Okay, I’m not opposed to the project of inventing fun games with no one winner—I mean, I enjoy Dungeons & Dragons—but I think games with one winner are awesome. I like the discipline imposed by them.
I’m not sure I can put into words what I mean by discipline; it’s related to the nameless virtue. But, for example, sometimes in a computer game I find myself thinking, “wow this game is badly designed; it’d be more fun and realistic if it rewarded a good balance of archers and spearmen and cavalry, but I’m pretty sure the archer unit is so cheap and high ground is so accessible that I can just spam the archer unit and win”. I then have a choice; I can do the thing that seems fun and elegant to me and build a realistic army, or I can spam the archer unit and win. I can either complain, or I can win.
To the extent that I’m stretching a rationalist muscle in games at all—and often I’m not, I’m just having fun, not everything I do needs to be justified as rational and virtuous—I think it’s that muscle: “ignore the temptation to adopt a really cool and fun map, and instead use a map that actually describes the territory”. This requires a certain harshness; I can do stuff that makes me feel good and lose and keep losing until I change my strategy. I can complain, “The designers clearly intended this thing to be a powerful strategy, so it should work!”—and if it isn’t actually the best strategy, I will lose. This teaches me to abandon what “should” be true, and pay attention to what actually is true.
The original designers’ intent very rarely comes across in games without very extensive testing and rebalancing IME. Maybe the game is designed so that you need to do X to win, but the very best competitive players will often create a metagame where everyone ignores X and does Y to win. Preventing this from happening requires so much playtesting, and then if your game gets a big enough audience that there’s a semipro or pro scene, it generally happens anyway. It’s like trying to beat the market; you’re just one game designer, and arrayed against you are the forces of thousands of smart people all trying to win your game. Unless you write “you can’t win without doing X” into the rulebook, or unless your game is very very simple, someone will find a way to win without doing X. (Maybe this isn’t true for board games, but I think it’s pretty true about video games, which are more of my experience. Esports games are constantly patched to tune down the dominance of whatever the latest powerful strat is. Card games also often have the problem of a card needing to be changed because, in combination with some other card, it’s being used in an unexpectedly powerful way. So I think it’s probably applicable to board games that are played competitively.)
I think your project is cool, but I also like games with a winner and a loser; I don’t think you need to explain why they’re bad to explain why your thing is good!
I see. I think when there’s socially oriented fairly ambiguous outcomes it could be much easier for a player group to get lost in a false social reality and miss a lot of the hard lessons of the game. That’s probably true. I think the skill of collectively maintaining contact with base reality under the influence of politics is so obviously important that acknowledging the difficulty of it only makes me more eager to develop these sorts of games. I think Peacewagers absolutely shouldn’t make single-winner outcomes impossible, so I think this effect will often be moderated when wily spot ways of completely stealing themselves a hegemony from under the noses of a hyper-narratized community. Situations where public beliefs will tend to point in one direction, away from noticing that there is this unilateralist monopolization threat laying around, that the most knavish character is very likely to pick up on, seize, and humble everyone with. Ah, I actually think the misaligned AI character, Miracle Machine, would do this. Everyone finds MM useful, no one wants to extinct them. When they’re small, it’s easy to pretend it’s not going to escape containment, but groups who follow individual incentives, overuse MM, lie about it, conspire in their lies to deny the tail risk, will always be humbled in the end :} however many times it takes to learn the lesson.
Hmm. I expect that if peacewagers tend to break under advanced play, players in this mindset will make a version of the game for advanced players and stop playing the variant that they broke. It’s common for a game to have enough depth that advanced players wont want to move on after domming it, they’ll linger, to show off, but if we follow this mindset (growth over all), somehow, we will strive to learn when to move on. I think growthists will tend to be more proactive about exploring the space of possible games. The way to design games for them may be less about finding the fun and more about providing tools for the community to find it and chart it themselves. (tools like level editors, wikis, recommender systems)
Okay, I’m not opposed to the project of inventing fun games with no one winner—I mean, I enjoy Dungeons & Dragons—but I think games with one winner are awesome. I like the discipline imposed by them.
