Slashdot Mirror

Many slashdotters are opposed to being scrubs. Most house rules are an attempt to make a game more fun by cutting off higher level play. You don't think it's fair that someone learned more 2 letter words than you, so you made up a way to temporarily prevent him from using them after the game started.

You could have found counters, but you didn't, because you're a scrub.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book...

Sooooo... you were BM and surprised he became BM in response?

I think the fact that I had to use a search engine to discover that this means "bad-mannered" is indicative of how hard it is to discover etiquette, especially for the Asperger demographic (like myself) that's attracted to computers in the first place.

Moreover, the implication that 6 pooling is not a valid strategy is subjective. [...] Try 6 pooling over and over again, btw, you'll quickly discover it takes some flair

In other words, when the cheese beats you, you should move with the cheese in order not to be a scrub.

Well, in my view, gaming's run into the same problem that faces people in general in other fields. Take movies, for an example: the latest X-Men movie was released recently. It's remarkable in that it wasn't a complete pile of shit like some of the other stuff that comes out. What do I mean by this? Well, one reviewer there mentions that it's a movie that doesn't condescend to the viewer; each character is presented as following their own motivations with less blatant kick-the-doggery than other general-audience flicks. The recent Star Trek reboot was a bit along these lines too.

And yet, neither is the audience particularly challenged by the film. Technical elements are filled with pseudoscience and only there as an aside to the main plot, which while ultimately formulaic (as anything must, by definition be once it's done), come back around to affirm things that the audience can relate to: normative interpersonal themes, traditional power structures, comedic relief, and so forth. So it is with games, too: they've found the way to do it. Always some new title following principles guaranteed to bring an audience, letting them come in and round the Skinner wheel a few times before running after the next shiny.

So, we'll get Call of Duty 15, and the big question in people's minds will be the controversy in some scripted scene where the player shoots American citizens. And of course the critical element lurking here is the social one: does it really matter, should it really matter (to myself, for instance) that this will be so? I don't have to play it, afterall, and it would probably serve me better to leave the topic well enough alone. I had some kind of "games ought not to be..." point, but I'm finding it a little distasteful myself.

Instead, here's a different one. Games, at their best (to me) can be the change they create, as a reflection, in the player. This is the whole e-sports subject again, but specifically, actually doing and discovering things in these games that relate to other fields of human knowledge; refining yourself. Finding unintuitive things that will help you competitively in that game, and learning a bit about procedural parts of the human system: reaction time, intuition, clumping together individual actions to create dominant sequences, inferring strategy from the game as it really is and so forth.

Here's an example of a game that's still played, by players who have played for over 10 years. And they play the same maps again and again, by and large.

Games don't have to all be bad. Under the current system of the world, where wealth and power are dominated by the numerically few, who is to say that it is desirable for someone to "do something productive?" Once a good decision gets made, it doesn't need 100 mediocre MBAs batting it around with their penises. A few absolute proven masters will suffice. The trend exerts itself in every area -- with automation, the machine does not require you to wait while $MIN_WAGER talks on his cell phone while ringing up your groceries. Codify the good decisions in the hardware of tomorrow and replace the workers.

So, that leaves a lot of people with jack shit to do. Luckily, games and sport are satisfying. Forge yourself in competition with your newfound free time, proles. Or don't. But these games are fair, and it's the best you can do to not get yourself killed in rebellion against "the Donald" and his ilk.

I've played Halo over the Internet. I've played Counter-Strike over the Internet. I've played Quake 3 over the Internet. All of these are fast-paced action games, and all of them are perfectly playable.

One difference is knockback. In first-person shooters, taking a bullet produces little knockback. Taking a rocket produces far more knockback, but it's also likely to sap all your HP in one hit. Fighting games are also more likely to incorporate flinching, or a short delay after taking damage when you cannot attack. Knockback and flinch hurt the client's ability to dead-reckon the position in future (unreceived) frames, and the delay between when someone applies knockback or flinch to you and when your screen updates to take the knockback or flinch into account can produce a disconcerting jump-cut, as a position close to the opponent is changed to falling and an attack on the other player is changed from landed to not landed. Knockback and flinch occur more often in a fighting game than in a first-person shooter. So to keep these jump-cuts from dominating a fast-paced fight where both players are doing combos on each other, fighting games just delay the input instead of doing prediction.

