Game Theory - Dear Fall Guys, I Fixed Your Game!

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he creates a BETTER version of Fall Guys based on YOUR feedback! *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Pedro Freitas, Dan "Cybert" Seibert and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Hello internet, welcome to game theory. The show that, like a jelly bean stuck in an obstacle course, has spent the last nine years stumbling and bumbling its way forward in the hopes of achieving victory, or at the very least, a place in your heart. Today we're talking about Fall Guy's Ultimate Knockout, the candy-colored game that's infested each and every slot of your suggested video feed.

But today, we're not gonna be talking about how these cute little pill creatures are actually freakishly tall, six-foot oblong monsters of destruction, nor are we talking about this The game's dark hidden backstory, where the ultimate knockout games are just the descendant of an ancient blood sport made from ritual sacrifices meant to appease a vengeful demigod. Because that lore ain't there yet. No, today we're looking at this game that has swept your YouTube and Twitch feeds, the way you're playing it, and the way Mediatonic, the game's makers, can make it better. You see, for all the rage that this game has caused, and it's caused a lot of rage...

I hate other human beings. I hate every other human being on this planet right now. People love it. I love it. Or at least we love most of it. And you see, that's where analytics and player psychology come into play. Today we're taking a great game and transforming it into the perfect game. And no, it's not just by adding in secret lore about how this is all meant to appease a vengeful demigod. But hey, certainly wouldn't hurt. For those of you who don't know, Fall Guys is basically Mario Party, minus all the board game elements.

Minigame after mini game injected directly into your eye holes. A 60 player battle royale were the best, or the lucky, or the hackeryest player is the last one left standing and taking home the crown. So, for our scientific look at the fall people, and yes, it is fall people here, Mediatonic, it's 2020. Fall women can be Fall guys too. For our scientific look at the fall people, we conducted a massive survey of you guys, the players, the theorists, asking for information about your favorite and least favorite mini-games, other games that you play, your personal gaming experience, and your personality type via the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. You responded and uh, boy, how, how,

Did you respond with a whopping 200,000 of you taking the time to fill out our little survey and before we get any further I have to say thank you thank you thank you for providing us with such a huge data set I have met real-world researchers who described getting data from a thousand people as a fantastic sample size and here we are at more than 200 times that It's not quite as many as the 500,000 that responded for our Super Smash Brothers survey, but hey fall guys is a new game, so I'll cut you some slack Anyway, with 200,000 responses, we had more data than the populations of 47 countries on the planet. Seriously, Monaco and its population of 38,300 is looking pretty jealous at us these days. From the survey data, I learned a lot of interesting things about you guys, like the fact that some of you live in countries like the Milky Way Galaxy. I forgot what a country is, Jimmy, not the beans, please, and none of your beeswax, sorry Matt Pat.

Though I also gotta say that this person went on to helpfully clarify that they're in the United States, despite it apparently being none of my beeswax. Also, this was really the first time in any of our surveys that we started to see responses like America, wish it was Japan, the good old US of A, I wish it was Canada, and I wish Russia, comrade, sadly USA. Probably not the best sign of patriotism that we had more people saying that they wanted to move away from the US than to it with this round of responses, but I'll just let you fill in the logical gaps there. Here's hoping that all of you are successful in your immigration aspirations. Remember to pack warm if you're moving to Russia. Last little shout up before we get into the meat of this thing, I gave you the choice, fighting one tiger-sized hedgehog or a hundred hedgehog-sized tigers. 71.5% of you opted for the solo giant hedgehog, which, let's face it, is the correct option.

For a generation raised on Sonic, oh yeah, we can take down one awkwardly large porcupine. But enough for the distractions, let's get into the real reason that you're here. Fall guys, and how we as a community can do our part to make this game better. So, let's just hop into the juiciest part here. Out of the 25 different mini-games available when we ran the server, What is everyone's least favorite part of Fall Guys? Take a guess, I'll give you a minute, or more accurately, like, five seconds. This is the internet age after all, things move fast, like a tiger-sized blue hedgehog.

And not at all like the Fall Guys and Gals because they weave on the wobble, and they very frequently fall down. Alright, guess is ready? There was an overwhelming and immediate trend that emerged in the data. Despite having 200,000 people that responded, no one likes Tail Tag Games. When asked about your least favorite survival stage, a while Whopping 45% said tail tag. When asked about your least favorite team game,

Tail tag again with nearly 30% of the vote. When asked about your least favorite final stage, it was, yet again, the tail tag game of Royal Fumble with a whopping 40% of the vote. When asked about your least favorite stage overall in the entire game, Team Tail Tag. 14% of people, nothing else even crossed into double digits. Second least favorite game, Royal Fumble.

