than seeing the value in the systems as systems.

“[A]ll work had to stop in order to pull together an emergency proof-of-concept demo by the end of December to quell outside concerns that the team lacked a sound vision of the game. […] During this time the only option was to hack features as best we could into the existing AI. While better than losing our funding, constructing these demos was not good for the project.”

In other words, the bean counters of our industry have the same perspective as the artist who felt that the one-hour blood spatter “proved” what the six-month AI optimisation could not. They want you to show them things they can quantify. This forces you to use systems and tools that aren’t ready, or eschew the systemic approach altogether in favor of something more predictable and more readily demonstrable. In other words, content is much easier to demonstrate than systems. Or even more directly: quantity is much easier to demonstrate than systems.

This isn’t reaching the full reason why we get on the treadmill just yet, but the shorter trust cycle matters. It means it’s far easier to make things reminiscent of other things, because we already understand those things. We can keep the comparisons flowing and measure what we get done between deliverables against things we already know.

If our game has more levels, more weapons, or higher resolution textures than some other game, those are measurable points of improvement. A fancy system is not.

The Games We Make

It almost doesn’t matter which big-budget game you play today, you’ll find some kind of abstract progression system with points, node trees, and/or other gamification. It’s usually tied to features, but it can also be cosmetics or rare or exclusive items that you unlock through play. It can be tied to gameplay, like defeating X enemies, or it can be tied to activities, like finishing Y matches. There are season passes to tread through and there are many other ways to unlock, progress, and to revel in on-screen pizzazz.

These can all be referred to as variations of reinforcing loops, empowering the player through repeated play, thereby reinforcing the features available. They lead to interactive repetition, often to a silly degree. Perform actions, gain points, unlock improvements, perform better actions, repeat. Usually in forms that are both short- and long-term, and provide reasons to play “just one more,” as you see the reward bar(s) inch forward.

The key thing about this setup is that these systems are externalised from the core gameplay. The gameplay will provide hooks, like the number of killed enemies or finished objectives, but it won’t work directly with the reinforcing loop. Content and system can be kept separated from each other. They can also be built around operant conditioning (colloquially known as “Skinner boxes“), including random rewards.

“In most games, there is an overall predominance of reinforcing loops. This enables player gain and progression, where the player’s in-game avatar or representation becomes more powerful over the course of the game.”

Michael Sellers, Advanced Game Design A Systems Approach

One side effect of this heavy reliance on reinforcement is that it works through content at a rapid rate. When you have defeated Enemy X using Ability Y enough times, the game gives you a new shiny thing and some new enemies to defeat in the interest of keeping things fresh. Then you do that for a while, and the cycle repeats. When players have burned through it all, you must provide more content, or they will have exhausted what you have on offer and leave your game for the next one.

All of this together means that it makes complete sense to step up on the content treadmill. Hire more artists to make more enemy variations, more designers to build encounters, more programmers to implement feature variations, and so on. Even more so if you can keep the content and systems separated by for example having the content in 3D and the systems relegated to modal windows where the designers can play with numbers, such as reward scores and experience thresholds, in relative safety.

Yes, a practical concrete reason for all the upgrade and quest screens.

How We Market Games

In his still-relevant 2004 DICE Summit talk, Jason Rubin summarized his main points as “Video games are currently sold like packaged goods; talent is not respected.”

The way you market packaged goods, you have to sell something other than the product. One brand is made different from another by being the same but more so or by packaging identity or other factors into its sales pitch. Pepsi vs Coke or PlayStation vs Xbox are both marketing ploys—not actual statements.

Video games tie into this by getting bigger, better, faster, harder, etc. By having more. More scary, more levels, more weapons, better graphics, tougher challenges, larger maps, and so on. This ties directly into the reinforcing loops and makes us run even faster on the content treadmill. Teams balloon to multiple 1,000s of developers to be able to keep up with the rate that our reinforcing loops push players through the content, and to be able to compete with that other game that has only half as much content as we want to offer. It’s even common that we say players want or even demand this, and that’s why we have to make it.

Play the new DLC. Join the new season. Get the sequel. Burn through it, then move on to the next one. This is how we’ve taught gamers to consume games and content in existing games. The new thing must be a produced thing, it can’t just be a new experience or discovery in an existing game. No matter how many hours some players can put into games like Civilization, where variations in the game experience are much less about content and more about the play experience itself, we still operate on the notion that we must produce more content.