Is Smash Bros actually faster than these other games, somehow? Or did Nintendo manage to screw up multiplayer?

If Nintendo screwed it up, Capcom screwed it up the same way. Google finds reports of people noticing lag in Street Fighter IV , another fast-paced fighting game.

It's basically cheating.

Scrub.

If you are a talented scrabble player, you should be better able to use the tiles you have

And you are better able to use the tiles you have if you know which combinations of those tiles are a legal play.

Those classes were held at UC Berkeley by Alan Feng and two others. Here is a writeup about them, quite interesting.

David Sirlin wrote about this a few years back, and estimated that over 99% of all people were scrubs. It seems he was right.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/intermediates-guide.html

After being "chilled" by players threatening to kill him, he then goes and publishes his personal information. Brilliant.

That said, I I think Sirlin would have something to say to the scrubs complaining about his tactics.

I've seen a few interesting blogs though. For example, for the more gaming inclined (both designers and competitive players), there's David Sirlin's blog, who both a designer for many Street Fighter games and a competitive player in some of them.

Having played many fighting games, and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of the Guilty Gear series in particular, I can safely state that this guy has no idea how people are trying to think in high-level gaming. Let me explain.

In high-level gameplay of things such as Guilty Gear, there are theoretically a huge number of choices that one could make at any given time. However, several of them are stupid as hell. Of those which aren't stupid as hell, there's a sort of weighted rock-paper-scissors game where you weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each move, along with whether or not your opponent should expect each move, given your previous gameplay.

Computer AI almost always chooses the safest move. Either that, or it deliberately chooses a bad move. Sure, this emulates bad play at lower levels of play, but that's when you can't even do a hadouken with 99.9% accuracy. People like that are bad at the game, and as you rise higher in skill you will stop making those mistakes.

For more information and better explanations than I could ever come up with, check out David Sirlin's website.

The author makes a distinction between playing for fun and playing to win as if they are mutually exclusive. In reality, it is most certainly possible to play for fun AND play to win, and I believe that should be the target of game design.

I believe the best way to deal with balance and fairness is to make a game with balance, as in players of equal skill have an equal chance of winning, and depth, meaning there are many valid and usable options available to the player at any point throughout the game. I think the notion of depth is an important one the author either didn't think about or doesn't recognize as being a characteristic that can be separated away from balance and fairness. He touches on the idea of a game that lets everyone start out on an even footing but that has a single dominant strategy to win. That means the game lacks depth.

Variety could be a word to apply to the depth of a game, however variety is not enough and just having that does not ensure depth. Imagine you are playing a fighting game with 10 characters that all vary wildly. Now imagine in this game, the characters can all do something to knock you down to the ground and once down on the ground all you can do is get up. That's variety without depth because after the throw you have no options and your opponent knows exactly what you are going to do and has plenty of time to capitalize on it.

Targeting players that both play to win and play for fun is important. Because if someone is really playing just for fun with no care about winning, then game design loses a lot of its importance. At that point you just have to keep them doing something amusing for some period of time and it'll keep them happy.

Playing to Win by Sirlin could be a helpful guide to anyone designing a gaming experience. Because, unlike the author of this article, I don't think you can ever exclude playing to win from playing for fun. If you are playing Super Mario and you can simply walk from one end of the level to the other, its not fun. If you add the challenge, and the fun is trying to get past it, congratulations, you are playing to win.

I have recently read a book called Playing to Win (available for free on the author's site), which makes a lot of interesting points on fairness and balance. A lot of the points made in this discussion are also mentioned in that book.

