Slippery Slope and Perpetual Comeback

If a game has slippery slope, it means that falling behind causes you to fall even further behind.

For example, imagine that every time your team scored in basketball that the opponent’s team lost a player. In that game, falling behind is doubly bad because each basket counts for score AND it makes the opposing team less able to score points of its own. The actual game of basketball does not have this screwy feature though, so real basketball does not have slippery slope. Scoring in real basketball puts you closer to winning but does not at all hamper your opponents’ ability to score.

Slippery slope is another name for positive feedback, a loop that amplifies itself as in a nuclear reaction. Because people confuse the terms positive and negative feedback so easily, I prefer the more descriptive term slippery slope.

Slippery slope is usually a bad property in a game. If a game has a powerful slippery slope effect, that means that when one player gets a small early lead, he is more likely to get an even bigger lead, which in turn makes him more likely still to get yet an even bigger lead, and so on. In a game like this, the real victor of the game is decided early on, and the rest of the game is futile to play out (or to watch).

StarCraft and Chess do have slippery slope. They manage to be good games anyway, despite this anti-climactic property. In Chess, when a player loses a piece, his ability to attack, defend, and control space on the board is slightly reduced. Sure, there are many other factors in Chess--positioning, momentum, pawn structure--that determine if a player is actually “losing,” but losing a piece does have an effect. Clearly, losing a lot of pieces, say 8, puts a player at a significant disadvantage. It’s pretty hard to make a comeback in Chess, and a game is usually “won” many, many moves before the actual checkmate move.

This is why there are a lot of forfeits in Chess. Good players don’t actually play out the pointless part of the endgame when they recognize the opponent will definitely win. Chess players would say that forfeits being a regular part of the game is fine and not awkward, but it’s a disappointing quality compared to games without slippery slope. Still, Chess is a pretty good game anyway.

This guy just lost a Chess piece.

StarCraft also has slippery slope. When you lose a unit, you are penalized doubly. First, you are closer to losing (having no units at all is so crippling as to be virtually the same as the actual loss condition of losing all your buildings). Second, you are less able to attack and defend because the unit you lost was not just part of a score, but also part of the actual gameplay of attacking and defending.

In basketball, the score is completely separate from the gameplay. Your ability to score points doesn’t depend at all on what the current score is. You could be ahead by 20 points or behind by 20 points and have the same chances of scoring more points. But in StarCraft (and Chess), the score is bound up with the gameplay. Losing units pushes you closer to loss AND makes it harder to fight back.

StarCraft has even more severe slippery slope when it comes to the game’s economy. Imagine that your opponent rushes you (sends an early attack to your base) and you fend it off. Let’s say you each lost about the same value of units in the exchange, except that you also lost one worker unit. In a different type of game, this might equate to being one “point” behind. But in StarCraft, that can be a crippling loss because gathering minerals is nearly exponential. Your opponent is ahead of you in the resource curve, increasing his earnings faster than you are. You’ve fallen down a very slippery slope here, where an early disadvantage becomes more magnified as the game goes on.

Fighting Games

Fighting games don’t usually have slippery slope. In Street Fighter, for example, your character still has all of his moves even when he’s about to lose. Getting hit puts you behind in life totals (in “score”) but doesn’t limit your gameplay options in the way that losing a piece in Chess does or losing a unit in StarCraft does. An unusual example of a fighting game that does have slippery slope is Bushido Blade. In that game, getting hit can cause you limp around or lose the use of an arm. This is extremely rare in the fighting game genre though, and for good reason.

While it might be "realistic" for a nearly dead character to limp, move slowly, and have generally less effective moves, it's not fun. (At least in Bushido Blade's case, this part of the game lasts only a couple seconds, then you lose.) Meanwhile in Street Fighter, comebacks are frequent and games are often "anybody's game" until the last moment. Street Fighter does have some very minimal slippery slope aspects (if you're very near death you have to worry about taking damage from blocked moves which aren't a threat if you have full life), but overall it's pretty "slippery slope neutral."

There is one fighting game that stands out as an exception: Marvel vs. Capcom 2. In this game, each player chooses 3 characters. At any given time, one character is active and on-screen, and the other two are off-screen, healing back some lost energy. The off-screen characters can be called in to do an assist move, then the jump off screen again. The main character can attack in parallel with the assist character, allowing for a wide variety of tricks and traps. The player can switch the active character at any time, and he loses the game when he loses all three characters. But here, slippery slope rears its bitter head. When one player is down to his last character and the other player has two or even all three of his characters, the first player is at a huge disadvantage. The first player has can no longer attack in parallel with his assists, which often means he has no hope of winning. Comebacks in MvC2 are quite rare and games often "end" before they are technically over.

Fighting games with "ring out" such as Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur as especially devoid of slippery slope properties. In these games, a player instantly loses if his character is ever pushed out of the ring, no matter how much energy he has. Basically, no matter how far behind you are, no matter how close you are to losing, you always have a 100% damage move: ring out. Long ago, I thought this concept was "cheap" and served only to shorten games while adding little benefit, but actually the threat of ring out adds quite a bit to both these games. Since the threat of ring out is so great, another whole element of positioning is added to the game. A player must fight both to do damage to his opponent, and fight for position to avoid ring out.

Limited Slippery Slope

Fighting games do have very localized, limited kind of slippery slope that’s actually a good quality. If a game truly has no slippery slope whatsoever at any point, then it can feel like a series of disconnected decisions. It’s interesting though, if a decision you make at one point in a game echoes forward through time, and can influence later moves in the game. The problem is if this influence is allowed to snowball into a greater and greater advantage.

In limited slippery slope, there is a cap on how far you can slip and the effect is temporary. In Street Fighter, getting knocked down (hit by a sweep) does have a bit of slippery slope. You lose health (“score”) but you also have temporary limitations on what your character can do. Your character falls down, then gets up into what is usually a disadvantageous situation. The two things that are important about this are: 1) after the knockdown is over, you regain all your moves and 2) you cannot get doubly knocked down.

Ken is at a temporary disadvantage here from being knocked down, but the disadvantage can't snowball into deeper levels of knockdown (there aren't any) and it fades with time.

Hitting the opponent with a sweep does echo forward through time, but this advantage is reset soon after and can’t snowball into “getting REALLY knocked down” because there is no such thing as degrees of knockdown. If you are already knocked down, you can't be knocked down "even more."

Another example is backing the opponent into the corner (the edge of the stage). If you do this, you have a natural advantage because the opponent has fewer movement options. But again, there’s a limit here. Once the opponent is in the corner, he can’t be “more in the corner.” There’s a limit to how disadvantaged he can get.

An even more basic example is anytime you block a move that has a fair amount of recovery. In these case, you recover from your blockstun before the opponent recovers from his move, so you have a few frames to act first. This gives you an advantage because if you both try to do a move of the same speed, yours will win (it will start first). Your good decision to block echoed forward into the future, but the effect is very fleeting. Even one second later, this advantage fades.

