A gameplay mechanic: the Dodgeball Effect

With the map I am creating I have been thinking a lot about gameplay dynamics, or gameflow if I may coin a term. The following is a karukef-style ramble on something I just thought of. I hope people can tell me what they think of this idea and perhaps reveal ways to implement it, or ways it is already used.

As you should know, it is very easy to design a game with a Snowball effect, especially when the game involves resources and experience. Snowballing isn't entirely bad but if it is too prominent, especially at the start of a game, the game can definitely suck and will experience a high abortion rate (leavers). A while back I developed a personal theory, which I still agree with, that a good goal in game design is to compensate for player mistakes early-game but over time "flatten out" and eventually reverse the effect so that players are penalized for mistakes and a full-out snowball effect takes place so the game can get over with. To give a very litteral example, imagine a sumo wrestling match where the wrestlers start off in a concave bowl-shaped arena. At the beginning it will be very easy for the wrestlers to correct themselves and stay in the game. The wrestlers will probably tend to bide their time, test their opponent and try to make them tire themselves out while expending less energy themselves. Then, as the match continues the edges of the bowl begin to lower, using some clever hydraulics or something. By the time the ring is flat the wrestlers will be fully going at it and if they still are in the ring when the edges have dropped lower than the center things will be quite desperate and the slightest mistake will end it for one of them. This gameflow method ensures games with a decent minimum and maximum play time. Incase you were wondering that isn't the Dodgeball Effect, I don't have a name for it, I think I just had to get that out of my system.

Now, the feature presentation. Recently, on the map I have been designing, I got the idea for some reason that I wanted there to be a lot of back and forth action on the map. I don't know, I just like it when one side is winning and then all of a sudden the tides turn and the other side starts pushing them back but then - oh, what's happening...they are making a comeback! If the gameplay just looks like one sumo wrestler slowly, inexorably pushing another out of the ring, especially because of some minute mistake early on, I find it boring. Like a novel with a predictable plot. So I was trying to just make my map more offensive and less defensive, I figured that should make things exciting. DotA has a simple but effective mechanic of starting off both teams with strong defenses and it is sort of a race to see who can wear the other one out first. But with my map (it is like Onslaught in Unreal) defenses can be rebuilt which can cause a game to go on indefinitely. Thus the need for teams to be able to push all the way to the enemies base to drain their "generator" but then have it swing the other way and have the other teams generator under attack.

So today I was deep in thought and somehow I came up with this analogy to dodgeball. I guess it is a method for handling resources in a game. Think of the game of dodgeball (the variety with two opposing sides throwing balls back and forth). You both start out on equal terms, but in order to win the game you must expend resources (your balls) in the hope of hitting an opponent. Now here is the kicker, when you expend your resources, they don't just go away, you give them to the other team! So what it comes down to is who can use the shared resources the most effectively. In a game of dodgeball things never get too crazy, but I think that by mixing this effect into more complex games, you could make for some interesting gameflow. Risk works similarily in that you try save up your resources (armies) for explosive offensive maneuvres, but if you get carried away, spread yourself too thin and can't finish what you started your enemies will come back at you with a vengeance.

I don't know if I will actually implement a system like that into my map, I don't want to make it too much more complicated. But if I did, maybe as a special mode, it would somehow work so that there is some resource that helps or is necessary for taking over nodes, but when you use it, it goes to the other team. And there would probably be alternate ways to get more of that resource so that things would get crazier and crazier until one side has the critical mass necessary to finish the game. Maybe when you expend 1 of the resource the other team would actually get 1.2 of it.

Anyway, that is my ramble. I hope you don't feel like you have wasted your time if you read all of that. Feel free to tell me how beautiful or crazy or useless my idea is. But please try to exhibit some intelligence in your responses.

I guess nobody sees the use of this idea.

Well it occured to me that on a map where you have auto-spawning creeps streaming out from each base, such as DotA, and such as my map, the creeps are rather like dodgeballs. Pushing is like throwing the ball and eventually they get to the "other side", run into towers and ever increasing opposing creeps and then the enemy tends to push back. So to that end I will try to promote pushing behaviour on my map.