It speaks for itself that the word “content” is a traditional marketing term. Marketing language so effective that the consumers have come to use it.

How We Make Games

Where I stand in this dilemma should be obvious: I think we focus on the wrong things. But the industry’s drive towards more content is just as obvious. Sellers mentioned predictability before, but what predictability actually means may not be entirely obvious.

In an interview with The Game Design Roundtable, Darren Yeomans talked about the value of doing things you know instead of taking unnecessary technical risks.

“Just build a different map,” he said. “Build three maps. Schedule that in. You know how to do that—you know how that works. You’re not going to gain anything spectacular on top of what you are doing otherwise.”

This comes from the pure scheduling benefits of doing things you already know how much they cost and how long they take. Because if the opposite of what you know is what you don’t know there will never be a strong argument for more systemic development. The only way you make that happen is by building whole teams focused on systems. Predictability saves money in the short term. It’s much easier for an external stakeholder to look at a hockey stick curve of added content—perceived value for money—than to try to decipher the tech jargon of an excited programmer building a system.

This is the conclusion that has to be made: we can intuitively understand what saving money in the short term means, but can’t quantify the value of making 100 AIs optimised on a Retina screen when it only looks like a bunch of capsules. If you look at the choice of whether to use six months to build a single system, or to use the same time to add more blood effects, the math will be simple and straightforward: let’s add 960 blood effects!

This, in summary, is why we get on the content treadmill. It’s because of how we’ve taught players to play, how we make our games, how we market them, and plan then. We’ve turned a fundamentally creative industry into an assembly line that is always several steps behind a demand that we have artificially created.

Measuring the Value of Content

We’ve had our reasons for getting on the content treadmill. We’ve marketed ourselves into a corner where we continuously sell “bigger and better” to our audience, to the point where they are using marketing terms to express demand. We brought this on ourselves by preferring predictability and by riding the tailwind of constant fiscal growth.

But no, games are not more expensive to make, and no one requires us to keep churning out this content. There is another way. Systemic design, of course! The same opposite that Michael Sellers presents in his book.

A New Systemic Golden Age?

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom broke records on launch. Baldur’s Gate III demonstrated that players love a good premium singleplayer CRPG more than ever. Starfield reinforced this further, though not achieving the fanfares of BG3. In 2023, we got the remade System Shock, the brilliant Amnesia: The Bunker, Hitman 3, and many more games that were decidedly not content-driven or even primarily multiplayer.

On the other end, many service games died the quiet death of server shutdown. From the recently launched Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt to the unreleased Hyenas. Bungie’s seemingly endless font of gold, Destiny 2, saw team downsizing as a consequence of shrinking revenues.

Coming out of 2023, it’s clear that content isn’t the only thing players want. Players want more kinds of games. Games that used to belong to small niches, such as turnbased singleplayer CRPGs, can “suddenly” sell tens of millions of copies, to the abject shock of many publishers who haven’t seen the value in such launches in years. Also, the idea that what you make must be free-to-play is demonstrably untrue. But the real question is how to measure and demonstrate the value of what you are making.

For this purpose, I have toyed with a measurement that tries to take many factors into account when we consider the value of the content we produce. I’ll present it here, so you can toy with it too. If you have suggestions for additional metrics, then please send them to annander@gmail.com.

Expense

The easiest thing to pinpoint is the expense tied to a piece of content. In budget pitching, we often calculate this using months. I’ll call them devmonths (for developer months).

A devmonth is the cost of a single developer working fulltime for a month. It also includes other running costs for said developer. Licensing fees, vacation, office rent, and so on, all rolled into one number. A game budget in its simplest form can be expressed as a multiple of devmonths. Say, 10,000 devmonths, 100 devmonths, or even 12 devmonths if you’re a solo developer for a year. Of course, if you took a month of vacation in those twelve months, it’d still cost 12 devmonths, it’s just that it’d be 11 devmonths that could be planned for.

For the sake of this post we’ll grab the number $10,000 as the cost for a single devmonth. In today’s studio landscape, this is somewhere in the mid-range of what a budget would assume, but it’s a nice number that’s easy to work with. If you pay salaries in some cheaper countries, this can be much lower. If you pay San Fransisco salaries it climbs much higher.

