Meaningful Button Mashing

When we were kids, my brother and I would steal my parents’ calculator to play a simple game: entering 1 + 1, we would then repeatedly press the = button, incrementing the counter by 1 with every press. The objective was to reach 100 in the shortest time possible, with the (non-digital) clock ticking – leading to many rounds of wild button mashing (and a dubiously timed leaderboard). What does this primitive game, invented by two boys below the age of 10, have to do with modern game design? Quite a bit, if you go by the state of current console games. Button-hammering gameplay is ubiquitous in today’s titles, usually in the form of “press X quickly to perform some act of strength”.

It would be easy to react cynically to this historical parallel, to the effect of “oh boy, look how far we’ve come as an industry!” If a couple of pre-teens could come up with the mechanic in the 80s, shouldn’t today’s multi-million dollar games do better? But, if framed correctly, there’s meaningful gameplay in these button mashing minigames. That is true for three reasons:

Investment
Button mashing sequences are often connected to high-stakes, high-reward situations, with the player very interested in the result. In God of War, the player mashes a button to kill off various enemies (often by ripping them apart.) In Dead Space, the player mashes A to escape from grappling Necromorphs. Both situations are high impact; in the first the enemy gets back up and continues to attach the player if he fails, in the latter the attacking enemy quickly drains the player’s health which, if not shaken off, results in his eventual death. The player is heavily invested in the outcome of each situation, and this investment adds meaning to the mechanically simple action.

Approximation
Most avatar actions are mapped to controllers in a necessarily arbitrary and optimized fashion. To make the avatar run, the player isn’t required to engage in a similarly taxing activity; instead, he simply pushes the stick forward. But button mashing, when mapped to acts of physical strength as in the games above, is a good player approximation of the avatar’s physical exertion. For the player, it’s an intense burst of physical interaction with the controller that, much like the avatar’s action, requires physical commitment as well as a change in posture – buttons cannot be pressed quickly enough with the thumb, so the player usually shifts his hand to use the index finger. In this context, button mashing gains meaning by modeling the game action on the controller, bridging the gap between player and avatar.

Evaluation
One element of engaging gameplay is the player’s constant (re)assessment of his interactions with the game. This evaluation also happens during button mashing. Because the sequences are limited to a short duration (allowing the player to mentally time these sequences), and because the stakes are so high, the player is intensely focused on the action. Is my mashing affecting something? Am I pressing quickly enough? Can I let up a tiny bit because my fingers are starting to hurt? Is it over yet? Or did I stop too soon? This constant evaluation deeply involves the player, adding additional meaning to the sequence.

Different designers might present more (or different) reasons, but this list seems comprehensive to me. In 2008, Kent Hudson presented a GDC lecture on minigames, measuring several titles, from Oblivion to Splinter Cell, by five criteria: Ease of Understanding, Ease of Use, Immersion, Rewarding of Player Skill and Meaningful Consequences. Kent’s lecture focused on lock-picking minigames, and we might argue that, compared to the examples he used, button mashing lacks a sufficiently broad set of rules and possible player actions to even qualify as a minigame. But if we do measure the Dead Space and God of War examples by Kent’s criteria, the button mashing sequences evaluate surprisingly well:

• Ease of Understanding – High (Pressing a single button in rapid succession, as made very clear by the HUD.)
• Ease of Use – Medium High (Hammering a simple button is a very accessible mechanic, if straining to some.)
• Immersion – High (Player and avatar are locked in the same physical battle, the player is heavily invested in the outcome.)
• Rewarding of Player Skill – Low (This is where the extremely simple mechanic of the minigame reveals itself.)
• Meaningful Consequences – High (The outcome of the sequence has immediate, fundamental effects on the game at large.)

As we can see, even a game that little kids played on their calculator 25 years ago is still a valid design element today, as long as we understand the player psychology behind it. The lessons to take away from this are two-fold:

The context of button-mashing gameplay greatly matters. Only use this mechanic for situations that model the avatar’s physical actions to the controller, and that have an outcome in which the player is heavily invested in. Mapping button mashing to trivial avatar actions of small consequence quickly exposes the mechanic’s shortcomings.
We also see that button mashing sequences need to be limited to a short, predictable number of presses; not only by necessity (the inherent physical strain), but because the restriction provides a clearly defined window that allows the player to anticipate the end of the sequence and evaluate his speed/performance (which builds investment). Sequences of variable duration eliminate the player’s ability to internalize the gameplay action, and anticipate future sequences accordingly.