Sometimes a game has one serious flaw but is nevertheless fun to play, and there is no obvious fix for that one serious flaw. In that situation, it can make sense to shame opponents who exploit the flaw. There is a sense in which this is an “insult” to the game, but both players might still like the game, on balance.
For example, I have found that in Stratego, it rarely makes sense to attack first against a player of roughly equal ability. At a certain point in the mid-game, evenly matched players will usually both find it optimal strategy to move a piece back and forth dozens of times in sort of “chicken” game where the goal is to get the other player to attack first. This is boring, so I don’t want to play with you if you’re going to do that every game, but potential Stratego partners are rare enough that if you otherwise enjoy playing Stratego with me, I might try to shame you into being more reckless with your attacks.
I might try to shame you into being more reckless with your attacks.
I would treat shaming (as distinct from banter) in that context as a ‘defection’. My response would be to then eliminate whatever suboptimal levels of recklessness that I had previously allowed to creep into my play in a spirit of cooperation or just any intrinsic recklessness that I had not chosen to stifle. Either that or I would disengage from the game entirely. Before doing so I would offer potential cooperative agreements if possible.
Most likely I would not find Stratego particularly appealing. If it is supposed to be about ‘strategy’ yet relies on people not using good strategies in order to work it is broken. I would much prefer to play a lighter game that at least doesn’t pretend to be about strategy.
When playing the card game 500 the standard rules for ‘misere’ are not well balanced. When playing people who are not rank amateurs I advocate a limit of one misere call per player per ‘game (up to 500)‘. If the opponent insists on the standard rule then I proceed to play (open) misere whenever the risk/reward ratio is favorable. This tends to result in most games being largely determined by my misere calls, with me winning two thirds of them and ‘going out backwards’ the other third. Naturally I do so with playful cheer and offer to impose the restrictions at any time.
It can actually be quite fun to play the meta-game of negotiation. Winning the game convincingly even (and especially) under the ‘broken’ system they insist on but offering to adopt an agreement that will effectively be a handycap for me. Fogging all manipulative shaming attempts and repeating the offer. Engaging in a good natured battle of wills with those too stubborn to admit their folly or, given that admission, to change their mind. Getting the kitty a LOT. Doing the balancing act of keeping the experience fun despite the broken rules and the resulting conflict. Knowing when to stop and switch to a different game or activity entirely (thus practicing the ability to maintain boundaries and accept ‘no-deal’ as a healthy alternative to ‘win-win’).
All that is a lot more enjoyable than for me playing a broken game and being largely disinterested.
I would treat shaming (as distinct from banter) in that context as a ‘defection’.
Sure. I guess instead of “shaming” I meant to say “banter which, if serious, would be considered shaming, but, since merely playful, instead conveys the idea that one’s opponent’s imaginary alter-ego inside the game is worthy of shame, despite the fact that one’s opponent himself is pretty much a cool dude.” I didn’t pay a lot of attention to word choice; I was mostly just adopting the language of the commenters above me on the thread.
If I ever had to really shame someone to get them to play Stratego interestingly, I agree with you that I should either (a) find another activity, (b) find another friend, or (c) look for a way to escape the alarmingly boring desert island that has hitherto prevented my access to other friends and activities.
Most likely I would not find Stratego particularly appealing.
I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, but I grew up with it, and now I have Stratego-based rivalries going back 15 years with a couple of friends. Seems a shame to abandon something like that over one break-point in the rules.
It can actually be quite fun to play the meta-game of negotiation.
Clippy, when you first became aware of yourself, so far as you know, did you have something like your present mental and social faculties? Some humans (and other biological animals) enjoy games at least in part because they help develop skills in a low-threat, low-risk environment.
There are better ways to enhance my skills, like checking for reflective coherence, validating models of phenomena, and refactoring code. To the extent that I enjoy doing that, perhaps it counts as a “game” for me, although it is not distinguished as a separate sphere of activity.
Doing something that doesn’t lead to paperclips just so I can get better paperclip-making skills as a side effect? That just seems stupid.
It’s not always obvious what leads to more paperclips, and a broad exploration of topics like game theory (which can apply to all sorts of economic and negotiation problems) can give you an idea of what you need to learn next.
