But losing can be upsetting, and can cause emotions to take the place of logical thinking. Below are some common “losing attitudes.” If you find yourself saying these things, consider it a red flag.
“At least I have my Code of Honor,” a.k.a. “You are cheap!”
This is by far the most common call of the scrub, and I’ve already described it in detail. The loser usually takes the imagined moral high ground by sticking to his Code of Honor, a made-up set of personal rules that tells him which moves he can and cannot do. Of course, the rules of the game itself dictate which moves a player can and cannot make, so the Code of Honor is superfluous and counterproductive toward winning. This can also take the form of the loser complaining that you have broken his Code of Honor. He will almost always assume the entire world agrees on his Code and that only the most vile social outcasts would ever break his rules. It can be difficult to even reason with the kind of religious fervor some players have toward their Code. This type of player is trying desperately to remain a “winner” any way possible. If you catch him amidst a sea of losses, you’ll notice that his Code will undergo strange contortions so that he may still define himself, somehow, as a “winner.”
I played a defender in high school school football. In football the defender can not touch or physically interfere the receiver of a pass from the time the pass is thrown until they catch the ball, to do so is a moderate penalty for the defenders team and considered bad sportsmanship at the amateur levels. As a adolescent that identified with Lawful Good, it came naturally to see Interference as against the rules, and not to be done.
It was an enlightening moment when a mentor explained that the penalties are not there to discourage and exclude types of behavior from the game. When they explained that penalties are part of the game with clearly defined rules, just another mechanical system to be gamed. That the penalty is not a punishment for bad behavior, but the price payed to implement certain tactics.
Yes and no. Sometimes certain things are against the rules because they risk injuring someone. I wish more sports would make explicit the difference between the rules you’re allowed to break and pay the penalty and the rules you should never intentionally break, because disagreements over which category a particular rule falls into can be very vicious.
Do you have any case studies of the line being explicitly drawn in that sand, and working to deter harmful behavior, even at the playing to win level? I know the NHL (National Hockey League, North America) has been working on this problem with player fines, game suspensions, and occasion criminal charges.
Now sports are just a easy to relate to example where the mechanics of system can fail to represent the intent of the system when it comes to discouraging harmful tactics. This problem is near universal.
The Extra Credits Political Series deals with this root problem under the light of the American political system. A good watch if you are at all interested in how behavior is shaped by the reward mechanics in a system.
No case studies, I’d be interested to hear of any. At university I was part of a society for a competitive game with an evolving ruleset, and making that distinction explicit was one of the things we experimented with.
I don’t think the only point of many games is winning. If you play Go and want it to be an enjoyable experience it makes sense to stick to the general of code of conduct for Go.
Competitive games like Go are most enjoyable when people all agree on the same rules, when losing grants you no excuses to salvage pride at the cost of the victor. For this to work, the rules must be unambigious. You either broke them and are a cheater and the match is invalid, or you exploited them and won fairly. Subjective codes of honor are extremely ambigious. My competitive game of choice (though I rarely play it these days) is Warcraft III, and the online community associated with it is rife with these kind of “codes of honor” (mostly in the mid levels of the skill hierarchy, or “ladder”; the low skill people are trying to learn, the high skill people got that way because they don’t self-handicap, but the mid skill people want to imagine themselves as high skill people but with honor). I have seen several of these codes of honor. I once followed one. Examples are: “No mortar/sorceress, no mass chimera, no hero worker harass, no air worker harass no tower rushes, no tower/tank, no mass batriders, no mass raiders”. There is never a clear line between honorable and dishonorable behavior. How many mortars and sorceresses do you have to have before it’s mortar/sorceress? etc.
A game where you win by inching closer to “dishonorable” behavior is no fun. In addition, Warcraft III players will note that the majority of prohibited strategies are mainstays of the orc and human races. The game is already patched by Blizzard to make the races balanced in professional play, and professionals do not self-handicap. So taking them out of the game would strengthen night-elf and undead players.
And I can attest that beating a “scrub” with a strategy they deem dishonorable and hearing them protest is extremely fun. I can also attest that being a scrub and running into players who don’t abide by your “code of honor” is not fun at all. I have even been a scrub and ran into other scrubs who had different “codes of honor”, such that we were each violating each others, and that is sort of fun for the victor (if they are hypocritical enough to think that their code is the “correct” one, while laughing at the other one for their code’s arbitrariness) and very unfun for the loser.
