In multiplayer gaming, whether team-based or free-for-all, there’s a fundamental problem with how most games are played and enjoyed.
Control, Skill, and Enjoyment
Enjoyment in games often comes from control: the feeling that you can predict and influence what happens. When you correctly anticipate what your opponent will do and have the mechanical skill to execute your plan, you succeed, and that success feels good.
Naturally, higher-skilled players enjoy games more because they can control more situations. But on the receiving end, lower-skilled players experience the opposite: frustration and helplessness. They try to act but are consistently shut down by stronger opponents.
This isn’t theoretical. When I first played in the TF2 competitive 6v6 league, our team lost 5–0 every single game. Every goal we set felt unreachable. You can change your goals, like deciding to focus on communication or coordination, but ultimately winning remains the main objective, and being unable to reach it feels bad.
Yet the process of going from “can’t win” to “can win” is also one of the most rewarding parts of gaming. Skill progression is valuable precisely because it restores a sense of control.
The Role of Matchmaking
When games pair players of similar skill levels, matches become balanced and enjoyable. Skilled players must push their limits of prediction and execution to win, while beginners compete in simpler, more forgiving interactions. Additionally when equally skilled players modify their playstyle the enemy player has the chance to adapt back, because improvements made on either side are theoretically possible since they have the same baseline knowledge.
But what happens when low-skill and high-skill players meet?
In most games, the weaker player simply gets destroyed. And while losing can be part of learning, it’s not very productive when you’re completely outmatched. Against an equally skilled opponent, you can observe their behavior, adapt, and slowly develop new counter-strategies. Against someone far better, you can’t even process what’s happening before you’re defeated, making it nearly impossible to learn in real time.
Improvisational Gaming
For me, the most satisfying kind of play isn’t about dominance or repetition, but about improvisation.
Improvisational gaming in multiplayer games is the mindset that enjoyment doesn’t come from predictable outcomes, but from the ability to invent and execute new ideas you've never tried before in response to what’s happening.
A game that supports improvisational play rewards players in two ways:
Locally: when a player successfully does something they personally have never done before.
Globally: when a player invents a new strategy or technique that no one else has done before.
Why Repetition Kills Enjoyment
Under this view, repetition becomes the real enemy. The opposite of improvisation is “cookie-cutter” play doing the same thing over and over because it’s reliable. High-skill players often fall into this trap. Dominating weaker players feels good at first, but it quickly becomes boring because the interaction is obvious: you already know exactly how it will end.
Ironically, that means a beginner who’s experimenting, even while failing, might be having more fun than an expert stuck in a loop of predictable wins.
Designing for Improvisation
When a game doesn’t explicitly reward improvisation, players who naturally think that way can still excel as long as the skill ceiling is high enough. For these players, the in-game reward becomes secondary to their own creative satisfaction.
Take Team Fortress 2 as an example. The "market gardener" technique is when hitting an enemy with a shovel while rocket-jumping before landing, which is an act of deliberate risk. You put yourself in a disadvantaged position on purpose, but if you pull it off, the reward isn’t just the kill. It's the ability to read a situation and purposfully equalize or put yourself at a disadvantage where you should have a loss of control, but then be able to pull it back. Players like this create their own enjoyment by taking boring fights and instead of using the standard highest probability of success strategy, they reject it and purposefully introduce risk and uncertainty just so they can fully express what they're capable of.
At the high level when a player that does this plays against worse players, they’re really just restoring balance. By forcing themselves into harder situations, they equalize the playing field and rediscover that edge of unpredictability and reduce the control they have so that they can feel what it was like to be new to the game again. It’s a self-imposed handicap that recreates the thrill of fighting someone at your own level.
That’s a powerful idea, but imagine if the game itself encouraged this kind of creativity from the start. As of right now I don't know that many gamemodes that actually have this.
While completing the in-game object is fun, improvisational players usually come up with their own meta about what's important in a game, in frag movies lots of times what's important to that specific player comes through (or simply just watching them play live). In quake duels you have to get the most frags to win, in frag movies its about airshots, spawn killing, using the gauntlet and hitting a bunch of rails in a row, all of those things indicate that you probably won, but are only indirectly related to winning, for example you don't win just because you had more gauntlet kills. In TF2 competitive the capture points are the objective, but frag movies aren't about capping points either. In CS getting an ace leads probably leads to winning the round, but if they planted the bomb and it still goes off, does that nullify the ace?
In almost all games what's impressive to most people has nothing to do with the actual in-game objective.
Matchmaking Revisited: Rewarding Creativity
Traditional matchmaking isolates players at different points in their skill journey. A new player stands no chance against an expert but what if they could, under the right conditions?
If a game’s scoring or reward system valued creative play rather than raw effectiveness, new players could actually compete. A player who experiments and tries something new could be rewarded more than a veteran repeating the same moves.
One way to achieve this is by tracking player behavior: the types of weapons used, movement patterns, or tactics. When a player does something they rarely do, they earn more points. New players, having less established habits, would naturally earn more by simply trying things. Experienced players would need to keep innovating to earn at the same rate.
A game mode like this also matches our intuition about what we know. When a pro player is killing people worse then them using standard strategies, that's what a cookie cutter would do, so we're sleeping, but when they do something that we know would be hard for them to do, then we care. It's all about their relative skill compared to the previous behavior.
As long as the skill ceiling supports it, both groups are challenged equally beginners by execution, veterans by invention. The focus shifts from "who’s better" to "who’s more creative right now." or "whose pushing themselves out of their comfort zone"
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So that's it in the current multiplayer climate, not many games in-game system actually match what players deem is skill, it's actually something else entirely. Instead there should be a game where local improvisation, that is doing things you've never done is rewarded, and yields a metric which can allow new and veteran players to play against eachother on an equal playing field. Also the game devleoper listens to the players, and when new global improvisation happens, a technique which hasn't been done before and is not yet rewarded by the game, it's added in, so the skill ceiling progresses higher as players reach the limits of what's possible. Now only if there would be a game to do that ... well that might become a reality one of these days.