So fighting games are full of small, temporary slippery slope effects that actually help the game. And yet, on the macro level, they do not have the real kind of slippery slope, the permanent kind that snowballs until the game ends. Compare this to Chess where you don’t just get your captured pieces back a few turns later.

And RTS Without Slippery Slope

Here’s an idea for turning the full-on slippery slope (usually bad) into the limited kind (usually good). Both players start with the same amount of resources to buy units. When your units are destroyed, your resources are refunded. A delay in the timing of this refund combined with the build-time for making new units means that losing units really is a disadvantage, but that the disadvantage fades over time, similar in nature to getting knocked down in a fighting game. The real-time strategy game World in Conflict does exactly this, but I’ve never actually played it.

My point here isn't about whether World in Conflict is a good game, or even whether the exact refund system stated above is good. It just shows that it is possible to remove slippery slope from an RTS if you try hard enough. Someone very dedicated to that problem could probably come up with an even better way to remove it that results in a deeper game, rather than a shallower one.

Perpetual Comeback

The opposite of slippery slope, I call perpetual comeback. That’s just a more descriptive term for negative feedback. (Also, negative feedback sounds like a bad thing, but it’s usually a good quality in games, so it’s helpful to have a term that doesn’t sound negative.) A thermostat uses negative feedback to keep the temperature of a room from spiraling out of control.

Perpetual comeback, then, is a quality in which being behind actually gives you an advantage. I’d like to draw a distinction between two types of this effect, though. In one, when you are behind, a force pushes on you to help improve your position. An example of this is the Fatboy mutator in Unreal Tournament. In that first-person shooter mod, when you kill an enemy, you become fatter and easier to hit. When you die, you become skinnier and harder to hit. Multiple hits magnify the effect, so if you die over and over you get skinner and skinner. Note that even if you die a lot, you are still losing (your score is not helped), but you do have an advantage (harder to hit).

Beautiful, but dangerous.

A similar example is any version of Mario Kart. The further behind you are, the more powerful the items you get. In last place, you can get the powerful blue turtle shell which has homing powers to zero in on the first place racer. Meanwhile, the first place racer gets only weak items.

Advance Wars: Dual Strike on the Nintendo DS has a similar feature. Each side has a powerful “tag attack” that’s tied to a meter. When you get attacked, your meter fills up at twice the rate as usual, so the losing player will have faster access to this powerful attack, giving him a chance to make a comeback.

In all three of these examples, the games have a force that help out players who are behind and hinder players who are ahead. This is generally a good type of force to have, because it makes games closer, and small early mistakes are not crippling. That said, maybe the effect is too extreme in Mario Kart, or maybe it creates strange artifacts such as avoiding 1st place on purpose for most of the race. And the power of the tag attacks in Advance Wars might be too extreme, making them dominate the game. Tuning issues aside, the concept is still sound and when it’s done right, it can make matches closer and more exciting.

Perpetual Comeback Extreme

There is a different type of perpetual comeback that is far more extreme and far more rare. That’s when getting closer to losing doesn’t JUST give you helping hand, but instead actually puts you ahead. I think the best example of this strange property is Puzzle Fighter.

Puzzle Fighter is, in my opinion, the best puzzle game ever made and I felt that way long before I was lead designer of Puzzle Fighter HD Remix. The game seems standard enough--it's one of those games where each player has a basin that pieces fall into. There are four different colors of pieces, and you try to build big, single colored rectangles (power gems). You can then shatter those rectangles with special pieces called crash gems. The more you break, the more junk you drop on the opponent's side. When your side fills to the top, you lose.

Several factors come together to create perpetual comeback (the extreme version!) in Puzzle Fighter. Firstly, each "character" (there 11 to choose from, including secret characters) has a different "drop pattern." A drop pattern is the pattern of colored blocks that a character will send to his enemy when that character shatters blocks on his own side. For example, Ken's drop pattern is horizontal row of red, followed by a horizontal row of green, then yellow, then blue. Every time Ken sends 6 or fewer blocks to his opponent, he'll send a horizontal row of red. Every time Ken sends 12 blocks, he'll send a row of red, then a row of yellow. Since the enemy knows this, he can plan for it. He can build his blocks such that Ken's attack will actually help rather than hurt. There's one catch: when you send blocks to the opponent, they appear in the form of "counter gems," which can't be broken immediately by normal means, and can't be incorporated into deadly power gems. After about 5 moves, the counter gems change into regular gems.

The other very critical property is that power gems broken higher up on the screen do more much more damage (send many more counter gems) than gems broken at the bottom of the screen. So consider what attacking is actually like in this game. Attacks are really only temporarily damaging, until the counter gems turn into regular gems. At that point, the opponent will probably be able to incorporate the gems into their own plans, since the opponent knows your drop pattern. Even if the opponent isn't able to benefit from your attack in that way, he can still "dig himself out" of trouble by breaking all the stuff you sent him. By filling up his screen most of the way you've basically given him more potential ammunition to fire at you. What's more, as he is nearest to death, his attacks will be the most damaging due to the height bonus. Gems broken at the very top of the screen do significant damage.

Puzzle Fighter has the extremely unusual property that "almost losing" looks exactly like "almost winning." Let's say you break a whole slew of power gems and send a large attack at your opponent. You're screen is now almost empty. You're winning right? His screen is nearly to the top--almost full. He's losing, right? Well, he is on the verge of losing, but he has all the ammunition and he has the height bonus, whereas you have almost nothing left to defend with. In effect, your opponent is both "losing" and "winning" at the same time. Very curious, indeed!

Ken (left) was close to losing, but he got the yellow crash gem he needed just in time. Donovan (right) will lose.

It turns out the best way to play Puzzle Fighter is to very carefully never attack until you can make it count. All those little jabs you make just help the opponent in the long run. You've got to save up for a huge, 1-2 punch. You need to send a big attack that almost kills them, then immediately send another attack that finishes them off. 1, 2! The point is that Puzzle Fighter is a high energy, edge-of-your seat game. Your opponent very often has enough attack to kill you, so you have to have enough defense to stop them. Whenever the scales start to tip in your opponent's favor, they have also, weirdly, tipped in your favor as well, in some sense. A game of Puzzle Fighter is never over until the last moment. Comebacks are the name of the game, and the excitement goes to the very last second almost every time.

Conclusion

Slippery slope is a force that punishes players who fall behind, making them even more likely to fall further behind. Left unchecked, this makes for matches where the real victor is decided long before the game actually ends, leading to either boring endgame play, or lots of forfeits. While fighting games lack this overall slippery slope, they do have several forms of temporary, limited slippery slope that improves gameplay. This limited slippery slope probably exists in other genres as well, but could be a conscious design choice for future games. Finally, perpetual comeback, the opposite of slippery slope, is a force that helps losing players and puts the brakes on winning players, making for close matches. This property can easily go wrong if tuned improperly, but if done well, it leads to closer, more exciting matches. Puzzle Fighter takes this concept to an extreme, by making winning look almost the same as losing.