Besides enjoyment, there is another goal of gaming that you get by playing to win, which is self-improvement. If you allow yourself to think that you lost because you are good and honorable, then you will think about your choices during the game and your thought processes and ask “what can I improve?”. And there are transferable Slytherin skills to learn from gaming, such as deceit, modeling your opponent’s mind, and searching with (as Quirrell would say) “censors off” for ways to win. Scrubs don’t only hurt their own development, but if there are enough of them, they hurt the development of their opponents. You can’t really test “Is this a good stratregy” against a scrub, because often it will be a bad strategy but it’s against their code so they won’t have learned the counter to it, and it will work on them. There are players who do nothing but play anti-scrub strategies to exploit this, but they are also missing out on most of the depth of the game because that’s not how you beat high-level players.
Competitive games like Go are most enjoyable when people all agree on the same rules, when losing grants you no excuses to salvage pride at the cost of the victor. For this to work, the rules must be unambigious. You either broke them and are a cheater and the match is invalid, or you exploited them and won fairly.
Go works quite well with rules that aren’t unambiguous. Especially the Japanese Go rules have their quirks.
As far as Warcraft III goes, I played the game ages ago, in a clan the year before Frozen Throne came out.
Back in the day you could hide building in the woods to drag on a game an additional 10 minutes against a lot of opponents with the hope that the opponent leaves the game out of boredom.
On the other hand I have no problem with the idea of tower rushes.
You can’t really test “Is this a good stratregy” against a scrub, because often it will be a bad strategy but it’s against their code so they won’t have learned the counter to it, and it will work on them.
I you are a good player in Warcraft you can win with any strategy against bad players.
mostly in the mid levels of the skill hierarchy, or “ladder”; the low skill people are trying to learn, the high skill people got that way because they don’t self-handicap, but the mid skill people want to imagine themselves as high skill people but with honor
I don’t think that you become good at Warcraft by practicing tower/tank to perfection.
An example in chess could be the enforcement of the touch-move rule in a “friendly” game not played under tournament conditions. Personally, I would tend to see someone who insisted on applying this rule in a friendly game when the opponent makes a mistaken touch as a bit of a jerk who cares too much about winning. I am sure this varies across different people and different chess circles though.
I agree. As usual, the key question is what are you trying to accomplish. To win? To socialize? To have an interesting game? If you are playing a friendly game, and an interesting position develops, and then your opponent makes a huge and immediately obvious blunder, there’s something to be said for letting him retract his move. There’s something unaesthetic about an interesting game—hard fought and well played on both sides—which is won because of a stupid move.
I suppose Sirlin’s response would be to suggest you have a clear idea in your head at the beginning of what you are trying to accomplish; and to try to avoid from changing that objective after the fact in order to save face.
One could observe that in most competitions, there are a lot of objectives besides just winning the competition. For example a runner up on America’s Top Model who nevertheless lands a modeling contract due to her exposure on the show.
I suppose Sirlin’s response would be to suggest you have a clear idea in your head at the beginning of what you are trying to accomplish; and to try to avoid from changing that objective after the fact in order to save face.
No Sirlin, is very much advocating that games should be about winning. It’s one of his key ideas on the philosophy of game design.
His games might bring more joy at family events. I like games which are designed to be fun when everyone is trying to win, not just when the winners are also having to subtlely contort their decisions to avoid ruining anyone’s fun. I’m not familiar with Sirlin’s games, but I do recall reading a similar point in reviews of the “German-style” games which have revitalized board gaming: since these games’ mechanics try to make them enjoyable to lose, not just to win, it’s easier for people to both try to have fun with other players and try to win without one goal compromising the other.
Ironically enough Sirlin’s games are virtually impossible to play to win (or to lose). He’s a big believer in having all your options being of equal value, so the “game” is in figuring out what your opponent will do and playing the appropriate counter to that. But the result is that playing randomly is just as good as playing strategically.
No. There are good and bad players at, say, Kongai. Whether I would win or lose depended very strongly on how focused I was and how well my team was organized.
It’s the difference between Rock-Paper-Scissors as usually played and RPS if you get 4 points for winning with scissors, 2 for winning with rock, and 1 for winning with paper.
Does to me. But I was never a fan of the two-player fighting games that Sirlin seems to hold in such high regard; I can imagine that people who like those (and there are many such people) might like Sirlin’s games.
His games might bring more joy at family events. I like games which are designed to be fun when everyone is trying to win, not just when the winners are also having to subtlely contort their decisions to avoid ruining anyone’s fun. I’m not familiar with Sirlin’s games, but I do recall reading a similar point in reviews of the “German-style” games which have revitalized board gaming: since these games’ mechanics try to make them enjoyable to lose, not just to win, it’s easier for people to both try to have fun with other players and try to win without one goal compromising the other.