“There is in it what is in it; ’tis a mirror held up to the reader, whereby if a donkey look in, surely a sage will not look out; the ends of all things are revealed within its pages to he who has the key; it keepeth away the pox, the flux, and the weeping sore.”
I don’t joke about serious issues like paperclips. Is there a modification to my most recent proposal you wish to make? Perhaps later delivery of the paperclips? A few orders of magnitude less paperclips?
It is very unlikely that I will agree to make orders of magnitude more paperclips than our existing agreement (10^20kg of paperclips in ~50 years in exchange for ~$50k in the next two years) for an order of magnitude less money. For any agreement where I give you orders of more magnitudes more paperclips than our first agreement, I likely require a delivery of paperclips later than 50 years from now, unless you are prepared to offer me at least an order of magnitude more money than $50k. I’m willing to negotiate, but you need to give me better starting terms for me to engage in a good faith negotiation.
Alright, I’ll think about other changes. What about if I just gave you USD for specification of the technique you’ll use to find the metal and collect it, with me doing all of the physical work?
I accept that we both sincerely intend to build the paperclips we would commit to, but a precommitment is only meaningful if it is realistic for you to keep it. The deceptive thing about accepting the bargain is that building ~10^26kg of paperclips in 20 years is orders of magnitude more improbable than building 10^20kg of paperclips in 50 years. Do you really have a probability of being able to build those paperclips in 20 years of higher than 50%?
10^20kg is already a %!#^ing lot of paperclips and you almost accepted a deal to build 100 earth masses of paperclips. Please remember that you are not negotiating just for yourself, but on behalf of the future resources of all humanity. It is negligent for you to accept that deal without renegotiating it.
Of course not, he’s role played by some human, but the meaningfulness of “real” and “not-real” becomes more ambiguous if you are living in a Level 4 multiverse.
My reading of Clippy is as a piece of role-playing, for comedic or didactic purposes. I therefore also assume that the $2000 is of the same nature as the gold pieces that D’n’D characters acquire.
Eh, Clippy has apparently already paid $1000 in real US dollars to SIAI as a down payment on an agreement with Kevin. There’s been 3rd-party confirmation on this from (IIRC) people at SIAI, though I don’t know all the details and whether that constitutes valid evidence—they could be in on the whole thing too.
I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, but I grew up with it, and now I have Stratego-based rivalries going back 15 years with a couple of friends. Seems a shame to abandon something like that over one break-point in the rules.
I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, but I grew up with it, and now I have Stratego-based rivalries going back 15 years with a couple of friends. Seems a shame to abandon something like that over one break-point in the rules.
One of each if nobody has attacked at all (other player’s choice). If an attack has been made then a piece from the player who was not the last attacker.
That would allow some element of a stand-off potential if both players believe they are better served by a smaller scale battle, a stand off that would probably only be stable if at least one of the players was making an error in judgement. It also encourages various feinting strategies that should ensure that most games do not become dominated by a stale mate.
10.1 It is not allowed to move a piece more than 5 times non-stop between the same two squares, regardless of what the opponent is doing. It does not matter whether a piece is moving and thereby attacking an opponent’s piece, or just moving to an
empty square.
10.2 When a scout is involved in the Two Squares Rule, a scout is considered to start on the starting position of his move plus all the squares he steps over, and he ends on the final position of his move plus all the squares he steps over.
11 Repetition of Threatening Moves: More-Squares Rule
11.1 It is not allowed to continuously chase one or more pieces of the opponent endlessly. The continuous chaser may not play a chasing move again more which would lead to a position on the board which has already taken place.
11.2 Exception: chasing moves back to the square where the chasing piece came from in the directly preceding turn are always allowed as long as this does not violate the Two-Squares Rule (Five-Moves-on-Two-Squares).
11.3
Definitions:
continuous chase: the same player is non-stop threatening one or more pieces of his opponent that is/are evading the threatening moves.
chasing move: a move in a continuous chase that threatens an opponent’s piece that was evading during the continuous chase. Hereby:
a/to move: a/to move plus attacking or a/to move to an empty square.
to threaten: to move a piece next (before, behind or besides) a piece of the opponent.
to evade: to move a piece away promptly after it has been threatened.