That other tail tag game, 9.7. percent of responses. In short, the tail-tag games are great at being universally despised. So I wanted to dig a bit deeper into this. In data processing software, you can make these things called pivot tables. They're incredibly powerful tools where you can break down data based on other data in order to find deeper levels of conclusions. Sometimes they can give you general things, like how many responses did we get from people in different age ranges in different countries? But they can also give you very specific information, like how many players in Latvia rated their gaming expertise at five,

and also play Fortnite. Answer to that, by the way, zero. The one top-tier Latvian player response that we got actually prefers Call of Duty Warzone. No joke, that is an actual data point that we got amongst the 200,000 responses. That shows you the power of this stuff. I was able to find that one very specific person

from this mountain of data that you provided me. So wanting to get to the bottom of the tail tag hatred, I crossed the data with every single other variable we asked you about. Was it an age thing? No, players across all ages, hate, Tail Tag? Was it a personality thing? Like, are introverts concerned about people getting all up in their personal space? Nope. Every personality type, tail tag, rock bottom. Is this a gaming experience thing? Are inexperienced people just bad and weighing down the... Nope! No matter how I broke down the data, tail tag, and specifically team tail tag was the worst. Now, there could be a lot of reasons for this, right? Maybe it's because the tail tag grab mechanic is a bit finicky and most prone to be affected by someone with a laggy connection. Maybe it's the fact that those rounds are

all two minutes long, yet they almost always boil down to what happens in like the final five seconds, rendering everything that came before just totally wasted time. Or maybe, just maybe, one of the contributing factors is the team element. So I ran another dataset. One of the questions I asked you guys was your favorite and least favorite game types. Racing stages like DoorDash and Slime Climb, survival stages like rollout and perfect match, final stages like hexagon and royal fumble, or team games like Team Tail Tag and Egg Scramble. When asked, a whopping 56.5% of you said that the team games were your least favorite, which is kind of saying a lot when there were four categories that you could have chosen from. Roll that clip of me again?

I hate other human beings. Yes, I'm not alone. And here's the wackiest part. Not only am I not alone, but people who choose to play this game with their friends agree with me. You'd think, right, that people playing with their friends would enjoy, you know, playing with their friends in things like team-based challenges, but nope. Online friends, offline friends doesn't matter, even when playing with people that you like, when you have chosen to play with them, you still hate playing together in team-based mini-games. So the team element here is certainly a mathematical problem, and I get why. It can suck to feel like you got eliminated through no fault of your own. But you see, I think it goes deeper than that. I think a lot of this goes back to an episode I did a long, long, long time ago of game theory.

Seven years ago, in fact, are 1 million subscribers where we looked at the reasons that people choose to play games. And when you boil it all down, there are three core needs that video games fulfill. Different needs for different sorts of players. I call them the car needs. C for competence. People who play games to gain a skill, accomplish something, overcome some challenge, or feel like they're achieving.

A, for autonomy. These are the games where you have free and complete control over the world around you. Open world exploration. You are uninhibited. So the games that you gravitate towards are sandboxes for you to play in where you're encouraged to do practically anything you want. And lastly, there's R for relatedness. These are your multiplayer games, where you're playing to relate to others, to build friendships.

Games are fun, sure, but they're a social experience made better by being around other people. And that, my friends, is what I lovingly call the lame tri-force. Three separate needs, three very different types of games, to fulfill those needs. So, knowing those three needs, let's take a look at Fall Guys. It's a party platformer-style game with cartoonish graphics. It's a game that obviously appeals to a lot of lot of different people and how friendly and casual it is, but if there's one gamer group in particular that this game is almost perfectly suited for, it's the Nintendo crowd. The bright colors, the wacky-looking characters, the tongue-and-cheek humor,

the core gameplay being platformer controls of running and jumping. And these types of gamers largely are playing to satisfy their sea need, their competence. Platformers are all about precision, achievement, accomplishment. Think of the marios and zeldas of the world, where you're completing quests and speed running levels. Or think of the entire country of Japan known for its precision and pride of mastering skills. Think it's a coincidence that their arcades are filled with rhythm games? It's all a desire for precision, mastery, competence. People who are most drawn to fall guys

are people looking to video games to prove competence. And as such, those are the same people who are gonna get the most frustrated when a team-based challenge throws off their precise gameplay. It's also why the wacky, inconsistent controls of tail tag are so frustrating to so many players. These are platformer players grown up under the expectation that buttons do what you want them to do within a fraction of a button press. If my theory here were true, you'd expect to see minigames that reward competence and precise play as the best or favorite minigames on the survey,

and ones where control feels out of your hands to be at the bottom. And wouldn't you know it, but that's exactly what happened. Here are the five most hated stages in order. Team Tail Tag at number 1 at 14%, Royal Fumble at 9.7%, egg scramble, not far behind at 9.5%, seesaw, Tide at 9.5%, and DoorDash, at 9.3%. Now, immediately you can see that these games are all based on mechanics that can make the player feel helpless. A lack of player agency.