Personally I disagreed with many of the author's points but it was still a very interesting read. It's not a very long book, it can easily be read in a single sitting.

The author is David Sirlin, who used to be a pro player in several Street Fighter games, and has also worked (is still working?) as a game designer for Capcom. He doesn't just discuss Street Fighter though, but also RTS games like Starcraft, FPSs like Counter-Strike, as well as traditional games like chess and go.

I have recently read a book called Playing to Win (available for free on the author's site), which makes a lot of interesting points on fairness and balance. A lot of the points made in this discussion are also mentioned in that book.

Personally I disagreed with many of the author's points but it was still a very interesting read. It's not a very long book, it can easily be read in a single sitting.

The author is David Sirlin, who used to be a pro player in several Street Fighter games, and has also worked (is still working?) as a game designer for Capcom. He doesn't just discuss Street Fighter though, but also RTS games like Starcraft, FPSs like Counter-Strike, as well as traditional games like chess and go.

I actually saw some of this a few days ago on David Sirin's Blog, and found it quite interesting. There's a fair bit of looking into the design of the game, in addition to the micromanaging for more competitive players. A worthy read for a system designer.

I agree with the parent completely. There has not been a comparable RTS since Starcraft, and there most likely never will be. There are two main aspects of a player's actions that have an effect on the outcome of a competitive game: strategy and execution. A few genres will forgo one entirely for the sake of the other. Chess (or any TBS game), for example, removes all execution for the sake of creating a pure strategy game. Fighters remove all strategy for the sake of creating a pure execution game. RTS games are one of the few genres which embrace both aspects to the fullest extent.

Or, at least, that is what they claim to do.

Every RTS game that I have seen or heard of since Starcraft was released has sought to remove execution from the equation, and those which fail at balance inadvertently remove the strategy, as well. While lowering the execution bar makes the game more widely accessible for competitive play, the amount of depth in the game is lowered with it. Squad-based RTS are the most glaring example of this. In Starcraft, you could easily write entire books on each unit in the game and the various ways to micromanage them in nearly every situation in order to utilize them to their maximum effectiveness. To this day, people are still discovering small AI quirks which you can exploit to your advantage. In a squad-based RTS, however, this kind of control is removed from the player's hands. Units can only be given approximate orders, take cover on their own, are impossible (or incredibly difficult) to use individually, etc. Another major change is that the overall pace of combat in Starcraft is incredibly fast compared to most other RTS games since. In Blizzard's own WC3, for example, the unit health has been raised so high and the unit damage lowered so much that it takes an order of magnitude longer for units to be destroyed. Contrast this with Starcraft, for example, where the lowly zergling (when upgraded) is one of the highest DPS units in the game (and the highest by far when comparing by resource cost) and 2-4 of them can flatten almost any ground unit in a matter of seconds. You might argue that Starcraft has a relatively high unit count, which is why units in other RTS seem to die so much slower, and you'd be right. This is also yet another example of removing complexity and depth for the sake of accessibility.

Now, it's hard to fault game developers for these changes, though. The fact is that these days, the "hardcore" market is significantly smaller than the more casual market to which these games are catering to. Game companies are, in the end, looking to make money. Creating a game which can be played on a deep competitive level is either an afterthought at best, or more often, simply not considered. Starcraft is likely to be the last truly competitive RTS that we will ever see.

As a side note, if you're interested in the topic, I would recommend heading to http://www.sirlin.net/ and checking out their lengthy running discussion revolving around their hopes for Starcraft 2.

Regarding the older games in the series: they always had a turbo slider, so you could change the speed of the game. Oh well...

Both the original and the HD remix version of the game does in fact have that slider. The line from the GP,

As for the game feeling like it's locked on a high super-turbo mode....I think that falls in with the territory of calling it a remix.

was a load of nonsense. Behold, factual information rather than vague conjecture!