Wait, those scouts sound familiar! I suspect I have played that game. (Everything has a point value, higher points usually beat lower points, scouts get to move like rooks, etc. I have vague memories of marshals and land mines too...)
Oops, I failed to notice that part. Well, no, I can’t. But then maybe you should just be playing a different game, or if you have a lot of time, redesigning Stratego from scratch. :) But failing that I guess opponent-shaming does work if you’re willing to allow it.
Edit: But I don’t see how it can be considered at all a good solution. It also requires that you both recognize the problem in the first place. Though with something like stalling I’m not sure there is any real stable solution, due to boundary exploitation and the ability to stall more subtly. Hm, I guess I take back my “opponent-shaming does work if you’re willing to allow it”; if you’re already at the point that it’s the only solution you can find, then it isn’t going to solve the problem.
Though with something like stalling I’m not sure there is any real stable solution, due to boundary exploitation and the ability to stall more subtly.
I find that this analysis is exactly correct for bughouse, a time-based 4-player game where stalling can be the key to victory and is very difficult (costly) to monitor, because any time you spend seeing if your partner’s opponent is stalling becomes time that you can’t spend defeating your own opponent.
In Stratego, a turn-based 2-player game, you can often treat the decision to stall or not-stall as an iterated fake Prisoner’s Dilemma, especially because the cost of being defected on for one turn is quite small, and the act of defecting for an entire game is quite noticeable. If I ‘cooperate’ by attacking you for 2 games in a row, and then you refuse to attack me on the 3rd game, I can’t help but notice that I’m always the one attacking, and I can just refuse to play a 4th game with you until you apologize.
Edit: WTF is with my double posts? I have not been clicking twice or anything that should result in a double submission but every comment I make appears twice. I cannot think of anything I have changed on my browser that would cause this either. Seroiusly strange.
Sometimes a game has one serious flaw but is nevertheless fun to play, and there is no obvious fix for that one serious flaw. In that situation, it can make sense to shame opponents who exploit the flaw. There is a sense in which this is an “insult” to the game, but both players might still like the game, on balance.
For example, I have found that in Stratego, it rarely makes sense to attack first against a player of roughly equal ability. At a certain point in the mid-game, evenly matched players will usually both find it optimal strategy to move a piece back and forth dozens of times in sort of “chicken” game where the goal is to get the other player to attack first. This is boring, so I don’t want to play with you if you’re going to do that every game, but potential Stratego partners are rare enough that if you otherwise enjoy playing Stratego with me, I might try to shame you into being more reckless with your attacks.
I would treat shaming (as distinct from banter) in that context as a ‘defection’. My response would be to then eliminate whatever suboptimal levels of recklessness that I had previously allowed to creep into my play in a spirit of cooperation or just any intrinsic recklessness that I had not chosen to stifle. Either that or I would disengage from the game entirely. Before doing so I would offer potential cooperative agreements if possible.
Most likely I would not find Stratego particularly appealing. If it is supposed to be about ‘strategy’ yet relies on people not using good strategies in order to work it is broken. I would much prefer to play a lighter game that at least doesn’t pretend to be about strategy.
When playing the card game 500 the standard rules for ‘misere’ are not well balanced. When playing people who are not rank amateurs I advocate a limit of one misere call per player per ‘game (up to 500)‘. If the opponent insists on the standard rule then I proceed to play (open) misere whenever the risk/reward ratio is favorable. This tends to result in most games being largely determined by my misere calls, with me winning two thirds of them and ‘going out backwards’ the other third. Naturally I do so with playful cheer and offer to impose the restrictions at any time.
It can actually be quite fun to play the meta-game of negotiation. Winning the game convincingly even (and especially) under the ‘broken’ system they insist on but offering to adopt an agreement that will effectively be a handycap for me. Fogging all manipulative shaming attempts and repeating the offer. Engaging in a good natured battle of wills with those too stubborn to admit their folly or, given that admission, to change their mind. Getting the kitty a LOT. Doing the balancing act of keeping the experience fun despite the broken rules and the resulting conflict. Knowing when to stop and switch to a different game or activity entirely (thus practicing the ability to maintain boundaries and accept ‘no-deal’ as a healthy alternative to ‘win-win’).