There's a sense in all of these mini-games that you're not really affecting the outcome of the game, and the mini-game isn't set up to properly reward those with the most skill. Team Tail Tag and Royal Fumble we already talked about. Egg Scramble, being a team game mode, has you largely at the mercy of your teammates. Even more so than all the other team games because here there's just so many objects on the field making it a lot harder for a single skilled player to carry the team and take home the win. Seesaws wasn't that far behind either and again, it comes down to the players feeling like they're at the mercy of what the other players are doing. You're not just running your own race, your race is affected by the actions of 59 other people on the field.

How many times do you've been waiting for a seesaw to level out so you can just amble across it, but you're stuck waiting for a bunch of people who've apparently never gotten the memo about how seesaws work. And so they just keep hopping on and diving off to their death, keeping the sees off balance, and making it impossible for you to progress. Ooh, that game is frustrating and it really doesn't have to be if people just understood the basics of physics. DoorDash has a similar problem. Doesn't feel like there's a ton that you as a player can do to affect the outcome of the game. You run at a random door, jump, and hope you pop through it. Out of all the stages, this one feels the most random. There is literally no science to choosing the correct door, you just pick one and hope for the best. Well, chaos and unexpected outcomes are a big part of the fun of all guys. The randomness,

By picked the right door randomly mechanic just isn't the fun kind of chaos. It's the frustrating kind where two people can be in a deadlocked tie for first and the thing that determines who makes it to the finish line is just dumb luck. On the other side of things if you look at the most beloved stage in Fall Guys, one winner is a clear standout Hexagon claiming 16.7% of the votes a huge huge lead considering that none of the other games even managed to break 10% in contrast to the most hated stages Hexagon feels like the stage where you are most in control of your destiny. You're on a massive map of hexagons that disappear as you run across or hop across them with multiple layers below you. It's a game that feels like there's way more strategy and freedom in how you play. Do you try to drop down early and set up traps for other players? Do you stay on the upper levels for as long as possible and try to outlast the rest? Do you try to sabotage other players or just run your own race?

In fact, out of all of the games, it's probably the one that has the most room for strategy. Further supporting my theory is the fact that the more competitive a player lists themselves, the more likely they were to say hexagon was their favorite. Based on your self-reported competitiveness score from 1 to 5, here's how much each of the five tiers rated hexagon as their most favorite. 13.2%, 15.3%, 15.5%, 17.6, and 18.3. In short, the more competitive you are, the more likely you are to say that hexagon is the best. Though I should also call out that for non-competitive players, hexagon was still the clear favorite.

But here's the big twist, my friends. Let's look back at the rest of those top five stages. We already talked about hexagon at number one. Worley gig is number two at 9.8% of the votes, DoorDash at 9.7, and Slime Climb at 9.4. That's right, I double check just to be sure. While DoorDash was among the most hated stages, it was also among the most favorite stages.

That shouldn't be the case based on my competence theory, right? Well, here's where breaking down the data really matters. Because I ran one final data cross. Favorite stages against your skill. Are you among the first to get out? Low average, average, above average, your top tier. And wouldn't you know it, the less skilled you rated yourself, the more likely you were to list DoorDash as your favorite.

This suggests that the very reason DoorDash is in the bottom for so many players is the exact reason it's in the top for another massive group of players. Think about it. If you're confident in your skills, you want to minimize randomness. But for players who feel less confident in their abilities, randomness makes it more likely that they might run hot for one or two more rounds and somehow come out on top. It allows them to progress further in the game. And in the end, I think that this might be a big part of what made Fall Guys such a wildly popular game. It doesn't cater exclusively

to casual or hardcore gamers. There's something in here for everyone. It has just enough randomness and chaos to give you the feeling that anyone could win or get eliminated, while giving players enough control and having enough skilled platforming challenges to make players feel like their skill is being rewarded, most of the time. It's a tricky balance to walk, but Fall Guys seems to have nailed it. Well, it might be easy for some players to say, well, Fall Guys would be a better game if they remove DoorDash for a significant number of other players that's their favorite part of the game. Weirdly, the things that you personally hate most about Fall Guys might actually be the thing contributing to its success. But in the end, our

survey definitively showed that no one, no matter how skilled or how not skilled you are, no matter your personality type, age, or gaming experience, no one feels good when they have to be carried by their team, hence the hatred for the team-based mini-games. And no one likes to lose due to bad mechanics. Hence all the problems with the tail tag mini-games. Hopefully Mediotonic takes this lesson to heart in the future content updates Because the future of Fall Guys will be dependent on the support that it receives. Well, 28% of you reported that you don't expect the game to hold your interest enough to still be playing it three months from now

And 27% of you reported that you plan to keep playing it no matter what the vast vast majority 45% said that the question of whether you see yourself playing Fall Guys three months from now comes down to whether there'll be new content to keep the experience fresh. Fortunately, there's good news on the horizon. Season 2 was just teased, bringing more new games to the mix. And if they managed to find ways to keep things from getting stale, without finding new ways to get your tail stolen, it seems like the majority of players might just be sticking around. Might I also suggest some hidden lore?

Murdered children, perhaps? Everyone loves that. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.