14) Game speed. The game speeds match the arcade version of the game, but this is confusing so bear with me. In SF HD Remix, speed 3 is the default and is intended for tournament play and online play. It's the same speed as Japanese arcade speed 3, which is also known as US arcade speed 2. You don't really have to understand what's going on with all that, just play at the default speed 3 and be happy that it matches the arcade.

Furthermore, there is a speed 0 in there for the hardcore players. On all speeds except 0, the game uses its own system of dropping frames in order to increase speed (we didn't touch this, the arcade version did it too). This does affect whether some combos are possible/impossible. Speed 0 is slow, but it will let combo masters and makers of combo videos take frame-dropping out of the equation when they are trying to figure out which crazy combos are possible.

This information is straight from http://www.sirlin.net/articles/street-fighter-hd-remix-features.html . Sirlin was the lead designer for the game. So it doesn't get much more definitive than that.

This is nothing new.

I recall a player trying to 40 box molten core back a year or two ago. I don't know if he ever did it or not but it was possible to do back then even though he needed a single PC per account. Now, 4 or even 5 accounts per computer is possible thanks to quad cores.

http://www.sirlin.net/archive/the-man-who-would-solo-a-40-man-raid/

This guy 50 boxes (althogh he was botting / farming them and not multiboxing).

http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=498

I think this was posted on Slashdot once, so you may have seen it before, but there is an excellent article by David Sirlin on Gamasutra that's about this very distinction.

David Sirlin's website is also full of great articles about game design and theory, if you're into that kind of thing it's definitely worth reading through.

Actually any game is like that because there will invariably be a move or strat that counters what is being performed by your opponent. If not, and all moves in the game are equal, then it comes down to sheer chance. The exception to this is having the option to hide your actions, or encapsulate them into something else: being sneaky. It's games like this that makes for GOOD games. Bad games usually either reward one or a few move too much (unfair and broken moves) or neglect to include enough good moves (all your choices are too weak). In a good game, you have a variety of choices that are all viably good ones to make. Good players learn to primarily use these moves, balancing their play between exploiting the best qualities of weaker moves and mixing up into the good moves that yield the best outcome. The opponent always has to guess what's coming next, the "good" move that wins a lot, but has a counter or a "bad" move that isn't safe unless I use my "good" move. But then what if my opponent knows that I know this. What's the counter to that "bad" move, because that's the move that I want to use... unless he knows that I know he knows...

Computers are great a finding patterns, but bad at guessing. I actually think that chess is the IDEAL game for an AI achievement because there are a plethora of moves and just as many ways to disguise each one of them. A RTS really doesn't have all that many options when you think about it. Not only that, but most games distill down to either outright guessing, or rock-paper-scissors and I'm rather sure that this is true of chess and most RTS games. In chess, your pieces are your primary resources, and it's plain to see what pieces your opponent have available and what can possibly be done with those pieces. In RTSs other arbitrary factors are resources and even though it may be impossible to now exactly what your opponent is capable of, one can generalize and devise a contingency for a number of possible outcomes, except you become limited in how you can mix up your options because EVERYTHING requires resources and once you've spent them they are gone. In chess, your you have much tighter control of your resources because all the resources do not depend on each other, therefore making it less of a slippery slope game. In an RTS, expending a large amount of oil (for example) on troops of a certain type directly hinders your ability to produce a different type of troop if the need arises for that sort of counter. You've slid that much further away from victory by spending that oil. In chess, however, loosing a pawn doesn't necessarily hinder your knights ability to capture. It definitely, most absolutely may have a great bearing on the game and/or it's outcome, but it still doesn't change the capture pattern of the knight or whether or not you still have one available.
For an excellent article on this sort of thing check out http://www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_Yomi.htm

Obviously the patent office needs to make money. Tying income to volume, while obvious, is a bad solution because it probably does the opposite of encouraging and protecting innovation, which is what patents are supposed to do in the first place. I'm not sure whether David Sirlin's suggestions in his Gamasutra article http://www.sirlin.net/archive/my-patent-article-on -gamasutra/ will work, but I doubt they could be worse than the current setup. On the other hand, there's not much you can do when the shortage of federal funds is due to their being sent out of the country these days. It's affecting many government agencies, not just the patent office.

