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Weird, I was having just this discussion this evening. I think that the downtime problem is a serious one for many games. Simultaneous actions should be default game design. Settlers/monopoly 'get something nice on an opponent's turn' is a good way of offsetting the problem, as is barring players from making whole strings of decisions on their turn. The MtG route of heavy interactivity and the possibility of reacting on an opponent's turn probably can't be supported by most games. The exception might be in longer (2hrs+) multiplayer games, where I find several minutes of downtime can be welcome. Ninja edit: I really should have said 'default BOARDGAME design' as I wasn't thinking about wargames etc. Ebethron fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Nov 22, 2012 |
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Nov 22, 2012 01:18
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jmzero posted:Garfield does call this kind of complexity beyond players' ability to predict "luck"; in general his use of "luck" (which has very much leaked into how I think about these things) is pretty much "unpredictability". But he doesn't give a terribly satisfying way of extracting "luck" and "skill" elements from something cleanly measurable like play results. It seems like an awkward problem. How about this: the more skill-based a game is, the better the win-record of two players will predict who will win in a game between them. I agree that there can be luck in games without random elements. In game theory, when there multiple equally valid options the rational thing to do is to randomise one's choices - e.g. when playing scissors, paper, stone. But I think when playing against other people this kind of luck is sometimes mitigated by the fact that players don't make their decisions entirely randomly, meaning that other players can try to guess or intuit the opponent's choice rather than make a random choice themselves. I think that depth could potentially be defined as the size of the decision-tree of a game and the complexity of the simplest algorithm that produces the optimal strategy. For example, people on BGG have criticised Dominion for providing only an illusion of depth because a robotic 'Big Money' strategy can easily win games (i.e. decision-tree is large, but navigating the decision-tree is in fact very simple). Defenders hit back that although this strategy wiped the floor with new players, it was a long way from being the dominant strategy.
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Nov 22, 2012 11:13
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xopods posted:First off, let me say that finding mutually agreed-upon definitions for certain terms was something I was hoping we could do in this thread, and part of the reason I left room for a glossary in the second post. Just wanted to say that this was a very very interesting post that made a lot of good points. One thing I would like to add is a suggestion for a definition of 'space' as opposed to 'depth'. Donald X Vaccarino described Dominion as a game with a high degree of 'space' because the optimal lines of play change based on the initial selection of action cards, of which there are many. Dominion with different action cards, he suggested, effectively makes it a different game. This is clearly true from a game theory perspective. In a presentation I watched, Richard Garfield talked about a version of chess in which the starting positions of pieces for each player are random and symmetrical. The space of that game is greater than conventional chess because it is effectively many chess variants embedded in a single game. Shallow games can reward skill and provide an interesting learning curve if they have a high degree of space. Players have to learn strategies to deal with the many possible alternative game set-ups. Lots of popular recent board-games have a high degree of space. Maybe it's because lots of gamers like the initial process of discovering basic strategies more than honing and optimising those strategies. Mark Rosewater argues that the process of discovery, renewed with the release of each set, is one of the reasons why MtG is so popular (the endless Dominion expansions support this sort of argument too). MtG is also a game with a lot of space if we consider the whole constructed metagame, as match-ups between different decks are effectively different games. Players get bored and frustrated when the space narrows because the format has been 'solved' and a single best deck has been discovered(i.e. a shallow metagame results in reduced space across a sequence of games in a given tournament).
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Nov 23, 2012 12:12
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