Now, if you want to make a AAA-quality character model, for example, you will most likely need several people:

• An art director that comes up with the overall direction for all art production.
• A concept artist, who first conceptualizes the character until the direction is satisfied, and then produces a model sheet or other reference materials that can be used as the foundation for building the 3D asset.
• A character artist, who sculpts the high-poly mesh, bakes the low-poly mesh, and textures the character with all applicable maps for your renderer. The texturing can sometimes be a separate developer, depending on company size and culture, but we’ll wrap all of that into this one character artist for simplicity.
• A technical animator, who rigs and skins the character and preps it for animators after the character artist is done.
• An animator, who keyframes animations or records animation using motion capture equipment and then targets it for the technical animator’s rig.

Five people, each responsible for a separate area of the work. For the sake of our example, we’ll skip the director, and assume that we need each of the other developers roughly this much:

• Concept artist, two weeks.
• Character artist, full month.
• Technical animator, two weeks.
• Animator, full month.

That’s a total of three devmonths (or $30,000) as the expense required to create this character.

Just for the record: an asset like this can be much more expensive, but it can also be much cheaper through use of stock assets, good generative tools, and other solutions. This is a very rough estimate for the sake of argument and doesn’t reflect the complex subjective realities of game development in general.

Exposure

How prominently each piece of content is shown to a player can be thought of as the content’s exposure. By comparing expense to exposure we can calculate a kind of consumer value for our content.

To illustrate how this can be calculated, let’s use a few sample metrics. Each is a value between 0 and 1 so they can be easily combined.

Timeline

Add this variable to content that appears after the game’s marketing or splash screen.

At what point in the game a piece of content will appear. If it’s at the start, there’s a much higher exposure. At the end, fewer players will ever get to see it. After the end, say in an endgame or similar, very few players will engage with it.

The following timeline numbers are based on a cross-section of Steam Achievement statistics for single-player games. Around 10% of the people who buy a game on Steam never start the game or finish the tutorial, and only about 30% of players who start playing a single-player game actually reach the end.

0.9 = the very beginning of the game
0.5 = the midpoint of the game
0.3 = the end of the game

Frequency

Add this variable to content that appears infrequently in your game.

Some content, like a third-person main character or menu theme, will be used every time the game is played. Other content will only be presented once and will therefore score much lower on frequency. Many games will reuse content for this very reason, since it’s fairly obvious that six weeks spent on something that’s only seen for a second isn’t an effective use of time (or money).

1 = multiple times every game session
0.75 = once every game session
0.25 = once every few sessions
0.1 = once, ever

Interactivity

Add this variable to content that isn’t directly interactive.

If you assume that players engage more with feedback, content’s grade of interactivity becomes relevant. Some content—you can call it “pizzazz” or “juice”—is made as direct feedback, while other content is passively observed. Content that the player must actively seek out will score higher in interactivity, but will of course score lower in frequency (see previous metric).

A gun in a first-person shooter provides direct feedback to player interaction, while a cutscene is passively observed.

1 = direct feedback
0.5 = restricted feedback
0.1 = passively observed

Exclusivity

Add this variable to content that is exclusive to consumer subsets or timed events.

In certain cases, like with modern season passes, Christmas specials, paid DLC, and so on, there is a factor of limitation added to the content. Content that’s limited will have lower exposure, since you must pass the bar of entry before you can peruse said content.

Some edge cases are relevant, such as multiplayer skins, since they may be seen by you, but not interacted with, but you’ve technically still been exposed to the content in question even if you didn’t interact with it yourself (why the Interactivity metric above is necessary for differentiation).

1 = available to everyone
0.5 = only available to subset of players
0.25 = strict but temporary limitations (say, Halloween content accessible every Halloween)
0.1 = strict permanent limitations

Targeting

Add this variable to content that is made less for players and more for developers.

Some of the things we do in development only benefit developers. Tools, technical pipeline work, concept art, and so on. Many of the things that go on behind the scenes have a much lower exposure value because it’s not actually intended for exposure.

It’s important to note that developer-facing content is fairly rare. Systems, logic, gameplay, and architecture can all be primarily developer-facing, but that’s not really content. Rather, it’s what makes the production of content possible to begin with.

So before you add the Targeting variable, consider whether this developer-facing thing you want to score is actually content or simply the cost of doing business.

