(Excellent post, strongly agree at the object-level)
It’s worth considering why poker is so popular relative to a game like Figgie — I’d claim is significantly helped by the downsides you outline in obfuscating the quality of decisions and increasing the emotional stakes.
For a betting game to be successful, you need an ecosystem which includes lots of bad players, who ideally don’t realize they’re bad. So having your mistakes laid bare is prohibitive. And some emotional journey is fun, both for playing and watching other play.
Is there some way of making games like Figgie also have some of these properties? (preferably something more connected to the actual game than “winning a game of Figgie gives you get a 60⁄40 chance to win $x”...)
Oh, I agree. Sort-of-relatedly, I asked a few poker pros at Manifest why we conventionally play 8-handed when we play socially, and my favorite answer was “because playing heads-up doesn’t give you enough time to relax and chat”. (My second-favorite, which is probably more explanatory, was “it’s more economical for in-person casinos, and everyone else apes that.”) And if you talk to home-game pros, they will absolutely have thoughts about how to win money on average while keeping their benefactors from knowing that they’re reliably losing. The format of the game we play is shaped by social-emotional-economic factors other than pedagogy, but which are real incentives all the same.
Is there some way of making games like Figgie also have some of these properties?
I mean, Figgie itself is not purely skill-testing; you can always blame the cards, or other blame A for feeding B and losing but also causing you to lose, or any number of other things.
If you wanted to make it fuzzier on purpose, I think you could do the thing that often gets proposed for dealing it at home, which is to deal 40 cards out of a 52-card deck and call the goal suit the opposite of the longest suit (which might not be 12), with some way to break ties. I think it’s a worse pedagogical game for being less clear—not unrelated to the fact that it will make it harder to figure out why you’re winning or losing. And my guess is that the skill ceiling is higher, also not-unrelatedly.
(Excellent post, strongly agree at the object-level)
It’s worth considering why poker is so popular relative to a game like Figgie — I’d claim is significantly helped by the downsides you outline in obfuscating the quality of decisions and increasing the emotional stakes.
For a betting game to be successful, you need an ecosystem which includes lots of bad players, who ideally don’t realize they’re bad. So having your mistakes laid bare is prohibitive. And some emotional journey is fun, both for playing and watching other play.
Is there some way of making games like Figgie also have some of these properties? (preferably something more connected to the actual game than “winning a game of Figgie gives you get a 60⁄40 chance to win $x”...)
Oh, I agree. Sort-of-relatedly, I asked a few poker pros at Manifest why we conventionally play 8-handed when we play socially, and my favorite answer was “because playing heads-up doesn’t give you enough time to relax and chat”. (My second-favorite, which is probably more explanatory, was “it’s more economical for in-person casinos, and everyone else apes that.”) And if you talk to home-game pros, they will absolutely have thoughts about how to win money on average while keeping their benefactors from knowing that they’re reliably losing. The format of the game we play is shaped by social-emotional-economic factors other than pedagogy, but which are real incentives all the same.
I mean, Figgie itself is not purely skill-testing; you can always blame the cards, or other blame A for feeding B and losing but also causing you to lose, or any number of other things.
If you wanted to make it fuzzier on purpose, I think you could do the thing that often gets proposed for dealing it at home, which is to deal 40 cards out of a 52-card deck and call the goal suit the opposite of the longest suit (which might not be 12), with some way to break ties. I think it’s a worse pedagogical game for being less clear—not unrelated to the fact that it will make it harder to figure out why you’re winning or losing. And my guess is that the skill ceiling is higher, also not-unrelatedly.