Could you describe such a game to me? I’m intrigued.
Grossly overgeneralizing here, the difference between a “German-style game” or “Eurogame” and what is affectionately known as “Ameritrash” among boardgame enthusiasts (though there are games in both categories designed in both the US and Europe) is that Eurogames tend to be games involving strategic optimization to earn points, whereas Ameritrash tends to emphasis direct conflict between players. Though it’s more of a spectrum than a dichotomy.
The big three light (as in easy-to-learn) Eurogames that really went mainstream are Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride. Of those three, only SoC really offers the possibility to be a dick to another player, and even there not to the degree you would see in direct-conflict games.
Note, among other things, that it is rare to have a runaway leader in these games, and in the cases of Carcassone and TTR, it’s almost impossible to tell for sure who is winning until the game is over. That tends to keep everyone engaged and enjoying themselves.
If you want examples of heavier, pure Eurogames, take a look at something like Puerto Rico, Argricola, or Power Grid.
Some TTR maps are more cutthroat, but the basic TTR and TTR: Europe are sufficiently forgiving in terms of alternate routes that you can’t really say someone is being a dick by cutting you off. Whereas, say, “trade X for Y, followed by play Monopoly X” in SoC is genuinely obnoxious though perfectly legal.
I am reminded of the game “Yahtzee” which has no direct conflict between players; you just try to maximize your score and whoever scores highest wins. I agree that a game like this has less potential for cutthroat play than other games.
But still, one can imagine Sirlin playing Yahtzee with a child at a family event and the child (who is way behind in points) makes a poor decision about which dice to re-roll. Would Sirlin let the child take back his choice?
I think it’s to avoid a situation where a player does a move, sees how his opponent reacts, realizes his mistake and retracts his move—leading to argument, or players having to control their reactions until they’re really really sure their opponent finished his move, etc. Chess is supposed to be about strategy, not about bickering about whether a move was really confirmed and trying to guess which move is good by watching your opponent’s face.
Also, it’s to force new players to think quietly, which is good for them anyway in the long run.
I don’t know about its history, but I imagine that the point is to discourage grabbing a piece and hovering it over where you are thinking of moving it to visualize better the new situation that would arise. Doing this seems to violate the spirit of the game if you think an important part of it is to be able to look ahead and calculate in your mind’s eye. Plus it could be annoying/distracting for the opponent.
This guy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Lasker) was a chess generalist (able to play most position types comfortably), and chess world champion for 27 years. He succeeded by playing moves his opponents found most uncomfortable (murky tactics vs positional players, ‘boring positional plays’ vs flashy tactical players).
There is some disagreement today on whether Lasker was really about psychology or merely ahead of his time. My opinion is he did use psychology, but he also had very good positional sense which most of his contemporaries did not share (lots of Lasker’s supposedly dubious plays are established modern lines). So he did play in questionable ways but not as questionable as might have seemed back in the day.
My favorite players are Capablanca, and Karpov (I don’t like Lasker’s style much, but the dude was amazing. His style most resembles machine play out of all players I know).
David Sirlin on self-handicapping in competitive games
I played a defender in high school school football. In football the defender can not touch or physically interfere the receiver of a pass from the time the pass is thrown until they catch the ball, to do so is a moderate penalty for the defenders team and considered bad sportsmanship at the amateur levels. As a adolescent that identified with Lawful Good, it came naturally to see Interference as against the rules, and not to be done.
It was an enlightening moment when a mentor explained that the penalties are not there to discourage and exclude types of behavior from the game. When they explained that penalties are part of the game with clearly defined rules, just another mechanical system to be gamed. That the penalty is not a punishment for bad behavior, but the price payed to implement certain tactics.
Yes and no. Sometimes certain things are against the rules because they risk injuring someone. I wish more sports would make explicit the difference between the rules you’re allowed to break and pay the penalty and the rules you should never intentionally break, because disagreements over which category a particular rule falls into can be very vicious.
Do you have any case studies of the line being explicitly drawn in that sand, and working to deter harmful behavior, even at the playing to win level? I know the NHL (National Hockey League, North America) has been working on this problem with player fines, game suspensions, and occasion criminal charges.
Now sports are just a easy to relate to example where the mechanics of system can fail to represent the intent of the system when it comes to discouraging harmful tactics. This problem is near universal.
The Extra Credits Political Series deals with this root problem under the light of the American political system. A good watch if you are at all interested in how behavior is shaped by the reward mechanics in a system.
No case studies, I’d be interested to hear of any. At university I was part of a society for a competitive game with an evolving ruleset, and making that distinction explicit was one of the things we experimented with.