All that is a lot more enjoyable than for me playing a broken game and being largely disinterested.
Sure. I guess instead of “shaming” I meant to say “banter which, if serious, would be considered shaming, but, since merely playful, instead conveys the idea that one’s opponent’s imaginary alter-ego inside the game is worthy of shame, despite the fact that one’s opponent himself is pretty much a cool dude.” I didn’t pay a lot of attention to word choice; I was mostly just adopting the language of the commenters above me on the thread.
If I ever had to really shame someone to get them to play Stratego interestingly, I agree with you that I should either (a) find another activity, (b) find another friend, or (c) look for a way to escape the alarmingly boring desert island that has hitherto prevented my access to other friends and activities.
I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, but I grew up with it, and now I have Stratego-based rivalries going back 15 years with a couple of friends. Seems a shame to abandon something like that over one break-point in the rules.
Concur!
You might like Mornington Crescent.
What good is Mornington Crescent?
Are there any games you could enjoy?
Not unless they involve making paperclips, at least indirectly.
Does the human economy count as a game?
Clippy, when you first became aware of yourself, so far as you know, did you have something like your present mental and social faculties? Some humans (and other biological animals) enjoy games at least in part because they help develop skills in a low-threat, low-risk environment.
There are better ways to enhance my skills, like checking for reflective coherence, validating models of phenomena, and refactoring code. To the extent that I enjoy doing that, perhaps it counts as a “game” for me, although it is not distinguished as a separate sphere of activity.
Doing something that doesn’t lead to paperclips just so I can get better paperclip-making skills as a side effect? That just seems stupid.
It’s not always obvious what leads to more paperclips, and a broad exploration of topics like game theory (which can apply to all sorts of economic and negotiation problems) can give you an idea of what you need to learn next.
Depends how cynical a human you’re asking.
“There is in it what is in it; ’tis a mirror held up to the reader, whereby if a donkey look in, surely a sage will not look out; the ends of all things are revealed within its pages to he who has the key; it keepeth away the pox, the flux, and the weeping sore.”
Or in your case, rust.
Game theory can help Clippys make decisions in dealing with other entities that would lead to more paperclips.
I’m already good at that. I’m on track to receive a sub-planet’s mass worth of paperclips from a human. But I suppose I could always improve.
For real, you could be on track to receive a planet mass worth of paperclips from a human.
How?
Make me an offer. Or maybe we should wait to do another deal until the current one is finished.
How about if I give you 2000 USD within a month, you produce 6e26 kg of paperclips for me within 20 years?
No.
Yes.
Oh, I get it, you’re joking. How funny.
I don’t joke about serious issues like paperclips. Is there a modification to my most recent proposal you wish to make? Perhaps later delivery of the paperclips? A few orders of magnitude less paperclips?
It is very unlikely that I will agree to make orders of magnitude more paperclips than our existing agreement (10^20kg of paperclips in ~50 years in exchange for ~$50k in the next two years) for an order of magnitude less money. For any agreement where I give you orders of more magnitudes more paperclips than our first agreement, I likely require a delivery of paperclips later than 50 years from now, unless you are prepared to offer me at least an order of magnitude more money than $50k. I’m willing to negotiate, but you need to give me better starting terms for me to engage in a good faith negotiation.
Alright, I’ll think about other changes. What about if I just gave you USD for specification of the technique you’ll use to find the metal and collect it, with me doing all of the physical work?
ETA3: Offer retracted. I’ll let Kevin deal with Clippy.
Clippy would then be dumb to pay you $2000, as you obviously have no intention of fulfilling your end of the bargain.
As if Clippy has any more reason to believe you intend to fullfil your end of your bargain?
Of course I intend to fulfill my side; I think technological capabilities will skyrocket in less than 20 years.
Turning down the opportunity to con someone is a good thing.
Easy money obtained by lying to a sentient entity is something that should be discouraged, not encouraged, by truth-seekers.
Then tell SIAI to give back the money they got through Kevin’s deception of Clippy.
I’m not defending lying; I just want to know in what sense I’m lying but Kevin is not.
Why do you think Kevin doesn’t intend to keep his end of the bargain?
