Bogged Down with Stuff

Words: 2167 Approximate Reading Time: 15-20 minutes

I recently found myself reflecting on the number of items I have by the end of a game. I have a bit of a hoarder’s tendency, to fall back on that idea of “what if I need it later.” Which is certainly not to say that these items never get used, but that it is rare.

And this is not something unique to your run-of-the-mill role-playing games. It’s not that I’m finding items in a dungeon that I hang on to until the end of the game. In Elden Ring I barely made use of the item crafting system. In Ghost of Tsushima I practically never made use of smoke bombs – a device to allow you to distract enemies to either flee or get a free stealth kill. In Sekiro I hardly bothered with the prosthetic tools – a series of special secondary weapons that have all sorts of beneficial effects. Never bothered with potions and boosting items in Pokemon games.

And while I can’t say that this behavior is necessarily “normal” – it’s hard to know for sure what percentage of players make use of items to the fullest extent they can – it’s not necessarily abnormal, either. There are many players for whom item usage is almost alien. Sometimes they may hate the idea of these items – maybe they think those items cheapen the process. Sometimes they don’t use the items because they don’t see a point to the item. Sometimes they just forget the items even exist.

I wanted to take a bit of time to try and explore how item usage might be designed around these players. Insofar as items exist, they are technically optional. And yet, they are also a mechanic that is added into the game. In some way, the game could even be designed around them, even to a minor extent. You might not need them to be victorious, but you may not be meant to ignore them, either.

But that dichotomy – things being either necessary or optional – obscures a whole realm of gameplay. The value of these items is that they can open up all sorts of engaging options. When items are ignored, the player is often left with a single hammer, and every problem must be a nail. That can lead to frustration when the problem will not be pounded neatly into submission, but it can also flatten the experience in a way. Every problem has the same solution, so you don’t need to think, you just need to implement the solution better.

Uniqueness

The first inevitable question about an item is going to be its function. Does the item serve a purpose? To which the answer is pretty much always going to be “yes.” Of course the item has a purpose. It does damage, or it heals, or it removes a status effect, or it draws out enemies.

Talking about an item through the lens of purpose hides the major problem. The reason that items are often ignored is not that the player thinks the items have no purpose. Rather, that purpose is one that can be accomplished through another means.

As an example, you have a weapon. You can press a button to swing the weapon. By swinging the weapon enough times and hitting an enemy, you kill them.

Now instead, you have an item. By using the item you now need one less swing to kill the enemy.

This item has a purpose – it strengthens your blows. But in doing so its effect will likely be trivial. After all, you need to press a button to use the item, so it really hasn’t saved you any time or effort.

This example is simple, but it can explain a good deal. If an item will slowly heal you, what’s the use of that if you just learn to avoid getting hit, or use something else that heals all of that damage at once? If an item removes a status effect, but the effect will wear off on its own anyway, why not just wait it out and save the item? If an item can allow you to quickly kill an enemy, what’s the point if you can just hit them with your sword?

To be useful, an item needs to feel like it is unique. Not merely that it serves a function, but that that function is something that you cannot easily accomplish through other means. In a way, you almost want the item to feel necessary. Even when it is not literally required, it should fill a niche so well that depriving the player of that item would seem as though the player was left without a core gameplay mechanic. If the player can bypass the use of the item easily through something already available to them, then the item feels useless. Whether the item can be useful is not the question. It’s whether the player is able to recognize that usefulness in the moment.

Supply

When we talk about item usage, the obvious point of reference is hoarding. The “what if I need it later” question. But even if that question is not what’s lurking in our minds, hoarding can still occur.

The supply of an item is going to determine its usage. An item that is common and useful is going to get used pretty frequently. An item that is rare and useful is going to be hoarded. An item that is common but useless probably won’t ever see the light of day, and even less so if it’s rare and useless.

Of course, commonality relates to a few factors. Can you buy it from a shop? Can you make it? How expensive is it in terms of either in-game money or time to make the thing? How many can you hold at a time?

When an item can be used and then easily replaced, there is a greater incentive for the player to use that item. They know they don’t need to be concerned with saving it, because they can easily get more. And if they have multiple instances of the item at the same time, they don’t need to ask that “what if I need it later” question each minute.