Rock, Paper, Scissors in Strategy Games

A simple rock, paper, scissors (RPS) system of direct counters is a perfectly solid and legitimate basis for a strategy game provided that the rock, paper, and scissors offer unequal risk/rewards. Better still is if those rewards are unclear, meaning that players cannot easily determine the exact values of the rewards. The following video is not an example of that, but it's pretty exciting looking.

An Example of $10/$3/$1

Consider a strictly equal game of RPS with clear payoffs. We'll play 10 rounds of the game, with a $1 bet on each round. Which move should you choose? It makes absolutely no difference whether you choose rock, paper, or scissors. You'll be playing a pure guess. Since your move will be a pure guess, I can't incorporate your expected move into my strategy, partly because I have no basis to expect you to play one move or another, and partly because I really can't have any strategy to begin with.

Now consider the same game of RPS with unequal (but clearly defined) payoffs. If you win with rock, you win $10. If you win with scissors, you win $3. If you win with paper, you win $1. Which move do you play? You clearly want to play rock, since it has the highest payoff. I know you want to play rock. You know I know you know, and so on. Playing rock is such an obvious thing to do, you must realize I'll counter it ever time. But I can't counter it (with paper) EVERY time, since then you could play scissors at will for a free $3. In fact, playing scissors is pretty darn sneaky. It counters paper--the weakest move. Why would you expect me to do the weakest move? Are you expecting me to play paper just to counter your powerful rock? Why wouldn't I just play rock myself and risk the tie? You're expecting me to be sneaky by playing paper, and you're being doubly sneaky by countering with scissors. What you don't realize is that I was triply sneaky and I played the original obvious move of rock to beat you.

That may have all sounded like double-talk, but it's Yomi Layer 3 in action. And it had quite a curious property: playing rock was both the naive, obvious choice AND the triply sneaky choice.

Math Says There is a Solution

I'd like to meet Ms. Glasscock to find out how she does it.

You might say that even with unequal payoffs, there's still an optimal way to play. The optimal solution is called a mixed strategy, meaning that it involves randomly choosing your moves, but obeying certain percentages.

You should play rock 10/14ths of the time, scissors 3/14ths, and paper 1/14th. If you play against another player who is playing suboptimally (for example, he plays paper 100% of the time), you can change your strategy to exploit him (by playing scissors 100%). But the optimal mixed strategy above means that no one can exploit you to do better.

While that is the math answer, three related factors creep into the real-world application of that strategy:

1) People are very bad at actually playing randomly, especially at specific percentages such as 3/14ths.
2) When people fail to play randomly, they are probably falling back on tendencies they do not know they have, but that you can detect and exploit.
3) People cannot help but let their personalities spill over into decisions about how conservative (playing paper) or risky (playing rock) they are.

Fighting Games

Fighting games rely heavily on RPS. They have both overall games of RPS going on as well as many rapid fire situations of RPS. Virtua Fighter games can even have 5 sets of RPS take place in a period of 2 seconds! Really!

Virtua Fighter's overall system of RPS is as follows: attacking beats throwing, throwing beats blocking or reversing, and blocking and reversing beats attacking. To be clear, let's define terms.

An attack is a move that deals damage. An attack has an initial startup phase where it can't yet do damage (a punch extending), a short phase where it actually can do damage (the sweet spot of the punch), and a recovery phase (the arm retracts). If the defender is blocking correctly, an attack will not damage him, but he can be thrown.

A throw is a special type of move that instantly grabs an opponent whether he's blocking or not and does damage. The catch is, a throw will not grab an opponent who attacking (specifically, a throw will fail if the opponent's move is in startup or hitting phase).

A reversal is a special type of move that grabs an incoming attack. Reversals usually look like throws, but they work at the exact opposite times. A reversal only works when the opponent's move is in startup or hitting phase, which are, incidentally, the only times a throw would fail.

Even these explanations are simplified, but the RPS system is basically there. Attack the opponent. If they tried to throw you, you'll hit them. If they block or reverse your attack, they nullified your attack. If you expect them to block, you can throw. If they expect you to throw, they can attack.

The fighting game Dead or Alive basically uses this same system, except that the risk/reward for doing a reversal is much different. Reversals are difficult and relatively rare in Virtua Fighter, but they're incredibly easy and do a ridiculous amount of damage in DOA. Reversals are so effective, in fact, that they can paralyze the enemy into not attacking for fear of being reversed. Of course, that's when you throw them....

I bet Daigo Umehara would use this to beat everyone.

Unclear Payoffs

While psychology makes it difficult for people to deal with unequal payoffs, it can be even more difficult to deal with unclear payoffs. Imagine that you are making an RPS decision in the fighting game above, and you must consider "how bad" it would be if you guessed wrong and got hit by an attack (as opposed to guessing wrong and getting thrown or reversed). How much damage will you take?

It depends on which character you are figthing, and which character you are. It depends on the distance between you and the opponent, and on the timings involved: maybe it's likely he'll do a launcher into a juggle combo or maybe that's not reasonable but you fear he might do a stagger into a ground combo. Is your character's back toward the wall, meaning that your opponent could get extra damage from a wall combo? Is your back near the edge of the ring, meaning you might lose the entire round to a ring out? How good is your opponent at doing combos? Is he likely to really maximize his damage, or just get one hit?

It's extremely unclear what the payoffs of this situation are. A half-second later when you are in another guessing game, the payoffs will be different (maybe the distance between you changed) and it will still be very unclear. Cutting through all that and making a reasonable guess requires knowledge of the game, of the opponent, and the presence of mind to put it all together. It is a real skill (I call it valuation) and a very valid skill to test. If you can make payoffs unequal AND unclear, then you've already gone a long way toward making a good strategy game.

RPS in RTS

Real-time strategy games such as StarCraft also use the RPS system. Like fighting games there's the concept of RPS on large scale and a small scale. On the small scale, particular units are designed to counter each other in a RPS way. A marine dies to a guardian. A guardian dies to a corsair. A corsair dies to a marine. Abstractly, there are 6 categories of unit. Ground units can either attack 1) other ground units, 2) air units, or 3) both. Air units can attack 4) other air units, 5) ground units, or 6) both. Pure ground-to-ground units usually beat both other types of ground units, yet lose to both types of air units that can attack ground. Similarly, pure air-to-air units usually beat both other types of air units, but loose to both types of ground units than can attack air.

RPS is not limited purely to units countering each other though. Real-time strategy games also have the concept of trading off powerful units now for a strong economy now, which leads to even more powerful units later. So on one extreme, a Zerg player in StarCraft might sacrifice his entire economy to get a quick attack force ("6 pool" is the term). This will likely beat a player who chose the other extreme of playing for pure economy and no immediate attack force (by building double oven triple hatcheries). A moderate build (pool on 9th peon, one sunken colony) will likely defend against the early attacker's rush, though. Surviving the rush, the moderate build will have a much superior economy and win in the end. However, this moderate build will produce an inferior economy to the player who built 2 or 3 hatcheries and went for pure economy.