1 = player-facing
0.75 = optional UGC content
0.5 = modding-specific content
0.1 = developer-exclusive

Identification

Add this variable to content that is limited in identification and breadth.

In certain cases, content can be limited because of identification. In games where you can select to play as male or female, the male-identified option will be selected fewer times, since up to a third of male-identifying players will play the female character but only 7% of female-identifying players will opt for the male alternative if they can choose. This goes farther too, with color blindness, arachnophobia, a lack of beards in customisation, and a long list of other identifying traits may decrease exposure because of decreased interest due to limited representation.

At its worst, poor identification means no one buys the game to begin with. The issue with this metric is that specific content can be extremely restricted in identification (say, beards) but still empower a game’s wider representation by adding to a library of representative content. It’s therefore a tricky metric to apply to any one specific piece of content, unless that piece is something that’s very rarely seen in the type of game you are making.

To reflect this, you can inverse the Identification metric to make it about diversity instead of breadth.

1 = everyone can identify with this content (e.g., cartoon faces)
0.5 = stereotypical or restricted identification (e.g., realistic faces with content-derived custom variation)
0.1 = only a specific subgroup of your audience will identify with this content (e.g., realistic and clearly identified faces)

Entertainment

Add this variable to content that is difficult to engage with through secondary channels.

Streaming, let’s plays, video reviews and video essays. Ours is the age of video! Some of the content you make for your game may have little obvious value for the game itself but may have huge value for influencers or people watching streams of the game. Or vice versa.

It can therefore be relevant to consider a potential secondary audience and the entertainment value of the content you make.

1 = high secondary entertainment value
0.5 = difficult to understand without explanation or requires gating (e.g., age restrictions)
0.1 = won’t be seen by a wider audience (e.g., complex UI or other unengaging content)

Generosity

Add this variable to content that the consumer base would expect to get free of charge.

In this day and age of free games, something that has changed from the traditional view of what’s valuable is players’ views on levels and other downloadable content. Today, many players expect this content to be free. This gives some types of content a higher perceived value than other content. A new game level has low perceived value generally, while a new story mission or customization option may have high perceived value. It’s a tricky dynamic, because age groups will have very different opinions as well.

This is what drives many games to hire hundreds of artists and designers to produce more content, since it’s basically impossible to produce content as fast as it’s consumed. But it’s also impossible to keep up with this and risks forcing you to work in unsustainable ways for your employees. I.e., stepping on the content treadmill.

1 = high perceived value: considerable expansion DLC, game characters, features
0.5 = low perceived value: consumables, unlocks
0.1 = things that players expect to be free: game levels, variations, bug fixes, and patches

Loss

Add this variable to content that doesn’t persist throughout the lifetime of your game.

Some types of content are subject to conversion loss. Between starting the work and ending it, you lose some of the developer time to iterations, bugs, or other phenomena. How prone content is to this effect depends largely on which area it’s used in. As a rule of thumb, the more content-driven your game is, the more you will lose along the way, and the more you end up iterating on production content, the more you’ll lose on top of that.

The reason for this is that you will eventually drown the individual pieces of content under the mass of content. When you hit your 50th season, the value of content you made specifically for the first season will have diminished to almost nothing. Not least of all because the team’s skills in producing such content improves over time. Particularly if you end up rebalancing your game with the lessons learned as a live product. Basically, the Loss metric is a kind of lifetime metric.

With the character example from before, the concept art can be considered a loss, since it’s not player-facing at all. But this can be mitigated by using it in promotional material, art books, or the like.

You can scale the Loss metric against a concrete lifetime if you want to. For example, five years. Then consider if this specific piece of content will still be relevant five years into the game’s lifecycle, and just how relevant it will be.

1 = all of the content will be used over time
0.5 = half the content will be used over time
0.1 = only parts of the content will be used over time

Continuity

Add this variable to content that requires updating, patching, or complementing during its lifetime.

In certain cases, you will need to maintain your content and it retains its exposure only for a short while. With live games, this can be the special rewards for finishing a certain season pass, or something like a Halloween or Christmas special. Some of them will be possible to use intermittently–like how Halloween tends to happen once a year–but some will be more restricted.

These types of offerings are usually done for marketing reasons, and marketing of course has its own value. But we’re talking about exposure here, and in such a case these types of restrictions may devalue your content over time even if they serve a marketing purpose.

