| Poll |
| What say ye? |
| I play for fun |
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39% |
[ 126 ] |
| I play to win |
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20% |
[ 65 ] |
| To me, Winning = Fun |
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28% |
[ 92 ] |
| Plorg is on my blacklist |
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7% |
[ 23 ] |
| None of the above (explain) |
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4% |
[ 15 ] |
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| Total Votes : 321 |
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Plorg
Joined: May 08, 2005
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 Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 08:55 |
 
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David Sirlin is a colleague of mine in the games industry who I have worked with in the past. He's a pretty cool guy. He has written a book that rings true to my heart and he has made it available online as well as in print.
Playing to Win
In addition to being a professional game designer, he has a background of playing national tournaments in various games. His book focuses on some interesting applications of Sun-Tzu and I recommend the read.
No matter whether your personal complaint is about Fouling, Stalling, Amazons, Dwarves, AG4, High TR Dark Elves, Low TR Norse, skewed perceptions of your personal luck, or whatever happens to be your pet peeve, I think this excerpt could be helpful to you...
| David Sirlin's Playing to Win wrote: |
Intermediate’s Guide
So far you have learned only obvious and mundane things. I know that taking the first step can be the hardest part of the journey, so I wanted to coddle you a little just to get you going. The coddling stops here. You must now understand the cold, hard truth of competition. This is the difficult part to accept. This is the part that will upset you. You will have many defense mechanisms that will tell you that I am wrong, but I assure you with certainty that on this point I am delivering divine truth directly to you.
Introducing . . . the Scrub
The derogatory term “scrub” means several different things. One definition is someone (especially a game player) who is not good at something (especially a game). By this definition, we all start out as scrubs, and there is certainly no shame in that. I mean the term differently, though. A scrub is a player who is handicapped by self-imposed rules that the game knows nothing about. A scrub does not play to win.
Now, everyone begins as a poor player—it takes time to learn a game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game even before deciding which game to play. His problem? He does not play to win.
The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevents him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. Let’s take a fighting game off of which I’ve made my gaming career: Street Fighter.
In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.
You will not see a classic scrub throw his opponent five times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimizes 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 block for fifty 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. Street Fighter was just one example; I could have picked any competitive game at all.
Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is a tactic close to my heart that often elicits the call of the scrub. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. That is true by definitionof playing to win. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.
A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which one tries to win at all costs is “boring” or “not fun.” Who knows what objective the scrub has, but we know his objective is not truly to win. Yours is. Your objective is good and right and true, and let no one tell you otherwise. You have the power to dispatch those who would tell you otherwise, anyway. Simply beat them.
Let’s consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite subtle and difficult to discover. Knowing the counter tactic prevents the other player from using his tactic, but he can then use a counter to your counter. You are now afraid to use your counter and the opponent can go back to sneaking in the original overpowering tactic. This concept will be covered in much more detail later.
The good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.
Let’s return to the group of scrubs. They don’t know the first thing about all the depth I’ve been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more “fun.” Superficially, their argument does at least look valid, since often their games will be more “wet and wild” than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of this “fun” on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn’t nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent’s mind to such a degree that you can counter his every move, even his every counter.
Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules.
The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is a sequence of moves that is unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a “skill move.”
I once played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him five times in a row asking, “Is that all you know how to do? Throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’” This was a big moment in that scrub’s life. He could either ignore his losses and continue living in his mental prison or analyze why he lost, shed his rules, and reach the next level of play.
I’ve never been to a tournament where there was a prize for the winner and another prize for the player who did many difficult moves. I’ve also never seen a prize for a player who played “in an innovative way.” (Though chess tournaments do sometimes have prizes for “brilliancies,” moves that are strokes of genius.) Many scrubs have strong ties to “innovation.” They say, “That guy didn’t do anything new, so he is no good.” Or “person X invented that technique and person Y just stole it.” Well, person Y might be one hundred times better than person X, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the scrub. When person Y wins the tournament and person X is a forgotten footnote, what will the scrub say? That person Y has “no skill” of course.
You can gain some standing in a gaming community by playing in an innovative way, but that should not be the ultimate goal. Innovation is merely one of many tools that may or may not help you reach victory. The goal is to play as excellently as possible. The goal is to win.
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Let the fun and frolicking comments begin! |
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Purplegoo
Joined: Mar 23, 2006
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 09:08 |
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I know I'm avoiding the point here (quite deliberately, it will be fun to watch as this progresses) - but people think throwing in Street Fighter is cheap, and a Dragon Punch a "skill move"?
Clearly I'm more hardcore than I thought.  |
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harvestmouse
Joined: May 13, 2007
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 09:13 |
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Personally I don't agree with this passage. Games were created for fun, and like your friend at street fighter and like you at bloodbowl (and numerous other games) you have taken it beyond the level the majority will play it.