In Starcraft, the early rush is a very, very risky strategy. It's all or nothing. You'll either win right away off it, or your rush will fail and you'll almost surely lose. Because of this, the early rush isn't all that common (depending on the map), but the very threat that the opponent might play the early rush is enough to stop you from playing for pure economy every time.

Finally, notice how hard it is to determine the actual payoffs in StarCraft. If your correct guess results in a battle between a few enemy Zealots and several of your Marines, what is the payoff? How many Marines will you lose? It depends on the micromanagement skill of both players, the terrain, and whether each player even focuses on the battle at all (maybe there's a more pressing battle somewhere else on the map). A lot of the goodness of StarCraft's design is that it's full of RPS with unequal and unclear payoffs.

Back to Basics

I'll leave you with this glimpse into the crazy world of people who don't seem to care about unequal or unclear payoffs.

Designing Yomi

In 1824, Sadi Carnot developed the theory of the reversible heat engine, the most efficient engine nature will allow. In 2005, I set out to develop the best game of paper, rock, scissors that nature will allow. That is, a competitive game based on the simple concept of paper, rock, scissors, and with the minimum amount of extra trappings needed to make the game deep and skill-testing. Furthermore, it had to test only the skills that make competitive games interesting. That means no joystick dexterity required, no aiming of a cross-hair, no physical reflexes, no memorization of book-openings, and no leveling up. As I covered in my book, Playing to Win, I think the two most interesting skills—the skills the lie at the heart of competitive gaming—are Yomi and Valuation.

I give you my latest invention: the Sirlin Reversible Heat...er...I mean Yomi: Fighting Card Game.

Yomi and Valuation

Yomi is the Japanese word for “reading,” as in reading the mind of the opponent, and also the name of my game. Valuation is my term for your ability to determine the relative values of pieces or moves in a game. Specifically, this means your ability to know the changing values of pieces during a game. For example, a pawn is generally considered to be worth one point in Chess, while a bishop is worth three, but given a particular board situation, these values will change. In so many games, the ability to read the mind of the opponent and the ability to know how much a piece or move is worth right now are the keys to success.

What if a game were designed to test only those two things? Everything else could be discarded to make the game as simple and accessible as possible. Competitive games tend to shut out most of the population because they tack on extra skill tests. Street Fighter, for example, requires so much dexterity with a joystick that most potential players are not able to experience the interesting mental challenges at the core of the game. I want to extract those great mind-games and offer them to everyone, not just the few who can pass the other extraneous tests.

Paper, Rock, Scissors in Other Games

Even these guys play rock, paper, scissors.Every competitive game I can think of has some conceptual tie to paper, rock, scissors. For a game to be interesting, there have to be different options, and the opponent has to be able to counter those options if he knows what you will do. Sometimes this means guessing whether Zerg will ground rush you or go for an air attack in StarCraft. Sometimes it’s guessing whether to go grenade (paper), rifle (rock), or melee (scissors) in Halo. Sometimes it’s guessing whether to attack (paper), throw (rock), or block (scissors) in Street Fighter.

Timing is also a key component here. Street Fighter, for example, appears to be a game of complete information. At any given moment, you can see exactly what both characters are doing and what their resources and options are. And yet if this were actually true, it would not be much of a game. Fighting games only work at all because of their double-blind nature: at the moment when you do a move, you usually do NOT know what the opponent is doing exactly. Human perception is only so fast, so you’re acting on information that’s a few sixtieths of a second old. At the exact moment you jump, you do not know if the opponent threw a fireball or not unless he threw it several frames ago. Most of your moves are essentially made in a double-blind situation, though I don’t think most players really understand that. This is true in other genres as well, though it doesn’t often happen on such a short time-scale as in fighting games.

Paper, rock, scissors already is double-blind, of course. At the moment you choose rock, you do not know what your opponent chose, except from an informed guess based on his history or tendencies. Even though paper, rock, scissors does offer different options (three options to be exact), a way to counter each one, and the nice double-blind structure that makes it all work, it’s still not very interesting to most people. (I should note it has a weirdly large following at worldrps.com, though.) There isn’t enough information to go on to really read someone’s mind. There isn’t any Valuation-testing at all because everything is worth the same amount.

The Two Secret Sauces to Improve Paper, Rock, Scissors

One of the secret sauces I used to spice up RPS.To spice things up, we need to add two varieties of secret sauce. The first one I covered years ago in another article about paper, rock, scissors: different payoffs for each option. If winning with rock is worth 10 points, while winning with scissors is worth 3 and paper only 1, then I have some opportunity to read your mind. Are you type of person who will go for the 10, even though you know I know about it? Are you the type who will sneak in a bunch of single point papers because you know only a fool would ever counter paper? I can at least start to measure you and make more educated guesses about your behavior.

The property of unequal payoffs isn’t enough though. Mathematically, you can’t do better than randomly choosing between rock, scissors, and paper in a 10:3:1 ratio. That said, it’s still a lot better than equal payoffs because at least human nature starts to come into play. But we can do better.

The second secret sauce to making paper, rock, scissors deep is unclear payoffs. What if we all know that rock is worth the most, but it’s not exactly clear whether it’s worth 5 times more than paper or 10 times more? Now following the 10:3:1 randomization strategy mentioned above is not as important as actually understanding the relative value of the pieces and how they change over time—and that’s Valuation. Part of the skill we want to test is the ability to make on-the-fly judgments about what things are really worth. Ideally these judgments are so complicated that you must use your intuition to solve them and knowing the exact answer is virtually impossible. Incidentally, using intuition rather than math to make a decision in a game makes the game more “fun” anyway.

This guy got a clear payoff. Will Yomi tournaments be this big?

The Yomi: Fighting Card Game System

Now we need a system that is so complicated that its exact paper-rock-scissors payoffs can’t even be calculated, and yet so simple that anyone could play it. It sounds like a tall order, but here’s how I did it.

Each player starts with one deck that represents his character. These are fixed (non-customizeable) decks with 52 poker-type cards, 2 jokers, and one character card. You could use these decks to play poker, but the cards have extra information on them for the Yomi game. The numbered cards represent normal attacks, the face cards are special attacks, the aces are super attacks, and the jokers are “bursts” used to get out of trouble.

Established Conventions Convey Information Quickly

I deliberately used the conventions of a poker deck in order to instantly convey a lot of information to the player. When you see a queen that is a Dragon Punch card, you know right away that that there are three more of them in your deck. You also immediately know how likely you are to draw a super move (there are four aces in your deck). You probably also have at least some intuition about how often pairs and straights come up if you’ve played any other cards games at all. Because I need to convey so much information and make it seem natural, it was very useful to piggyback onto a structure everyone already knows. (Two of them, in fact! Yomi: Fighting Card Game contains Street Fighter moves/characters as one bundle of information that a lot of people are vaguely familiar with as well as the poker structure that almost everyone is familiar with.)