1 = made once, used as-is forever
0.5 = can be used regularly, for example once per year
0.1 = requires regular updates

Cross-Media Intent

Add this variable to content that could be pulling more of the marketing or sales weight.

For some types of companies, games are merely parts of a larger whole. You want the characters plushable, the messages actionable, and the symbols tattooable. An app for the phone, a TV show, board games, merchandise, and paraphernalia. Preferably all of it at once.

Considering your content’s cross-media potential is tricky. A nice font that you can use on posters has cross-media potential and so does a compelling character design. But much of it can’t really be measured in advance. You can’t plan that a narrative plot beat gets virally memed, for example. Rather, this metric will measure your cross-media intent.

1 = high cross-media potential; easy to share, easy to make actionable, easily recognised, etc.
0.5 = narrow cross-media potential; too specific, too unwiedy (e.g., performance-intensive), etc.
0.1 = no cross-media potential; it’s an asphalt texture; not much you can do with it but asphalt.

Priority

Add this variable to content as a way to factor purely subjective priority into its value.

We know. Sometimes there’s a story moment that’s important for a certain character’s development or a set piece asset that’s desperately required for one reason or another. This variable lets you skew numbers a little bit for creative reasons by adding your own subjective value-based judgment as a single metric.

Don’t overuse this, however. The point of this exercise is to get a rough estimate of how much value you’re getting from the money you’re spending on content.

1 = absolutely essential to the game
0.5 = important, but not strictly required
0.1 = incidental to the game

How To Use Exposure

Multiply all the exposure numbers together to find a final exposure value. We now have a cool average! (Or possibly a terrible one.)

High Exposure (>0,8)

Content with high exposure is seen often and repeatedly by a larger group of consumers and will provide an increased sense of value because of it. But on the dark side of exposure you have content fatigue that kicks in when you’ve seen or heard the same content so many times that it makes you roll your eyes or make memes out of it.

High exposure shows you areas where the players will get more bang for your buck. This means you can spend more bucks on similar content and know that it will almost always be worth it. Record more alts. Build more variants. Investing a larger chunk of your budget where your high exposure takes you is almost always a good idea.

Average Exposure (~0,5)

This is all your bog standard run of the mill common milquetoast content. It may need to be there to flesh out your game, but no one will write home about it and chances are that you could save some money by cutting some of it out, reusing more of it, or moving these investments to higher exposure content.

There may also be something wrong about your variables, of course, and you can tweak them to see how that affects the average. But content that scores near 0,5 exposure is most likely not as important as you may have thought.

Low Exposure (<0,2)

If the content you’re making has marketing value or other player- or consumer-facing significance it may hold some merit even if it has very low exposure. But the argument to be made is that you maybe shouldn’t use too many resources to make low exposure content. A coffee stain texture for a table you run past at breakneck speed is probably not worth your time. But if the same coffee stain is also used elsewhere, maybe 100 times spread across the entire game, it will get a higher exposure.

So rather than blanketly saying “cut it out” because something has a low exposure, consider how you can increase exposure for your low exposure content. If it’s only used once, can it be used more times? If it’s reserved for the late game, can you move it to earlier in the game’s progression as foreshadowing? One good way to use the metrics is to see what happens if you add more of them than you initially thought necessary.

There’s allegedly an expression among airforce bomber crews, “polishing bombs,” that demonstrates something functionally useless. The smileys or spit polish you do on your bomb won’t matter at all to anyone ever, since the bomb will just explode. The explosion is the thing. This is a good way to analyse your low exposure content if you spend considerable time on it—you may actually just be polishing bombs.

E*E

Now we have two numbers: expense and exposure. Multiply expense by exposure and you’ll see what you get for your money in terms of consumer value. This is the asset’s E*E. The argument made here is that exposure directly affects value and should therefore be considered when you make the expense.

Every game will have different needs and variations on what players perceive as value but thinking of your content’s player exposure in terms of value for your money will help you get closer to the player’s mindset and maybe even waste less money on content that maybe isn’t as important as you originally thought.

In a production environment there should be a more rigorous process for finding these numbers. A process that is more directly related to the game you’re making. But the least the E*E can do is challenge your assumptions and make you consider how you can increase the perceived value of your content.