If too many players in a group take a game beyond it's intended level, the game mechanics can break, and could become 'unfun'. Personally I don't think bloodbowl has, but a few ethical tactics, could do so.
We have to remember possibly unlike your friend's this isn't a professional sport where you are paid to win, or really rewarded for winning........only by your peers. Which are the people you have used the extremities of the game to beat.
Maybe I am a scrub, but I believe when a game is played at such high levels (as here) we have to think about constraints that the game was not designed to accomodate.
I don't see any major problems with fumbbl however, we have the choice of playing how and who we want. In those choices (unless we break site rules) we should be allowed those choices and not condemned by living by them, as we shouldn't condemn players who play to the extremities of the game. |
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CircularLogic
Joined: Aug 22, 2003
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 09:22 |
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I have read his articled before.. he doesn`t mention a wight making multiple 4+/5+ rolls in a row... :p |
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Plorg
Joined: May 08, 2005
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 09:31 |
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| CircularLogic wrote: | | I have read his articled before.. he doesn`t mention a wight making multiple 4+/5+ rolls in a row... :p |
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Manbush
Joined: Nov 08, 2005
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 09:36 |
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I love the article, and I agree with the main point he makes in it. If your opponent is using tactics that you refuse to learn, counter or otherwise deal with, don't whine about losing, since the reason you are losing is due to the limits you have set for your game. Sure you can blab all you want about how if he was doing the exact same moves that you were doing, you'd be the one winning. Maybe you would be, and maybe that's why the opponent is using tactics different than yours to win. |
_________________
Happy is the person who can laugh at himself. He will never cease to be amused
I put the liquor in the same bottle his and mine, and mine was at the bottom, and, sure, I was obliged to drink his to get at mine |
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JanMattys
Joined: Feb 29, 2004
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 09:36 |
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Interesting read.
| Plorg wrote: | | Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is a tactic close to my heart that often elicits the call of the scrub. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. That is true by definitionof playing to win. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing. |
Important things first:
In an ideal world where all games are balanced and where game designers are so brilliant that they have planned a perfectly equilibrate set of rules, of course all these points stand.
The whole "scrubs are gay" thing loses a bit of its accuracy when (and sad to say, it happens) you play a game where a single rule is overpowered or out of context or whatever (before Plorg jumps at my throat: I'm not talking about fouling in BB... maybe about claw-rsc combos, but not fouling, at least this time).
Take Starcraft: I think we can all agree about the fact that Starcraft is a game designed and intended to be diverse and deep. With various degrees of success, but that's what the designers wanted to achieve. When the zerg rushes were invented, of course they were a brilliant tactic and an innovative one. They were also a very effective one. Are they cheap?
To answer this question I think it is impossible not to ask in return "is zerging defeatable without zerging yourself?". For example, fouling is a tactic which can be very effective in BB, but I think non-foulers can definitely counter (or even take advantage of) heavy foulers with better positioning, the right skills, and so on.
The biggest flaw in the excellent article Plorg posted is that, just like *every* article where an opinion is expressed as a truth, it doesn't take into consideration the possibility of its premises being wrong.
What if there ISN'T a valid counter to a cheap tactic? Does it qualify as cheap, then? If we play Starcraft, and I cannot beat your zerging if not by zerging myself, is your use of powertactics really smart and interesting, or it flats out the game to a challenge where the one who clicks faster wins?
The biggest flaw in the "Sheperd about fouling" article is that it implies fouling in BB is not counterable. I don't think this is true. But there are games (badly designed games) where a single powertactic is blatantly unbalanced. It's not the tactic that is uninteresting... but it *makes* the game uninteresting.
Your article talks about Streetfighter. Let's talk about Mortal Kombat. Imagine a game where all characters were available, including Goro. Goro in the hands of a human player would be almost undefeatable by normal characters, having twice hit points and twice damage rates than anyone else. Sure, fighting against Goro would make every player a master, because THAT's a true challenge... but wouldn't it be likely to turn into "Goro mirror matches" in the ideal world of your friend? I mean, if Goro is so damn powerful, why not take him?
Sadly, the gaming world is *full* of unbalanced and poorly designed games where a single tactic is out of context and *broken*. This makes your article very interesting, but only valid in an ideal world we are not living in. In the world we live, it's sometimes just sensible to agree to a particular set of rules that cut out the blatantly unbalanced aspects of the game. Imagine it as an update to game designers.
And before you ask: I don't think BB is a game with so heavy flaws. So your article applies to BB quite well imho (as far as I understand and enjoy the game). |
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Optihut
Joined: Dec 16, 2004
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 09:48 |
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It really depends. Winning in itself is an important aspect, but at a certain level the rush from winning is outweighed by the severe lack of fun that comes from being obsessed with winning. If what you are doing becomes hard work, then the objective of the game hasn't been met and thus winning and losing is irrelevant. The bottom line is that if I had to deep throat 50-60 hotdogs in 12 minutes, I personally wouldn't feel like a winner. |
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Epic_DT
Joined: Mar 25, 2008
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 10:02 |
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The thing I like in games in general is when I've to think about "how can I win?". I think there are some classical "steps" when you play a game.