Double-blind Decisions

The core of the game is that each turn, each player plays one card face down, so that his choice is double-blind with the opponent. Each card has two options on it, so the orientation of the face down card does matter. The side you orient closest to your opponent is the move you chose. Both cards are revealed simultaneously to see who won the exchange. Attacks beat throws; throws beat blocks and dodges; and blocks and dodges beat attacks. Different things happen depending on which option you win with—this is where the unequal and unclear payoffs come in.

Attack, Throw, Dodge, and Block Have Unequal Payoffs

1) Attack
Usually, the best way to deal damage is to win with an attack. (If you both attack at the same time, the faster one wins). When you win with an attack, you can then perform a combo by playing more cards from your hand. There are rules for combos, and part of the fun of the game is saving up for big combos. Normal attacks can be chained together, but only in increasing sequential order like a straight in poker. Normal moves also can also combo into specials or supers. Each character (deck) has a “combo limit” which limits how big a combo can be each turn. The specifics of the combo system aren’t important to go into right now, and they’re written on the cards anyway.

On a side note, there is tension between saving up straights (for chain combos) and saving up pairs. At the end of each turn, you have the option of discarding pairs, three-of-a-kinds, or four-of-a-kinds to search your deck or discard pile for either one, two, or three aces respectively. Is it worth it to break up a pair of fives to use one in a chain combo instead of trading in the pair for an ace? The answer is unclear and depends on a lot of things about the current situation.

2) Throw
Winning with a throw is very similar to winning with an attack, except that your resulting combo is usually not as good because of the way the stats on the throws are designed.

3) Dodge
Winning with a dodge lets you avoid an incoming attack completely, and then lets you hit back with any single attack. You can’t do combos though, so do your strongest attack, hopefully a super.

4) Block
Winning with a block lets you return your block card to your hand and draw an additional card. Note that you get to return the block card to your hand if the opponent attacks, blocks, or dodges, and you only have to discard it if your block gets thrown.

Unclear Payoffs

As I explained earlier, the payoffs are unclear. How good is drawing an extra card when you block an attack? It depends how many cards you have and somewhat on how many cards the opponent has. How good is winning with an attack? It depends on how big of a combo you can do. How bad is it if you try to throw but get hit by an attack? It depends on what kind of combo your opponent has built up, and you only have indirect information about that. Would it be twice as bad to get hit by his combo compared to letting him draw a card? Three times? One half times?

Players Naturally Develop a Pattern

These girls are somewhat related to what we're talking about here.Even though the payoffs are unclear, a definite pattern develops in how people tend to play. This exactly the property we want because it sets up the mind-games perfectly. If you are low on cards, I know you want to block to draw more, and you know I know. If I just traded in several pairs for aces, you know I’m itching to dodge so I can hit back with a super attack, and I know you know. Will you follow “the script” and do the obvious thing? Or will you go to the next Yomi layer and do the counter to the obvious thing? Or to the Yomi layer after that and counter the counter? These types of mind-games occur in just about every worthwhile competitive game, and the Yomi card game lets you practice these situations and practice reading opponents.

Special Abilities Make Payoffs More Unclear

There are more nuances. Each character has a special ability on his character card as well as two more special abilities that appears in the deck. For example, Ken's character ability lets him pay 3 life (starting life: 90) for each attack card he played this turn that he'd like to return to his hand. This is yet another Valuation test, constantly asking you how much you think each card is worth. Also, each of Ken’s 7s can be used for his “crossup” ability that gives him a 50% chance for his attacks to beat a block.

These abilities make computing the exact payoffs even more difficult because they manipulate so many different kinds of things about the game. Some improve the quality of cards in your hand, others make the opponent discard, others increase the speed of your attacks, others let you teleport out of a bad guess, and so on.

I could have put special abilities on every card, but I don’t want the game to be overwhelming. Even with just one ability on your character card and two others on eight cards in your deck, there is enough going on to make it very unclear what the smartest thing to do at any given time is, while keeping the game easy to play. Testers of the game often argue about what’s smart to do in various situations, and then I settle the debates by beating them without calculating anything at all, and just guessing right every time. Just kidding (sort of).

Conclusion

That’s the overview. It’s a game of paper, rock, scissors with unclear and unequal payoffs that tests Yomi and Valuation skills. Because the game is so boiled down to these essentials, I think it’s an interesting way to learn what these two skills are really all about. These are the two fundamental skills of competitive games, so I hope that whatever you learn from playing Yomi will help you in all your competitive gaming exploits adventures.

NOTE: The Yomi card game is still under development and not commercially available yet.

--Sirlin

Designing Kongai

This article explains the origins and design choices of my virtual card game called Kongai, which you can play here:

http://www.kongregate.com/cards

The First Inklings of Kongai

While Jim Greer was the technical director at the casual game site pogo.com, one of the things he oversaw was the pogo badges system. This allows players to earn icons in various games on that site, and show off their achievements to other players. Microsoft used this same idea with their aptly named Xbox Achievements. Now Jim is stealing his own idea back at his new casual game site Kongregate.com.

This time around there's an interesting twist. When you complete the challenges for various casual games on Kongregate.com, you don't *just* win an icon; you win a card that's part of a metagame that ties the whole site together. Jim asked me to design that game. I told him there are many pitfalls in this idea and I could think of at least one hundred ways to do it wrong. Jim asked how I'd do it right.

This is supposed to show that MTG's mythic rare rip-off scheme is ok.The first thing that came to mind was avoiding the style of game where we have artificial rarity for a few very powerful cards. There are going to be some players who get caught up in the fun of collecting cards, and there will be others who actually want to play this metagame. For that second group, I want them to have relatively easy access to all the cards. This doesn't conflict with Kongregate's business plan because the challenges aren't meant to be incredibly hard--they're meant to be interesting enough to bring the average player back to the site. We *could* make some cards extremely hard to get, but only if they have no gameplay differences from the easier-to-get version. For example, a very difficult challenge might get you a different border on the card, or different art, or a different icon for the edition of the card.

Along these same lines, I wanted all the cards to be approximately the same power level. I'm aware of Mark Rosewater's stance over at Magic: The Gathering that there should be a lot of bad cards on purpose to give players the fun of not choosing them. Mark is brilliant and I love his work, but on this point I disagree. I like the Guild Wars philosophy that as you gain more cards (or abilities in that game), you are gaining the ability to create a wider and wider variety of decks, but not more and more powerful decks.

Another thing I wanted to avoid was a game that required a lot of cards to play. So-called constructed decks in Magic: The Gathering have 60 cards, but winning 60 challenges on Kongregate.com just so you can try a new deck would be way too hardcore. Even if we gave you 60 to start, winning 60 ore to make a totally different deck is way too many. I wanted a game that could be played with relatively few cards.