I don’t think the only point of many games is winning. If you play Go and want it to be an enjoyable experience it makes sense to stick to the general of code of conduct for Go.
Competitive games like Go are most enjoyable when people all agree on the same rules, when losing grants you no excuses to salvage pride at the cost of the victor. For this to work, the rules must be unambigious. You either broke them and are a cheater and the match is invalid, or you exploited them and won fairly. Subjective codes of honor are extremely ambigious. My competitive game of choice (though I rarely play it these days) is Warcraft III, and the online community associated with it is rife with these kind of “codes of honor” (mostly in the mid levels of the skill hierarchy, or “ladder”; the low skill people are trying to learn, the high skill people got that way because they don’t self-handicap, but the mid skill people want to imagine themselves as high skill people but with honor). I have seen several of these codes of honor. I once followed one. Examples are: “No mortar/sorceress, no mass chimera, no hero worker harass, no air worker harass no tower rushes, no tower/tank, no mass batriders, no mass raiders”. There is never a clear line between honorable and dishonorable behavior. How many mortars and sorceresses do you have to have before it’s mortar/sorceress? etc.
A game where you win by inching closer to “dishonorable” behavior is no fun. In addition, Warcraft III players will note that the majority of prohibited strategies are mainstays of the orc and human races. The game is already patched by Blizzard to make the races balanced in professional play, and professionals do not self-handicap. So taking them out of the game would strengthen night-elf and undead players.
And I can attest that beating a “scrub” with a strategy they deem dishonorable and hearing them protest is extremely fun. I can also attest that being a scrub and running into players who don’t abide by your “code of honor” is not fun at all. I have even been a scrub and ran into other scrubs who had different “codes of honor”, such that we were each violating each others, and that is sort of fun for the victor (if they are hypocritical enough to think that their code is the “correct” one, while laughing at the other one for their code’s arbitrariness) and very unfun for the loser.
Besides enjoyment, there is another goal of gaming that you get by playing to win, which is self-improvement. If you allow yourself to think that you lost because you are good and honorable, then you will think about your choices during the game and your thought processes and ask “what can I improve?”. And there are transferable Slytherin skills to learn from gaming, such as deceit, modeling your opponent’s mind, and searching with (as Quirrell would say) “censors off” for ways to win. Scrubs don’t only hurt their own development, but if there are enough of them, they hurt the development of their opponents. You can’t really test “Is this a good stratregy” against a scrub, because often it will be a bad strategy but it’s against their code so they won’t have learned the counter to it, and it will work on them. There are players who do nothing but play anti-scrub strategies to exploit this, but they are also missing out on most of the depth of the game because that’s not how you beat high-level players.
But for a related point, see this.
Go works quite well with rules that aren’t unambiguous. Especially the Japanese Go rules have their quirks.
As far as Warcraft III goes, I played the game ages ago, in a clan the year before Frozen Throne came out.
Back in the day you could hide building in the woods to drag on a game an additional 10 minutes against a lot of opponents with the hope that the opponent leaves the game out of boredom.
On the other hand I have no problem with the idea of tower rushes.
I you are a good player in Warcraft you can win with any strategy against bad players.
I don’t think that you become good at Warcraft by practicing tower/tank to perfection.
Can you give an example of the type of code you’re thinking about?
An example in chess could be the enforcement of the touch-move rule in a “friendly” game not played under tournament conditions. Personally, I would tend to see someone who insisted on applying this rule in a friendly game when the opponent makes a mistaken touch as a bit of a jerk who cares too much about winning. I am sure this varies across different people and different chess circles though.
I agree. As usual, the key question is what are you trying to accomplish. To win? To socialize? To have an interesting game? If you are playing a friendly game, and an interesting position develops, and then your opponent makes a huge and immediately obvious blunder, there’s something to be said for letting him retract his move. There’s something unaesthetic about an interesting game—hard fought and well played on both sides—which is won because of a stupid move.
I suppose Sirlin’s response would be to suggest you have a clear idea in your head at the beginning of what you are trying to accomplish; and to try to avoid from changing that objective after the fact in order to save face.
One could observe that in most competitions, there are a lot of objectives besides just winning the competition. For example a runner up on America’s Top Model who nevertheless lands a modeling contract due to her exposure on the show.
No Sirlin, is very much advocating that games should be about winning. It’s one of his key ideas on the philosophy of game design.
Lol, he must be a real joy at family events.