I’m not sure I can put into words what I mean by discipline; it’s related to the nameless virtue. But, for example, sometimes in a computer game I find myself thinking, “wow this game is badly designed; it’d be more fun and realistic if it rewarded a good balance of archers and spearmen and cavalry, but I’m pretty sure the archer unit is so cheap and high ground is so accessible that I can just spam the archer unit and win”. I then have a choice; I can do the thing that seems fun and elegant to me and build a realistic army, or I can spam the archer unit and win. I can either complain, or I can win.
To the extent that I’m stretching a rationalist muscle in games at all—and often I’m not, I’m just having fun, not everything I do needs to be justified as rational and virtuous—I think it’s that muscle: “ignore the temptation to adopt a really cool and fun map, and instead use a map that actually describes the territory”. This requires a certain harshness; I can do stuff that makes me feel good and lose and keep losing until I change my strategy. I can complain, “The designers clearly intended this thing to be a powerful strategy, so it should work!”—and if it isn’t actually the best strategy, I will lose. This teaches me to abandon what “should” be true, and pay attention to what actually is true.
The original designers’ intent very rarely comes across in games without very extensive testing and rebalancing IME. Maybe the game is designed so that you need to do X to win, but the very best competitive players will often create a metagame where everyone ignores X and does Y to win. Preventing this from happening requires so much playtesting, and then if your game gets a big enough audience that there’s a semipro or pro scene, it generally happens anyway. It’s like trying to beat the market; you’re just one game designer, and arrayed against you are the forces of thousands of smart people all trying to win your game. Unless you write “you can’t win without doing X” into the rulebook, or unless your game is very very simple, someone will find a way to win without doing X. (Maybe this isn’t true for board games, but I think it’s pretty true about video games, which are more of my experience. Esports games are constantly patched to tune down the dominance of whatever the latest powerful strat is. Card games also often have the problem of a card needing to be changed because, in combination with some other card, it’s being used in an unexpectedly powerful way. So I think it’s probably applicable to board games that are played competitively.)
I think your project is cool, but I also like games with a winner and a loser; I don’t think you need to explain why they’re bad to explain why your thing is good!
I see. I think when there’s socially oriented fairly ambiguous outcomes it could be much easier for a player group to get lost in a false social reality and miss a lot of the hard lessons of the game. That’s probably true.
I think the skill of collectively maintaining contact with base reality under the influence of politics is so obviously important that acknowledging the difficulty of it only makes me more eager to develop these sorts of games.
I think Peacewagers absolutely shouldn’t make single-winner outcomes impossible, so I think this effect will often be moderated when wily spot ways of completely stealing themselves a hegemony from under the noses of a hyper-narratized community. Situations where public beliefs will tend to point in one direction, away from noticing that there is this unilateralist monopolization threat laying around, that the most knavish character is very likely to pick up on, seize, and humble everyone with. Ah, I actually think the misaligned AI character, Miracle Machine, would do this. Everyone finds MM useful, no one wants to extinct them. When they’re small, it’s easy to pretend it’s not going to escape containment, but groups who follow individual incentives, overuse MM, lie about it, conspire in their lies to deny the tail risk, will always be humbled in the end :} however many times it takes to learn the lesson.
Hmm. I expect that if peacewagers tend to break under advanced play, players in this mindset will make a version of the game for advanced players and stop playing the variant that they broke. It’s common for a game to have enough depth that advanced players wont want to move on after domming it, they’ll linger, to show off, but if we follow this mindset (growth over all), somehow, we will strive to learn when to move on.
I think growthists will tend to be more proactive about exploring the space of possible games. The way to design games for them may be less about finding the fun and more about providing tools for the community to find it and chart it themselves. (tools like level editors, wikis, recommender systems)
Yes, winning if fun!