With these ideas in mind--not too hard to get cards, no intentially bad cards, and small deck size--I needed to actually create a game. I had several candidates, not to mention three other card games I was already working on for my own amusement, but one idea rose to the top: Pokemon Netbattle.

Pokemon For Adults

Years ago on sirlin.net, I created a thread asking people to name a game that satisfied my long list of requirements for a good competitive game. I could not really think of any game that met them all, so I asked my readers. An unusually high number suggested Pokemon Netbattle, and it took them a while to get through to me that they didn't mean the Pokemon trading card game, which is a totally different game. What they meant is the turn-based battle system that's inside all the Pokemon role playing games on GBA and Nintendo DS. The fans of the game extracted the combat portion only, including all equations and stats, and created a PC online version that removes all the rpg stuff. Even though I do not have much experience playing this game, when Jim asked me for a metagame for Kongregate.com, I remembered all the good properties of Pokemon Netbattle, and it seemed like a good fit. It has good strategy, requires only one action from the player per turn (simple), and has small decks of 6 cards.

Here's a more complicated version of Kongai, for kids.

Here's a quick note on "good" versus "new." If I copied the Pokemon game exactly, it would not be new. I personally don't care at all about new, I only care about good. Besides, this game would be new to the vast majority of our audience at Kongregate because most people are not familiar with Pokemon Netbattle. That said, I decided to make lots of changes to how the game works, but they were all in the interests of creating a better game that's easier to learn. None of the changes were made for the sake of being new.

I'll tell you how the game actually works, but first I'll list the major areas I changed from the Pokemon game:

• Character switching mechanic changed
• Attack type system vastly simplified
• All math equations vastly simplified, replaced with simple arithmetic
• Mechanic for multiple hits added
• New mechanic for fighting at close range / far range
• Meter management system added/revamped

Most of you probably have no idea how these game work in the first place, so here's a quick explanation of the Pokemon game first. In that game, each player has a deck of 6 characters. Each turn, each player makes only one decision, but it's done in a double-blind simultaneous fashion. Your only choices are a) do one of your character's four possible attacks or b) switch to one of your remaining characters. So you might decide to do your attack A and your opponent might do his attack C. Then these choices are revealed simultaneously. The faster attack hits first, then the slower attack hits second. If one player chose to switch out, then his incoming Pokemon will get hit by the enemy's attack. When you lose all your characters, you lose the game.

Pokemon Is Really Complicated For No Good Reason

These mechanics are very simple, but learning the game is actully not simple so there was a lot I thought I could improve on. To understand this, let's look at how a Pokemon player should go about deciding what to do during his turn. Why choose Attack A over B? Why switch characters instead of attacking? A lot of the strategy of the game comes from a concept called resistence. There are 17 attack types in Pokemon (such as fire, grass, psychic, dragon, etc.). There is a 17 x 17 chart telling you how good each attack type is against each other attack type. In some cases, you'll do double damage, others you'll do normal damage, others you'll do half damage, and in others, no damage at all. If you understand and internalize this chart, you can use attacks that are very effective against your enemy's resistance, and force him to attack with attacks that are weak or have no effect because of your resistances.

Just internalize this chart and you're ready to play Pokemon.

On top of all that, each move is classifed as either a normal or special attack. Your character might have good resistance to normal attacks but weak to special attacks, in addition to the layer of resistances provided by the 17 x 17 chart. When both players understand this, it leads to interesting mind games. If your current active character has a very favorable mathup against my currently active character, we both know I'd like to switch out. But will I? Because of the metagame (players know which Pokemon are popular and tend to be in decks), you can probably guess which exact Pokemon I'd like to swtich to in order to counter yours. If you're really clever, you'll do an attack that's strong against the Pokemon I might switch in (that you haven't even seen yet!) instead of doing the obvious move of a strong attack against my current active character.

The problem is that none of this is interesting at all until both players have internalized an unreasonable amount of data. Ironically, little kids have a better chance at this, because they have been explosed to so much Pokemon media (games, tv show, movies, card games) that they already instinctively know whether grass-type beats bug-type or not (nope) and whether dark-type beats ghost-type or not (yep). We need a simpler system that doesn't require a 17x17 chart.

I decided to go with only three attack types: physical, light magic, and dark magic. Each character has three resistance numbers, one for each attack type. I also got rid of all complicated math that goes on behind the scenes. If you attack with for 15 physical damage and your opponent has 4 physical resistnace, then you will do 15 - 4 = 11 damage. Very straightforward. Note that it doesn't matter how much or little resistance the enemy has to light or dark magic when you do a physical attack.

This makes the game much easier to understand, but it removes too much strategy. There isn't enough "play" in dancing between three attack types as there is in dacing between 17. I needed to create more nuances. The first was the concept of multiple-hitting attacks. The rule is that resistances are subtracted from *each hit* of a multi-hitting attack. For example, if an attack does 10x4 damage (that's 10 damage four times in succession), then a resistance of 3 would make it do (10-3)x4 = 28 damage. But if that same attack had been a single hit for 40, then a resistance of 3 would only take it down to 37 damage. So all things being equal, you'd rather do a single hit for 40 than a multiple hit that adds up to 40, because the single hit is less susceptable to the enemy's resistances.

There are a couple other factors to consider though. Each character has a health meter and an energy meter. The energy meter is similar to a Rogue's energy meter in World of Warcraft. It holds 100 points of energy, starts full, and refills quickly (20 points per turn). But moves cost energy to perform, so now you have to coniser not just how much damage a move does, but also how much energy it costs. As part of the basic game design, it costs less energy to do a multi-hitting move for X damage than it does to do a single hit move for X damage. So the best possible case for you is if you fight an enemy with, say, no resistance at all to your multi-hitting move. You will then get to do all damage from every hit, and you didn't even have to pay the higher energy cost of a single hit. If the enemy *does* have resistance to whatever type your multi-hit move is though, it will probably be very ineffective. You'd be better off paying a bit more for a single hit move that isn't effected much by resistance.

A second thing to consider is that any bonuses you have (such as +1 damage) apply to each hit of your moves. So a multi-hit move can be powered up much more than a single-hit move. The point is, this system creates several nuances, but all of them are goverened by straight arithmetic and no elaborate chart is needed.

These days you can play games on the web with chat built right in.

Character Switching

One of the major changes I made was the character switching mechanic. As always, when you switch character, you gave up your chance to attack that turn. But Kongregate's game needed more ways for you to maneuver around attacks. Without the vast design space of the 17 x 17 chart, you needed some extra ways to avoid stuff when you know it's coming. This is why in Kongregate's game, switching characters lets you COMPLETELY AVOID all damage from your enemy's attack. If you know they will attack, you can make them waste the energy they paid to attack, and make them deal zero damage. Of course, they'll need a counter to this if they know you will switch, which is why I added the new mechanic called intercept.