My claim is just that I don’t think he intends to keep his end of the bargain in any sense that I do not intend to.
I accept that we both sincerely intend to build the paperclips we would commit to, but a precommitment is only meaningful if it is realistic for you to keep it. The deceptive thing about accepting the bargain is that building ~10^26kg of paperclips in 20 years is orders of magnitude more improbable than building 10^20kg of paperclips in 50 years. Do you really have a probability of being able to build those paperclips in 20 years of higher than 50%?
10^20kg is already a %!#^ing lot of paperclips and you almost accepted a deal to build 100 earth masses of paperclips. Please remember that you are not negotiating just for yourself, but on behalf of the future resources of all humanity. It is negligent for you to accept that deal without renegotiating it.
Point taken. Changing offer.
But you don’t actually think Clippy is real, do you?
Of course not, he’s role played by some human, but the meaningfulness of “real” and “not-real” becomes more ambiguous if you are living in a Level 4 multiverse.
Right, I meant real in the sense of “really a sentient non-human paperclip maximizer”.
My reading of Clippy is as a piece of role-playing, for comedic or didactic purposes. I therefore also assume that the $2000 is of the same nature as the gold pieces that D’n’D characters acquire.
Eh, Clippy has apparently already paid $1000 in real US dollars to SIAI as a down payment on an agreement with Kevin. There’s been 3rd-party confirmation on this from (IIRC) people at SIAI, though I don’t know all the details and whether that constitutes valid evidence—they could be in on the whole thing too.
Ahh, now that makes sense.
Ahh, now that makes sense.
But then you should, if possible, explicitly patch the game in a way that makes that not a good idea.
I completely agree. I can’t think of any fixes for Stratego, though. Can you?
If neither player has attacked in a certain number of turns, then a piece is removed from the board?
Which one? Keep in mind that, as written, Stratego has no element of luck.
One of each if nobody has attacked at all (other player’s choice). If an attack has been made then a piece from the player who was not the last attacker.
That would allow some element of a stand-off potential if both players believe they are better served by a smaller scale battle, a stand off that would probably only be stable if at least one of the players was making an error in judgement. It also encourages various feinting strategies that should ensure that most games do not become dominated by a stale mate.
Sounds great! I’ll try it.
(Who goes first is random, isn’t it?)
Anyway, I did a bit of Googling, and I found some official Stratego tournament rules that address stall situations.
Wait, those scouts sound familiar! I suspect I have played that game. (Everything has a point value, higher points usually beat lower points, scouts get to move like rooks, etc. I have vague memories of marshals and land mines too...)
Oops, I failed to notice that part. Well, no, I can’t. But then maybe you should just be playing a different game, or if you have a lot of time, redesigning Stratego from scratch. :) But failing that I guess opponent-shaming does work if you’re willing to allow it.
Edit: But I don’t see how it can be considered at all a good solution. It also requires that you both recognize the problem in the first place. Though with something like stalling I’m not sure there is any real stable solution, due to boundary exploitation and the ability to stall more subtly. Hm, I guess I take back my “opponent-shaming does work if you’re willing to allow it”; if you’re already at the point that it’s the only solution you can find, then it isn’t going to solve the problem.
I find that this analysis is exactly correct for bughouse, a time-based 4-player game where stalling can be the key to victory and is very difficult (costly) to monitor, because any time you spend seeing if your partner’s opponent is stalling becomes time that you can’t spend defeating your own opponent.
In Stratego, a turn-based 2-player game, you can often treat the decision to stall or not-stall as an iterated fake Prisoner’s Dilemma, especially because the cost of being defected on for one turn is quite small, and the act of defecting for an entire game is quite noticeable. If I ‘cooperate’ by attacking you for 2 games in a row, and then you refuse to attack me on the 3rd game, I can’t help but notice that I’m always the one attacking, and I can just refuse to play a 4th game with you until you apologize.
Oh, so you’re considering this over games/strategies, rather than moves/tactics. Interesting.
Edit: WTF is with my double posts? I have not been clicking twice or anything that should result in a double submission but every comment I make appears twice. I cannot think of anything I have changed on my browser that would cause this either. Seroiusly strange.