All of your points are good if you are trying to argue which game is more realistic. But games are games and they are important as long as they are FUN not as long as they are REALISTIC. You should be arguing how all this features and their units are balanced, probably with a rock,paper,scissors which is the most common way to balance and give depth to games. I'm surprised you aren't modded -1 non sequitur. .... check www.sirlin.net for info in game design if: http://www.sirlin.net/archive/rock-paper-scissors/

MarioKart online got boring the minute people figured out snaking

So why don't you snake back? Otherwise, you're a scrub. If you're worried about disconnecting losers, snake only during one lap so that the race appears close.

Here's a link to one of a series of interesting articles written by someone who would disagree with that.

If a griefer is exploiting game behaviors which exist outside the context of the game - for example pulling the plug before an online game can run to completion - then I'd agree with you completely. Such behaviour is not simply griefing, it is downright cheating, and not acceptable under any circumstances.

But if the griefer merely expoits advantages they have found within the framework of the game's ruleset, then they are doing nothing more than playing the game. It forces everyone else to think of counter-tactics to escape the griefer, and then the griefer needs to refine or replace their tactics if they are to get their kicks. Successive iterations of this cause everyone to raise their game, causing a natural evolution in player behaviour, as the ultimately effective tactics that are implied by the games rules are slowly divined by all present.

If the game offers no counter-tactics which griefer victims can use, then guess what? You're playing a shit game! Bail on it and find one with a modicum of tactical depth.

Check out David Sirlin's smashing essays about 'Playing to Win', starting here on sirlin.net.

Look no further than:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puzzle_Fighter

This game strikes an amazing balance by being both compelling for serious competition and entertaining for casual play. David Sirlin has a relevant article (http://sirlin.net/archive/slippery-slope-and-perp etual-comeback/) describing "perpetual comeback" as it pertains to Puzzle Fighter and why it makes that game so very fun.

Are you still looking further?

Well then...

Another example of perpetual comeback is the fighting system in Battle Arena Toshinden (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Arena_Toshind en) where each character has usually two special moves (in addition to their normal repertoire) that they can only perform once their health gets very low (i.e., they are about to be knocked-out). These moves (sometimes referred to as "desperation moves") usually do a great deal of damage and can easily turn the tide of a round or just win the round outright so they add cool intensity to the conclusion of many matches (even when one player is notably superior because they need to be extra careful to avoid getting hit by one or more of these "come-back" moves). These moves can be difficult to perform for those uninitiated to the common fireball and yoga-flame joystick movements they typically require but they totally have the best risk-vs.-reward benefit when a player is learning the game. I'd recommend studying and practicing the execution of those moves first to new players. Additionally, some characters have very easy ones like (if I remember correctly) Ellis and Sophia only need to press back, forward, back, forward + Triangle to do theirs. Choose an easy and fast character to start with until you learn enough to venture out.

Of course there are some fun cooperative experiences (like Halo or MMOs) but if your partner shows an affinity for, and appreciation of, games requiring increasing reflexive (a.k.a. "twitch") skill, I would highly recommend the plethora of http://shmups.com/ out there. Ikaruga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikaruga) must be mentioned as one of the greatest here. All threatening bullets and beams are either white (with blue highlights) or black (with red highlights). Similarly, each players' ship can flip over to alternate between those colors as well. When you're the same color as bullets, you absorb them into your shield and they store in a meter which can be unleashed as homing shots. When you are the opposite color of enemy ships, your shots do double-damage (but you're vulnerable to their bullets because they are the same color as them). It makes for awesome tension because the whole screen can be completely covered in bullets but at least half of it is always survivable space if you're the same color as the bullets occupying that space. Check out "bullet-eater" mode too. You can beat lots of levels without firing a shot (i.e., by just alternating to the right colors and dodging terrain features).