Intercept does nothing at all if the enemy attacks--you just get hit. But if the enemy switches characters, your inercept will prevent the switch AND deal 35 damage, a huge amount. That means your opponent skipped his attack (because he chose to switch characters instead), he doesn't get to switch, and he takes a huge amount of damage. This intentionally creates a game of paper, rock, scissors with highly weighted outcomes. If you have an opponent down to very little life, everyone knows he wants to switch out (he'll heal one hit point per turn while switched out, by the way). Or, if your opponent's character has little or no energy left to pay for moves, everyone knows he wants to switch out. So the "textbook" thing to do is to intercept him in this case. This creates a good mind game where you have to read how crazy your opponent is. Is he crazy enough to actually attack when his character has 2 hit points left? Is he crazy enough to attack two turns in a row? Three turns in a row?!

Fighting at Close or Far Range

So far, we have energy meter management, we have paper/rock/scissors system of attack/intercept/switch, and we have single/multi-hit attacks and three types of resistances. This almost gives the players enough wiggle room to use good strategy, but I wanted players to have one more tricky way to influence the fight: attack ranges.

Each turn, the fight will take place at either close range or far range. Each attack in the game is designated as either a cloes range attack, a far range attack, or both (can be done at either range). Some characters must be far to be most effective, others must be close to be most effective, and others are able to fight at both ranges. This mechanic lets you try to change the range in order to get an advantage, but it's intentionally expensive to change ranges: it costs 50 energy points (half your energy meter) to attempt to change it.

This brings the total number of decisions per turn from 1 to 2. Now, you must first decide wheither you want to try to get close (50 energy), try to get far (50 energy) or just go with the flow (0 energy). If you decide to go with the flow (which you usually will because spending 50 energy is a lot), then you're allowing the enemy to pick the range for the turn. If one player chooses close and the other chooses far, then the choices cancel each other and the range is set to whatever it was last turn.

The double-blind nature of the choice can make it a hard decision sometimes. Imagine that you are playing a character who is great at close range, but poor at far range. The range is currently close (yay!) but now you must choose which range you want for this turn. You'd like to pass (go with the flow), so'll get to keep your 50 energy and fight at your optimal range. But your opponent might move to far and then you'll be very unhappy. To guard against this, you decide to choose close range (50 energy) even though you're already at close range. This guarantees you'll fight at close range, because if the enemy chooses far, that will just cancel out your choice and the range will remain the same. So you choose close (50 energy). Remember this choice is double-blind, so after you committed your choice, it's revealed that your enemy chose to pass (0 energy). You psyched yourself out into spending 50 energy for nothing. The fight would have been at close range even if you passed.

One good thing about the range mechanic is that it's visual. Your characters on-screen are either standing far apart or close together, and it's obvious which range you're at. It's also a lot easier to deal with three resistances in your head than it is to deal with 17. It's easier to deal with simple arithmetic that you can easily compute yourself before you attack, than relying on a hidden algorithm to determine stats and damage. And finally, it's easier to actually participate in the paper, rock, scissors part of the game with attack/switch/dodge than it is to participate in the 17 x 17 version of the paper, rock, scissors in Pokemon.

Focus on Strategy and Reading the OpponentCan Kongai improve your yomi skills?

And yet for all this simplification, you still have a lot of opportunity to be smart and sneaky. I've only told you the basic skeleton of the game, but there's also a lot of twists and turns added because every character has his own special ability (that automatically takes place--you don't have to click anything to make it happen). Also, every attack has a chance at producing an extra effect of some sort. And finally, as in Pokemon, you can equip one item card to each character which gives him even one more automatic ability. None of these require any extra clicks from you, but they create more opportunity for strategy.

With attack/switch/intercept, resistnaces, changing ranges, and automatic special abilities, you can really size-up what kind of person you think your opponents is and start to outplay them by reading what you think they will do. There's enough going on that players tend to develop patterns you can use against them. And most importantly of all, it's relatively easy for players to go from beginners with no clue about anything to intermetidates who grasp enough of the game to develop decision tendencies.

Head over to Kongregate.com, win some challenges, and try it out for yourself.

--Sirlin

Writing Well, Part 3: Origins of a Writer

When writers are asked how to write well, they often reflexively talk about their childhood and how they became writers. James Joyce did it, George Orwell did it, and Steven King did it. I thought this was a strange pattern at first, but now I understand it. Writing well is not just about clarity and omitting needless words—it goes all the way down to the core of a person, and so writers tend to tell you about who they are to explain how or why they write as they do.

Many of us had that one teacher. That one horrible teacher who either hated you, or you hated, or both. I thought long about whether I should protect the names of the guilty, but I think we should all be held accountable for our actions, good or bad, and so I’ll tell you that her name was Professor Ellen Cooney of the MIT writing department. I have encountered many people over the years who disagree with me, insult me, or stand in my way, but never before or since Professor Cooney did I actually think to myself, “At least she will probably be dead before me because she’s older.”

Mr. Spock will be born in the year 2230 at Shi'Kahr, Vulcan.Before we get to her, I’ll tell you about what happened eight years earlier, in 7th grade. I was in Algebra I, an advanced math class for a 7th grader, because my 6th grade teacher said I was good at math. I had no idea I was good at math before that as I wasn’t particularly good at arithmetic. (Just as writing isn’t spelling—math isn’t arithmetic, so I’d be ok in that class.) After the first test in that class, my friend got a perfect score and I didn’t do very well. I thought back to all the episodes of Star Trek I watched every weeknight at midnight during the summer, and about how Mr. Spock would have gotten a perfect score, too. And how could anyone not get a perfect score? You just follow things through to their logical conclusion and you get the right answer. From that day on, I was good at math and I liked it (and science, too). That’s where my head was.

Except for a girl, that is. Her name was Jenny Sime. I said I’d mention the names of the guilty, so it’s only fair that I mention the names of the innocent, too. (Dear Jenny: did you notice the ironic double meaning of the word “innocent,” as applied to you?) Jenny and I loved ironic double meanings. I talked to her on the phone often, for hours. She was there when the wet cement of my personality was hardening, and I can still feel her impression. We each delighted in the use of language, always saying things without saying them. We understood each other, and even if our classmates could have listened in, they would not have grasped our subtlety. I learned to choose my words carefully with Jenny Sime, and to give them just the right shade of meaning. She gave me plenty of practice, too. I don’t know how much of language ability comes from nature and how much comes from nurture, but it’s probably no coincidence that I had so much practice with language at that young age, and that I’m so adept with it now.

I got an A on every essay in every English class all four years of high school. I was not “one of them,” though, the literature kids I mean. I wasn’t into poetry or literature or reading any of that squishy stuff. I was the math and science kid who stopped by English class to get his A, usually causing a lot of trouble and debate. English teachers and I never had much regard for each other, and I knew some of them absolutely cringed at giving me those A’s, but what else could they do? I remember thinking at one point in high school that it would be an ultimate joke of the universe after all my hating of English classes if I would somehow end up a writer instead of a mathematician or physicist. (Note to the universe: nice one.)

