In which I begin a two part talk about healing in games and the problems that designers face when they try to implement lifegain.

Here’s an abstract strategy question: would you rather have an ability that healed yourself or damaged your opponents, given some random game that has health or a lifebar of some kind? For the sake of argument let’s say that these abilities are mirrors of one another, the healer heals just as hard as the hurter hurts.

You might think that because they’re mirrors, it doesn’t matter which you pick. The interesting thing is that this isn’t true, and that most of the time a damage ability is more powerful than an equivalent healing ability. This is what I want to talk about today.

Why is lifegain generally less powerful than life loss?

To understand why this is the case, you need to look at how games with health bars are won. You don’t win these games by having a lot of health. You win these games by making the other guy have no health. Healing does not win games, it merely buys time and delays a loss. The important thing to understand is that having 1 unit of health left when they hit 0 is just as much a victory as having 100 units.

For example, imagine a character who can do nothing but heal. They have no win condition. If the other guy can do 11 damage a turn (or second or whatever) and you can heal 10, then you’ve made the game 10x longer but you haven’t changed the ending. If the other guy does 9 damage per turn to your 10 healing then you’ve prevented the game from ever ending, but you still haven’t won it.

The second issue that stacks up against life gain is that healing is conditional. It only works when there is damage to heal. If your opponent’s strategy doesn’t revolve around hurting you (think Ring-Outs in Soul Calibur, Stasis Lock decks in Magic: the Gathering or anything that revolves around an alternate victory condition in any game) then any benefit of a healing ability is utterly canceled out.

Even if the other guy wants to win with damage, healing is still conditional. When you have 100% health, healing is useless. On the other hand, 10 points of damage is useful from the moment you say go. Taken some damage? Healing may still not be efficient. If you heal 10 points per use of your power and you have only taken 1-9 points of damage, then you are burning off 9-1 points of ability. The reverse isn’t true with damage. If the other player has 1-9 points of life left and you do your 10 points, you didn’t use all your power, but it doesn’t matter because you just won the contest.

By and large, you’d rather permanently remove the source of damage than temporarily reduce the damage being taken and our hurting power can do that while our healing power can’t.

When game designers balance conditional abilities, a good strategy is to just increase the power of the ability to compensate. The problem with healing is that it falls afoul of the first problem, in that it’s not a path to victory. A lifegain ability strong enough to balance out damage’s many advantages results in longer and longer games. No good! Games need to end and no one wants to create (or play) a game that grinds on forever.

All that being said, there is a place for life gain and healing in games. I’ll be discussing this next week.

Update: Here’s part 2