Another great one is Raiden Project (http://gamespot.com/ps/action/raidenproject/index .html) if you can find it for the old original PlayStation. That game had very interesting cooperative properties where certain shots would change characteristics and trajectory if they hit your friend's ship so sometimes it would be strategic to try to stay vertically aligned together (or overlay each other) to benefit from these special shots.

There are lots of great cooperative Shmups but the only directly competitive one I have yet encountered is astonishingly fun. It is called Twinkle Star Sprites (http://en.wiki

David Sirlin is a good friend of mine.

He recently wrote a Soapbox opinion piece on Gamasutra which prompted this /. story. The story summary highlighted the main point of the piece well and it drew a lot of comments, but of course, only a tiny fraction of even the highly-rated posts demonstrated understanding of the real arguments.

This problem was largely remedied over the past couple weeks in the discussion on Sirlin's blog where myself and other comment authors helped clarify the points that the casual reader habitually missed. Many interesting topics came up and I think your recognization of the "original twitch based videogame generation" being against the "new 'MMO' skill-less videogame-as-timesink generation" is wholly in line with the article and discussion.

The idea of lobbying for legal restrictions on games or their players is a distasteful one to me though. I would like to think marketers can make their proposed progress towards solving the political problems and intolerance the game industry faces... but I also feel the emphasis on marketing anything (over creating quality and superiority that speaks for itself) is the deeper issue. Salespeople are paid to convince and deceive others into becoming customers. In this interconnected information age we live in, the resentment towards advertisers telling us what to buy is on the rise. We'll see where it goes.

Anyway, you don't sound too nuts to me. Then again, a lot of people call me crazy so I'm maybe not the best judge. =)

-Pip

David Sirlin is a good friend of mine.

He recently wrote a Soapbox opinion piece on Gamasutra which prompted this /. story. The story summary highlighted the main point of the piece well and it drew a lot of comments, but of course, only a tiny fraction of even the highly-rated posts demonstrated understanding of the real arguments.

This problem was largely remedied over the past couple weeks in the discussion on Sirlin's blog where myself and other comment authors helped clarify the points that the casual reader habitually missed. Many interesting topics came up and I think your recognization of the "original twitch based videogame generation" being against the "new 'MMO' skill-less videogame-as-timesink generation" is wholly in line with the article and discussion.

The idea of lobbying for legal restrictions on games or their players is a distasteful one to me though. I would like to think marketers can make their proposed progress towards solving the political problems and intolerance the game industry faces... but I also feel the emphasis on marketing anything (over creating quality and superiority that speaks for itself) is the deeper issue. Salespeople are paid to convince and deceive others into becoming customers. In this interconnected information age we live in, the resentment towards advertisers telling us what to buy is on the rise. We'll see where it goes.

Anyway, you don't sound too nuts to me. Then again, a lot of people call me crazy so I'm maybe not the best judge. =)

-Pip

If your premise is correct, then Sirlin himself is making the mistake that Warcraft is, at its heart, a competitive activity. I'd say that most people familiar with MMORPGs would agree that they are not primarily competitive activities. There are competitive aspects, but that's hardly their primary purpose.

Fighting games, on the other hand, are almost pure competition. Given Sirlin's long history with fighters, it isn't surprising that his opinions on MMORPGs are informed by this history. Frankly, given the way he talks about gaming, (in particular his "play to win" article you mentioned - http://www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_PlayToWinPa rt1.htm, which upon reading, I realized I read years ago), I'm surprised he'd even be interested in WoW. I can only surmise he played it due to his loyalty to the Blizzar franchises due to their previous, purely competitive titles.

Ultimately, though, even if you filter his article through these facts, I think his points, which he tries to pass off as universal, still come across as someone justifying his own personal biases (about what is fun) as fact. For example, the definition he likes to use implies that fun == learning, which allows him to blast WoW as teaching the wrong lessons. The fun == learning definition is clearly wrong; I can "learn in a safe environment" by studying an Organic Chemistry textbook, but this is, by no means, fun. Conversely, hanging out with friends telling jokes is fun, but I haven't really learned anything, at least not in the sense he talks about.