First, when you begin as a newbie, you've no idea about the best way to play in order to win. You just play for fun, chosing a character/team/race that sounds "cool" and give it a try. You can have luck and win, or more often get beaten, but nevermind : if you like the game, you'll try to get better, with your first choice or not.
Secundo, you're becoming kind of familiar with the game, you know the pros and cons of every character/team/race and you begin to think "how could I exploit that?". That's the critical and interesting part for me : you're not a good player yet, but you want to be one, so you've to elaborate strategies and train your skills. Then, you play better players and can improve your gaming skills in general, over and over again.
For me, this competitive situation is the meaning of games, there is a slight difference between "being very good" and "being better than the others".
I could sound weird but in the first case, you don't compare yourself to the others, you feel confident about your skills and you just sit and say "wah, I'm very good". This sensation is enhanced by unfair confrontations when you play skillesses opponents and unchallenging tournaments : that's pure classical conditioning, and furthermore you chose carefully your confrontation, you avoid at all cost those games where you could get beaten, because you think you're very good and don't mean to reconsider it.
On the other hand, if you play to be better than the others, you must consider "all the others" and so you must beat "all" of them, even the strongers. You cannot confront newbies and be proud of it, because you know there could be other players that could beat you in no time. You can only have a good and competitive environment if you always look at the top. And there, the most important thing for me is that you've to think about your strategies, over and over again, and not simply doing always the same schemes.
For the Street Fighter exemple, i've never been good at it, and don't know the power of the "throwing move" at a worldwide scale. But if it's the real and perfect move that everyone has to do in order to win, the game is 1) Unbalanced and 2) Uninteresting |
Last edited by Epic_DT on %b %11, %2008 - %10:%Jul; edited 1 time in total |
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Zonker
Joined: Jan 09, 2006
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 10:03 |
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Isn't 'playing to win' a self imposed rule? |
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CircularLogic
Joined: Aug 22, 2003
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 10:10 |
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| Zonker wrote: | | Isn't 'playing to win' a self imposed rule? |
No it is not - most games are designed with 'winning' being the objective of the game. So the first rule of most games is: Players try to win.
Most games become pointless, if only one party is trying to win. |
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JanMattys
Joined: Feb 29, 2004
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 10:10 |
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Just to make myself clearer: if a game is designed with a paper-scissors-rock system where there's *no* winning tactic, then I think that the more a player tries to get closer to the limit the better.
When (and that's where the article totally fails and shows its inherent biasedness) there's no paper-scssors-rock system, then the broken tactic should be identified and reckognized.
Pulling my point to the extreme: imagine a version of BB with the new roster Space Marines... would a community that labels Space Marines as "cheap" be made of scrubs? I don't think so. |
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Sinner
Joined: Aug 02, 2003
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Jul 11, 2008 - 10:17 |
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I think BloodBowl is meant to be fun,
BUT under the pretence that both coaches try to win.
In a league/tournament (non-ko) game this might differ a bit as a coach may have different goal (i.e. he cannot win the league/tournament anymore but is struggling to get awards - most td, least against, most casualties, etc...).
So, there might be games where winning is not paramount. I agree with Epic_DT that you only know your true skill if you compare in a global environment. If you play in a sandbox you can always fool yourself with your imagined skill. But if you are able to win against everyone, every matchup, against all odds without relying on luck (too much) - then you are a true master.
I know I am very good and also better than most  ... but I also know there are more than enough coaching better than my not so humble self.
/me points to signature ^_^ |
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Sinner
Darkie's Dreams - successfully cherrypicking any race, any coach, any rating, any number of DP since 20/09/2003 ... and still winning! |
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rumpage
Joined: Feb 06, 2008
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 10:18 |
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I stopped reading somewhere into Street fighter. Because hell, who the hell makes a throw 5 times in a row? It spoils the fun!
I mostly play to win, but some ways are just, yes, cheap.
Zonker makes a point, since lots of games sucks at balancing and will simply be more fun if you make some restrictions on how lame one can be. It's either that or stop playing bloody Street figter :I
For Blood Bowl on the other hand, anything goes. |
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pac
Joined: Oct 03, 2005
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| Posted:
Jul 11, 2008 - 10:24 |
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| JanMattys wrote: | | What if there ISN'T a valid counter to a cheap tactic? |
Then the game is not a very good one and you should find something better to do with your time. 
(Which is always the ultimate counter. )
Edit: Or at least, it is not a game to spend time playing competitively. If it's a very attractive game in some other way, fine. In any event, every game first has to be explored with the competitive approach described to determine whether or not this is the case. |
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