By the time I encountered Ellen Cooney, I knew how to write and I knew how to get an A on a writing assignment. I started her class by writing a short story in the style of Jack London (my choice) about a man and his dog. I thought it was pretty good. She hated it. The narrator actively judged the man in the first and last sentence of the story, on purpose. She hated that even more.

I didn’t know exactly why she hated it, and I wasn’t used to that kind of reaction. She kept saying, “It’s not literature! We write literature here.” It took me the whole semester to even get an inkling of what literature meant to her. It seemed mostly to mean, “boring stuff written by the students who I personally like talking to in class.” She said my story was too fake and she wouldn’t even accept it, much less grade it. She said I had to write another story instead.

This is what writing feels like most of the time.

I may have some ability at writing, but writing takes me a very long time. What’s worse is that I can’t compartmentalize it from the rest of my life. When I write something, the actual time I spend typing is between 1% and 5% of the total time investment. The rest is spent day dreaming about it, thinking of how the ideas will go together, about this sentence that should appear halfway through, about things I might need to research first, and so on. And when all that’s sorted out, I still have to wait around for the moment when I’m not tired, hungry, or distracted. Then I have to keep waiting even more until I’m also inspired. I believe at least three of the planets must be aligned, too, or two plus a moon at the least. The point is, writing another story was a major time investment.

I don’t remember what happened with that second story, but I bet she hated it too. On the assignment after that, I wrote a story about a man who took a long journey to find a magic coin, but there was some kind of trick about how the guy who told him about the coin was not who he seemed. Yeah, she hated that one even more. I spent a very time long on that one making sure it was well-written, too. She said it was “genre writing,” not literature, and that it could appear alongside any other fantasy writing on a store shelf and blend right in. (Is that an insult or a compliment?) Apparently literature couldn’t contain magic. It also couldn’t be a mystery, have too much action, or much violence, I would later learn. Meanwhile, we read a story about two girls who lived in an isolated country-side and used to play together as children, then they tried to keep in touch as adults but their lives had diverged too much to make the same kind of connection. Now that was literature, she said. I have to admit, even though it had no apparent point, it did feel real when I read it.

She made me write two stories for every one that anyone else wrote in that class. It was an incredible amount of time and work and she hated all of it. I wondered why she made me do all that if I was so terrible, yet none of the other students had to.

I wonder if Mr. Spock ever went to any 3D Chess tournaments. Remember that episode where he programmed the computer to play Chess and it beat him?For my final assignment in that class, I decided to write something I knew enough about to bring to life. I wrote about a young man who was entering his first Chess tournament and the various personalities he encountered at the event. The antagonist was a tricky jerk who had enough experience with how the events were run to mess with the main character’s mind. They would face each other in the tournament, and I even went through the trouble of coming up with a real chess situation that was interesting in itself, and that illustrated the mental sparring between the characters. And I took great care describing this so it wouldn’t be boring or overly technical for non-Chess players.

Guess what, she hated it. She said I was a failure as a writer and I’m guessing she added that I’d never amount to anything, for cliché’s sake. She said, and I quote, “You are a master of linguistic flourishes, but you ultimately have nothing to say.” Wow! Yes, she really said it, exactly like that. A master of linguistic flourishes…but ultimately with nothing to say. That was over ten years ago and I remember it exactly.

I began to wonder if she was right. She was a close-minded bitch, sure, but what was I trying to say with that story about the guy and his dog or about the magic coin? Maybe nothing. At least the Chess story had some point. The year after that in another writing class, I decided to write a comedy about depression (challenging!) and another story about someone who is trapped in his own superstitions, but ultimately realizes that he controls his own destiny in life. I was at least trying to really say something.

A few years later, I had a lot to say. I had competed in and organized numerous video game tournaments, and I kept seeing the same annoying losing attitudes. The players I hung out with didn’t have these hangups, but the ones on the periphery often had the whole concept of competition wrong. So I wrote Playing to Win, Part 1. I finally had something to say, and I never got so much attention for writing anything until then.

William Strunk, Jr. famously said to omit needless words. I’ve come to look at this in a new light, and when I see writing that doesn’t really say anything, I wish all the words were omitted. There are a lot of mechanics involved with writing well, but it doesn’t amount to much unless you have something to say. Having something to say often goes along with taking a stand on something. Research what you’re interested in, live life and accumulate experiences, stand up for what you think is right and fight against what you think is wrong. It takes a certain kind of person to do that. Writing is often about revealing a truth or exposing a lie, so it’s no wonder that so many writers are the kind of people who don’t care what people think of them—they care about the truth and saying what they have to say. I don’t mean pop novelists either, I mean Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. Even Richard Feynman was a great writer in this regard when he wasn’t busy being one of the world’s leading physicists. He even wrote a book called What Do You Care What Other People Think?

I worked with an amazing graphic designer for a while until he quit and went to another company. In our last conversation, the day before he left, I asked him how he became so good. How is it that he’s so much better at what he does than most others who try to do it? He said in art school, there was one Korean guy in his class who really shouldn’t have been in there. The Korean guy already took these classes in his own country, but his credits didn’t transfer over for some reason. My friend said he always studied the Korean guy, how he made this line, how he made that shadow, whether he added decoration here or not, and so on. He told me that when some students presented their projects, they had some big artistic vision they were trying to communicate, but they always fell so far short. My friend never focused on that—he focused on execution instead. His reasoning was that once he had mastered the mechanics of graphic design, he would then be able to think about what artistic statements he wanted to make. I did not take such a conscious journey as my graphic designer friend, but perhaps the result is the same: first, how to put sentences together properly, then having things to say.

Many years ago, I had some things to say about game design, so I wrote them down and shared them with all of you. Then for years I wrote design documents and pitches for games. I wrote them with great care. Not only can I not show them to you, but for reasons unrelated to game design, almost none of them came to life. During this time, I have not said much to you, and maybe it was for the best. Even the horse Mr. Ed will never speak unless he has something to say.

Now I have some things to say again. A little of it will be about game design, a little about competition, and most of it about how to think and how to create. But those things are for another time, we’re talking about writing now.

I'm not sure what she thinks about when she sits down to write, but I'm curious.When I sit down to write, I don’t think about Jenny Sime and the nuances of language I practiced with her all those years ago. Caring about exact shades of meaning is second nature now. But I do sometimes think of Professor Cooney as I write. “A master of linguistic flourishes but ultimately with nothing to say?” I’ll show her, I sometimes think. I’ll prove to her that I do have something to say, and that I’ll say it no matter what the consequences or what anyone thinks. I’ve even developed her same contempt for other people’s empty writing. It was hard to take that criticism back then, but I’m almost willing to admit that she was right.

Maybe being fueled by such a negative fire is a bad thing, but being fueled by no fire is far worse. I’ll leave you with this quote from a guy who’s sold a few books.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

—Stephen King

--Sirlin