The other main points that he makes are 1. Skill is more important that time, and 2. Solitary activity is more important than cooperation. Again, his preference for solo, competitive passtimes clearly explains this bias.

The first point, as others have pointed out, is an either/or proposition - sometimes time invested is more important that pure or learned skill. All the skill in the world isn't going to build the pyramids. From Blizzard's perspective, it's pretty clear why things are based on time-sinks: WoW has a finite amount of content. By forcing players to take a long time towards consuming it, they guarantee that people will remain subscribed for as long as possible. This is the main reason I don't play MMORPGs - I simply don't have the time to devote to them to work my way through the content.

On the second point, Sirlin is on much shakier ground. The history of the world, if anything, shows that cooperation among groups is far more important than talented individuals. Economies of scale, specialization, and just pure manpower carry far more weight in the real world. The world needs people who can work with others to get tasks done, not a bunch of loners who think they can do it all themselves. Even if you don't agree with this, it is still a valid interpretation that invalidates his "wrong lesson" premise. From an economic perspective, encouraging people to group and form communities is the main way an MMORPG ensures that people remain subscribed - players with a stake in the community are less likely to drop off.

Finally, Sirlin himself is pretty proud of his abilities as a gamer; I think a lot of his resentment towards WoW stems from the fact that these abilities do not win him the same stature that he has earned in other circles. But in his "playing to win" article, he makes it clear that he's talking about belonging to a community that is in the top tenth of a percent in terms of "skill". Yet Blizzard is not interested in this small community, and I don't see why they should. They want to create a game that can appeal to as wide a base as possible in order to keep themselves employed.

There are plenty of games out there that already cater to the elite. These games themselves turn out to be not so much fun for the novice if when entering them they perceive that there will be no way for them to ever fully enjoy them because of players that

There is an article over at sirlin.net that discusses this. http://www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_PlayToWinPa rt1.htm Here's a small snippet. "You're not going to see a classic scrub throw his opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimize his chances of winning? Here we've encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you...that's cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that's cheap, too. We've covered that one. If you sit in block for 50 seconds doing no moves, that's cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap." -- If you rocket jump of your friends shoulders.. that's cheap!

Article by Sirlin, a game designer

This article may be somewhat outdated as it refers to the senate hearings initiated by Senator Joseph Lieberman. However, it addresses the violence in video game issue very well.

If you've enjoyed Fluxx, you might also enjoy Nomic. Dave Sirlin recommended both in the same article, and I trust his judgement.

Hmmm. I'm not exactly sure what you mean. That the Japanese would appreciate a seemingly open-ended style of play of RTS games?

I guess the same could be said of Street Fighter. RTS games have an explicit goal window: annihilate the other side. The whole strategy and rest is technique for accomplishing that goal. By no means does this imply a limited experience or that these games are inferior. Hell, Sirlin would say that they exemplify good gaming design. But the ultimate step ("killing the other guys last unit" "reducing the other player to 0 health") is obvious.

Anyway, these are just rules of thumb on culture, not hard and fast rules.

The point in the article, that sniper rifles (in thier current implimentation) unbalance gameplay in the FPS games they appear in, is a truth. In counter-strike, every weapon has the ability to kill in one shot (well let's pretend anyway, we all know the glock single fire and the five seven won't do that), but only one gun in the game can kill in one shot nearly anywhere. In the article he calls this the finger of god, and that's what it really is in CS. Since it's there though, there's no reason NOT to use it. Your best bet is to go ahead and pick one up. Not just on pubs, clan matches too. Use the damn thing like it's a bigger, fatter, more deadly pistol. It's entirely possible to assault close range with an AWM, it's just not going to be easy. However, until they take it out, or gimp it, there's no reason to bitch about it and not use one. That's just bad form.