As an example, in Bloodborne there are a handful of special blood vials (healing items) in the game that you can get from particular NPCs. You can technically get an unlimited number during certain portions of the game, but you can only carry one at a time. These items serve as an extra heal that technically boosts your maximum number of blood vials…but with the caveat that you need to constantly run back to the NPC to replenish that vial each time. Which adds an extra set of steps to go back and get a new one. Which is why so many players acquire these blood vials and then never ever use them. It is an item meant to help players, and yet so many do not get helped.

This is why thinking about items in terms of whether they are limited or unlimited is not helpful. A theoretically limitless supply can still be constrained just as a limited supply can. Instead the question is how that supply impacts the player’s thinking about whether using an item is worth it – both in the sense of whether the item will pose value in the moment, and whether that item might be more valuable later. The long-term and short-term calculations that impact that decision are going to be driven largely by what the supply of those items feels like.

Training

The last factor I want to explore is how the game pushes the player to use these items. Quite often games treat items as a given. You pick stuff up, and it is your choice as a player whether you want to use that stuff or not.

But this approach leaves players with a poor impression about what those items do. So many games nowadays try to stuff interesting bits of storytelling into their item descriptions, and yet the player is rarely asked to look at these things. So many games may try to use items to provide clues about what to do, but what use are those clues if the player is never directed to pay attention? So many games include items to give players a variety of tools for solving problems, but then players can feel that they just need to stick to the basics for everything.

And part of this disconnect is that games rarely encourage players in more direct ways to experiment and play with the items provided. Some players will certainly do so of their own accord. But a good number of players effectively forget the items exist. Maybe they were already cognitively strained when they picked the item up. Maybe they made a mental note to look at the item later, then forgot. Maybe they just didn’t bother learning how the item existed at all.

Whatever the case, games have a lot of potential in pushing players to experiment. One of the things I talked about earlier was how useful an item is, but sometimes an item that’s useful needs to demonstrate that usefulness. The approach most games have is to introduce an item and tell a player what it does, in the hopes that the player will say “oh, that sounds good.” But this description is lacking. Firstly, because sometimes that text description – or even quick video – just can’t compete with the player feeling how the mechanic works. Secondly, because that description could have any number of issues that lead the player to forget about the mechanic entirely.

That kind of teaching is important especially when items are going to have special effects that require experimentation.

As an example, in Sekiro one of the prosthetic tools you can get is a spear. It does a bit of damage, but its primary utility is for pulling armor off of certain enemies.

About 20% of the way through the game you can get access to this spear, and depending on the pathways you walk down you will be introduced to an enemy that is meant to clue you in to the spear’s usage. It’s not a great tutorial – the guys who mention the ill-fitting armor the enemy is wearing carry the key to get to the spear, which is located somewhere else. And then the enemy is fairly easy to kill using stealth, so you have no real point to pull off the guy’s armor anyway. You’re more likely to never know how the spear works and thus never use it.

But the spear is incredibly useful at two points in the game. First, during a major boss fight about 40-60% of the way through the game which is in no way telegraphed as something you could do with the spear, and second during a miniboss fight which is very much built for the spear’s explicit function. Yet because the game has not taught you A) how to experiment with the prosthetic for the uncommon uses, and B) has not properly taught you how to use the prosthetic for its normal uses, many players on their first go are likely to struggle with things that they don’t need to.

In short, if you want players to use the items in your games, give them plenty of opportunities to use them, give them those opportunities quickly so that they are encouraged to do so, and make sure that you get them used to trying those items out on all sorts of occasions.

Concluding Remarks

I find myself coming back to this question about item usage in games because there is this strange gap. So often you can see players who just never touch these mechanics, which may make up a significant portion of the gameplay’s design. And yet you can also see high-level players making extensive use of these same items, perhaps in ways that new players would never have thought of.

How often have you finished a game, and then watched someone else play or read the Wiki only to learn that some item you thought was useless was actually incredibly powerful? How often have you learned that an item actually had some cool use that you would never have guessed?

While there will always be a gap between new and experienced players, sometimes that gap feels contrived. Some portion of that gap can feel like it’s a problem of design, where the new player has been handicapped both by their inexperience and the game’s own systems. And it seems very often that that gap can fall down to certain mechanics which are easily written-off by new players in favor of more simplistic solutions. Yet if players were encouraged and pushed in these more complicated directions, they might embrace these kinds of strategies naturally, rather than needing to be shown or told about their value.

And that can all be as simple as getting players to use their items more often.