Valve's Employee Handbook

I thought this video was interesting:

Brain science also talks about focusing on strengths. If you're good at X and bad at Y, you might end up spending a whole lot of time on Y. In addition to making you miserable, it's also just not that effective. While at first glance you might think if you're bad at something, then it's easier to improve because there's so much possible improvement you could do, it's usually more like the opposite. If you're good at something, your neural pathways (as in, the physical structures of your brain) are better set up to do it, and you have more ability to learn and grow quickly at that thing. So if possible, develop your strengths. And find other people whose strengths are in your areas of weakness.

In a small company, we don't usually have this luxury though. Probably the lead designer of Portal 2 didn't do all the graphic design for the box it comes in, because Valve probably has a team devoted entirely to graphic design for marketing materials and packaging. (Meanwhile, I do both things.) That said, strengths-focus is definitely something even a small company should think about when adding any employees, or even contractors or volunteers. Just a little help in your areas of weakness, you could then have much more time to develop and use your strengths to an even better degree.

In other words, Valve's handbook's stance on that makes sense to me.

Golden Balls Prisoner's Dilemma

You might have seen this video going around:

Watch it first, then I will say some things...

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What is "A Love Letter to the Community?"

Saying that SF3:3s would be better if it was better balanced has resulted in a lot of personal attacks and hatred directed toward me. Not about the stated idea, but about me personally. That's sad to see after all the support I've given fighting games over the years, from helping running tournaments to working on the games themselves. Not real encouraging, you know. There's also a really strange claim that I only want 3s to be better because I don't like the game. As hard as it is to wrap your mind around that, let's think about it.

Street Fighter Alpha2

What would a love letter to the players of Street Alpha2 look like? I really like this game. Is the reason I like it because of the balance? No, it's because of the gameplay system. Regarding the balance, there's a top tier of ken, ryu, chun li, rose and they're pretty solid all around. I mean maaaaaybe chun li's Custom Combo does a bit too much damage (or maybe it's ok), but these top characters don't really need fixing. Zangief and Sakura are just below them, within striking distance, and they happen to have an unusually interesting match against each other. Probably don't want to mess with that. It is kind of annoying that Sakura's main combo is ducking short, short, stand short, dragon punch and that it overlaps with her near-useless triple hop move that gets you killed. Probably should make that a non-overlapping input, but the fun and balance are both ok here.

And then there's Birdie. Birdie is terrible and literally the worst character in the game, worse than Dan. Yes, really. If you write a love letter to me as a fan of the game, would it involve giving me the known-bad quantity of Birdie, a character who I can't really reasonably pick, or would this "love letter" give me what I liked about the game originally AND a pickable Birdie? Well, because I love the game, I would love to have a new choice in it, so of course I'd rather have reasonable Birdie instead of worthless Birdie. I played Birdie a bit in SF Alpha1, even, and he was stronger there but not even that good. It's not to hard to adjust him back up to at least be half-decent.

Adon is another example. He doesn't have much going for him, and just making his stand roundhouse half a decent hitbox and frame stats would be at least something. One of the very few good things he has is a good low strong, and interestingly that was actually *redrawn* and made worse in SFA2 Gold. So uh, that is not a love letter. A love letter would be fixing up Birdie, Adon, and a few other things with some of the worst characters. As I outlined above, there isn't really a problem with the first and second tiers.

Puzzle Fighter

I love Puzzle Fighter! Is the reason I love it because of

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Starcraft as a Spectator Sport

I enjoyed this article mostly because it explains there's at least *somewhere* in the US where interest in a mental sport overtook the interest in a physical sport--in a place usually known for caring about physical sports, no less. A bar.

The article also mentions "information asymmetry" (something we usually refer to as double-blind info around here) is a big part of the game's entertainment. That means each players knows something that the other doesn't. I very much agree that that's a source of great entertainment and you can see that exact same concept in my games Kongai and Yomi. And the reason I hit upon using that as a design tool is that it happens in fighting games too, it's just that the time-scale of the double-blind decisions is much shorter--just a fraction of a second. But that uncertainty of often having to make your move when you aren't exactly sure what the other guy did at just that moment is where a lot of the excitement of fighting games come from. StarCraft's double blind moments are much more prolonged, so there's longer to think about them and build suspense. Does he know the other guy is amassing a huge force just outside his base? When will he realize it??

That said, fighting games are practically made for spectating. You can see all the action on one screen (a wonderful property!), the matches are fast, fortunes change, and comebacks happen. Not having to cut from screen to screen like you do in a FPS or RTS makes for a smooth spectating experience. Furthermore, it's easy to "read" what's going on (a guy punched another guy several times and his lifebar went down) compared to all the unseen effects going on in WoW Arenas or Guild Wars. I've tried to spectate several type of games, but fighting games and RTS games have been the most watchable to me.

Maybe we'll see both genres (and other mental games, too) rise in prominence as spectator activities.

Football Helmet Clown Shoes Guy

I was doing some consulting on a small game that I can't really talk about, but there's a lot of customization in the game. I was discussing with a friend (the mysterious Mr. G. Phantome) how we were going to balance this thing. He imagined a future player who works really hard to make his guy into a samurai. He has the samurai helmet and armor pieces, and a decent plasma sword and everything. And then he meets...

Football Helmet Clown Shoes Robot. The terror of the metagame, this guy destroys the samurai guy. Why? Because even though the samurai looks cool, he basically sucks. The mishmash, discordant eyesore of Football Helmet Clown Shoes guy is just way more powerful. We imagined that the forums are full of outraged players, complaining about this, but they don't really grasp the game system. They keep calling for the football helmet to be nerfed, but they don't understand that the clown shoes are what really powers the build, in fact, it's really just the left shoe.

A new player starts playing and asks what pieces he should be looking for. The experienced players tell him "Dude, you want Football Helmet and Clown Shoes, for sure." The sad new guy asks if he has any other choice. "Caveman is barely viable," says the expert. "Flower hands can win too, but loses to everything else so good luck with that."

The point of all this is just that a customizeable system can have aesthetics at odds with balance or power. You have to look out that for the problem that actual experience the player will have with the game is encountering absurdly bad-looking characters. Imagine a fighting game, for example, where one guy is wearing some ugly safari outfit and the other has a huge hat that covers half his character and some enormous robe that covers the rest, so you can hardly tell who anyone even is. Yeah it's fun to customize, but some careful art direction is in order.

Magic: the Gathering

Later, for reasons unrelated to the above, I was scrolling through some images of Magic: the Gathering cards. By chance, I happend to come across the card Donate. I asked Mr. G. Phantome if he knew about how Donate (a seemingly terrible card that gives the opponent one of your cards) was actually part of one of the most powerful and dominant decks ever. He said he was not aware. So then I showed him Illusions of Grandeur, the other part of the combo. I told him to just LOOK at the cards, not even really read what they do, but

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