But what to do about the 'problem'? Well apparently nothing, all snipers need to go!

Assuming that's what the author meant when he didn't list any alternatives to the gameplay offered by sniping.

I don't think that would be a smart choice, as sniping in games such as these can be a big part. It divides gameplay in two parts, the sniper's game, and the grunt's game, and you get to chose to play either. Close range, generally it's the grunts who win, and long range, generally the sniper. Either way though both classes take a certain amount of skill to play and have their own quirks to master (leading, circle strafing, whatever), but if you go with only one aspect or the other (awp_map, ka_knifearena) the game really goes flat fast. There is some gameplay offered through the interaction of these two "classes."

A previous poster I do believe had a point, theoretically, a good way to get around a sniper would generally be a smoke grenade. However he stated that current games that impliment ones suck. He's pretty much right, in Counter-Strike, I've yet to see a smoke grenade do me much good. Well no, I've had it where a team mate has smoked up a hallway and I could not snipe through, however, running past the hallway on multiple occassions got ME sniped (big surprise there *sarc*).

It's a one sided rant, not well thought out and, in my opinion, is quite stupid. I think I've enjoyed more the discussion that has come out of it on slashdot than the article itself. I guess all things have a purpose eh?

are not ambitious. They decide to do what current games do but do it well. Take Half Life, most popular FPS ever. Sure, most of that is due to CS but why can a game then be rereleased in three different iterations and still do well? I mean, c'mon! Valve Software has released one product!!!

And why was it successful? It was neither too complex or too simple. It was rewarding at introductory levels yet, as your skill improved, you could find new avenues to challenge yourself on (i.e. downloading CS and playing it). Basically everything said on Dave Sirlin's site.

Most innovative games are forgotten. Die by the Sword? Killer UI for 3rd person sword fighting... yet the rest of the game was lacking. Dozens of other games can be listed that fall in the same category.

Unlike music or film, games are much more of a... viceral form of entertainment. A strong, ground-breaking element cannot make up for piss-poor gameplay (unlike making up for a bad story in movies or bad musicianship in music). How often would you play a game that looked photo-realistic yet crashed every 5 minutes and corrupted your HD?

The best games are focused. The worst ones try to be the omni-game. The be all and end all.

Jesus, just enjoy it. Quit over analyzing it.

Um. Well there are two schools of thought when it comes to a form of art:

1. Those who enjoy it for its own sake.
2. Those who enjoy it for intellectual reasons.

Take anything: music, film, fine art. Whatever and you will find these two camps (the second being smaller than the first).

Now your post title is "It's just a movie" so I assume you are in the first camp. Basically the rule of thumb is if you liked the movie or not. Binary. Runs. or Hangs. And that's fine.

The second group are those who take an active interest in looking deeper into a form of art. The political reasons. The creator's own personal relations to it. Larger social meaning and how it fits into the larger genre. Here analyisis brings deeper understanding of the film and thus more pleasure than just sitting back and watching it.

A good parallel is David Sirlin's editiorials on Street Fighter II. His gist? Either you enjoy video games just to play them, or you enjoy them by winning (and winning takes analysis of the deeper mechanics of the game).

In all things either it is just a meaningless pastime or a deep and profound experience. Passive enjoyment or active involvement. Understand that there are people who enjoy the same things you do but for different reasons.

Read some of the articles at Sirlin.net on competitive game design.

The gist is that the best games, although accessible to a wide audience, cater to the gamer by rewarding his time and interest with an even higher level of gameplay.

A game where the boundaries of experience are hard and fast die quickly. Great graphics. Cool storyline. But no replay value. And here we are talking about replay value in terms of multiplayer. The Quakes, Starcrafts, and Street Fighters of the world.

You can see how this is the same with hardware. The more you invest... in tweaking, prodding, learning... the more you can get out of your machine. The better the performance and the more rewarding of the experience. Sure, 99.9% of the population will never do that to their machine... but they will follow where the gamer has gone.