His games might bring more joy at family events. I like games which are designed to be fun when everyone is trying to win, not just when the winners are also having to subtlely contort their decisions to avoid ruining anyone’s fun. I’m not familiar with Sirlin’s games, but I do recall reading a similar point in reviews of the “German-style” games which have revitalized board gaming: since these games’ mechanics try to make them enjoyable to lose, not just to win, it’s easier for people to both try to have fun with other players and try to win without one goal compromising the other.
Ironically enough Sirlin’s games are virtually impossible to play to win (or to lose). He’s a big believer in having all your options being of equal value, so the “game” is in figuring out what your opponent will do and playing the appropriate counter to that. But the result is that playing randomly is just as good as playing strategically.
No. There are good and bad players at, say, Kongai. Whether I would win or lose depended very strongly on how focused I was and how well my team was organized.
It’s the difference between Rock-Paper-Scissors as usually played and RPS if you get 4 points for winning with scissors, 2 for winning with rock, and 1 for winning with paper.
Those are totally different games.
Doesn’t that make the game uninteresting?
Does to me. But I was never a fan of the two-player fighting games that Sirlin seems to hold in such high regard; I can imagine that people who like those (and there are many such people) might like Sirlin’s games.
Could you describe such a game to me? I’m intrigued.
Grossly overgeneralizing here, the difference between a “German-style game” or “Eurogame” and what is affectionately known as “Ameritrash” among boardgame enthusiasts (though there are games in both categories designed in both the US and Europe) is that Eurogames tend to be games involving strategic optimization to earn points, whereas Ameritrash tends to emphasis direct conflict between players. Though it’s more of a spectrum than a dichotomy.
The big three light (as in easy-to-learn) Eurogames that really went mainstream are Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride. Of those three, only SoC really offers the possibility to be a dick to another player, and even there not to the degree you would see in direct-conflict games.
Note, among other things, that it is rare to have a runaway leader in these games, and in the cases of Carcassone and TTR, it’s almost impossible to tell for sure who is winning until the game is over. That tends to keep everyone engaged and enjoying themselves.
If you want examples of heavier, pure Eurogames, take a look at something like Puerto Rico, Argricola, or Power Grid.
Watch Settters of Catan being played
Watch Carcassonne being played
Watch Ticket to Ride being played
Pfft. The only interesting way to play Ticket to Ride is to strategically block the other players’ routes.
Some TTR maps are more cutthroat, but the basic TTR and TTR: Europe are sufficiently forgiving in terms of alternate routes that you can’t really say someone is being a dick by cutting you off. Whereas, say, “trade X for Y, followed by play Monopoly X” in SoC is genuinely obnoxious though perfectly legal.
I am reminded of the game “Yahtzee” which has no direct conflict between players; you just try to maximize your score and whoever scores highest wins. I agree that a game like this has less potential for cutthroat play than other games.
But still, one can imagine Sirlin playing Yahtzee with a child at a family event and the child (who is way behind in points) makes a poor decision about which dice to re-roll. Would Sirlin let the child take back his choice?
What is the point of this rule? I never understood it.
I think it’s to avoid a situation where a player does a move, sees how his opponent reacts, realizes his mistake and retracts his move—leading to argument, or players having to control their reactions until they’re really really sure their opponent finished his move, etc. Chess is supposed to be about strategy, not about bickering about whether a move was really confirmed and trying to guess which move is good by watching your opponent’s face.
Also, it’s to force new players to think quietly, which is good for them anyway in the long run.
I don’t know about its history, but I imagine that the point is to discourage grabbing a piece and hovering it over where you are thinking of moving it to visualize better the new situation that would arise. Doing this seems to violate the spirit of the game if you think an important part of it is to be able to look ahead and calculate in your mind’s eye. Plus it could be annoying/distracting for the opponent.
That makes sense. Even so, it seems a little excessive.
Playing mirror Go is often considered dishonorable. In practice it’s not a major problem because it’s a suboptimal strategy.
In general plays where you know thaty they that only work when the opponent makes a mistake are considered dishonorable in go.
This guy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Lasker) was a chess generalist (able to play most position types comfortably), and chess world champion for 27 years. He succeeded by playing moves his opponents found most uncomfortable (murky tactics vs positional players, ‘boring positional plays’ vs flashy tactical players).
There is some disagreement today on whether Lasker was really about psychology or merely ahead of his time. My opinion is he did use psychology, but he also had very good positional sense which most of his contemporaries did not share (lots of Lasker’s supposedly dubious plays are established modern lines). So he did play in questionable ways but not as questionable as might have seemed back in the day.
My favorite players are Capablanca, and Karpov (I don’t like Lasker’s style much, but the dude was amazing. His style most resembles machine play out of all players I know).