The Binding of Isaac and the importance of Power Scarcity


















The Binding of Isaac and the importance of Power Scarcity

The Binding of Isaac from Nicalis, Inc and the mind of Edmund McMillen is a game that I'm sure the vast majority of you have heard of in some way or another. Over the past few weeks I've put in many hours into this title yet failed to understand what really kept me coming back. 

This perplexed me so much that I made up a new term for it: Power Scarcity. In this article I want to guide you through Isaac's brilliant use of this concept and how it leads to near infinite replayability. 


"What the hell is Power Scarcity?" 

To explain, in roguelikes dependent on passive items each run plays along some sort of bell curve. The vast majority of runs are somewhere in the middle of vastly overpowered and underpowered.  

Somewhere around 2/3rds of every run in The Binding of Isaac are average or below, but the importance of the top third is what makes the difference 

It is THIS dichotomy that truly makes Isaac special. By only showing its most powerful game ending items in scarce bursts over long play sessions, you entice the player into continually booting up another run for the chance to see something amazing. And, partially due to how long The Binding of Isaac has been worked on and expanded upon, the sheer amount of crazy situations you can find yourself in is endless. In one run you'll be scraping by on nothing until one room near the end of the run provides you with some crazy combination that sends it to overdrive and other times you'll begin immensely powerful early on and coast to victory. 

These wild situations of Isaac are offset by the amount of insignificant runs that end in failure. You will likely not win every time, and it is these failed runs where you barely do any damage that make the times where you fly through everything so significant. There's a tangible feeling of overcoming challenge when you destroy a boss that utterly decimated you in a prior run. 

The longer you play Isaac the more you appreciate seeing one of those glorious once in a thousand items lying on an item pedestal. It is such a raw release of dopamine that truly encapsulates a sort of primal urge within you. For those one to two seconds where you see that incredible item there after going through immense troubles prior to it, you truly do feel as though the hours of wasted runs of days past were worth it. 

So how does Isaac utilize Power Scarcity differently?

By now I'm sure any fan of roguelikes can name many games with similar examples of Power Scarcity to The Binding of Isaac, so what makes it different? 

In a word: Synergies

Synergies drive my determination to push on even in the bad runs of Isaac. You never know what wild item combination may lie behind the next item door. Through years and years of continuous coding, drawing, conceptualizing, and balancing I can say with the upmost affirmation that practically every item of Isaac's collection of over 700 has unique combined effects with each other. 


Any game can have a chance to give you a strong weapon, but only The Binding of Isaac has the means of showing you the effects of 15 different lower class items synergizing together to create some sort of  multicolored spectacle. 

Conclusion

The Binding of Isaac was such an outlier that I literally made up a term to describe why it has taken up so much of my free time lately. Though it takes an unbelievable amount of work to properly implement, I believe effective use of Power Scarcity can make the difference for any game aspiring to reach the towering heights of The Binding of Isaac. 
 

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