Puzzle Strike is Coming

Watch It Played just got their hands on the upcoming Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition + Shadows expansion.

Watch It Played did a really great series on Flash Duel, so I'm willing to bet the upcoming Puzzle Strike videos will really help show how the game works and demonstrate by example what's fun and strategic about it.

Thanks to everyone who supported the game on kickstarter. I think we'll be able to ship out to all of you in September as planned, though I'm always nervous about last minute-manufacturing / shipping delays. Really doing our best to hit that date. And that would mean everyone else would be able to order in October from either sirlingames.com or your local game stores (a list of participating stores at gamestorelocator.com). And while you wait, the online version is playable right now at fantasystrike.com!

Playing to Win in Badminton

There's a recent controversy about players losing intentionally in Olympic badminton. A lot of people involved seem concerned that it's embarrassing for the sport. It its. It's embarrassing that some officals and spokesmen of the sport have so little understanding of Playing to Win that they think the players are at fault.

Playing Fake Matches

I have run many fighting game tournaments, and I have witnessed fake matches. I completely agree that fake matches make a mockery of the tournament. This is so important that one of the MOST IMPORTANT considerations when designing a set of tournament rules is to minimize the chances of fake matches occurring.

Forfeiting a match and playing a fake match are similar (in both cases, one side is losing on purpose), but not exactly the same. Forfeiting should be a natural right of any player in any tournament. A player should be able to forfeit for any reason or no reason, and this must be make explicitly clear in the rules. Further, it should be explicit that if a player (or team) wants to forfeit, then they should NOT play a fake match. Playing a fake match is about the worst possible thing for a competition because of the impact on spectators. If the rules make it clear that simply forfeiting is far preferable to playing a fake match and that forfeiting comes with no penalty, then the rules will have stomped out 90% to 100% of fake matches right from the start. It's just a lot more effort to play a fake match and there'd be no benefit over forfeiting.

That's not the whole solution though, not even close. That's just the failsafe you need in case there is any incentive to lose on purpose in the first place. It should be self-evident that if a tournament system ever gives players an incentive to lose, then it's a problematic tournament sytem.

Losing on Purpose

Let's look at some cases where you'd want to lose on purpose. First a few that don't have to do with the Olympic Badminton case, then the one that does. (If you only care about that, skip to the "Back to Our Story" section below.)

Let's start with two terms from game design: lame-duck and kingmaker. In a game with more than two players (or more than two teams), a "kingmaker" is someone who can, through his or her in-game actions, decide which OTHER player will win the game. The kingmaker is so far behind that he can't win, but he could deal a card (or whatever) to Alice or to Bob, which would determine the winner. This is considered really bad because you'd hope Alice or Bob would win off their own skills, not from some 3rd party's vote. "Lame-duck" (a term I use because I don't know what else to call it in game design) is the portion of a game where a certain player cannot possibly win anymore but somehow they are still stuck playing the game. Lame duck players are ripe to be kingmakers. When you don't have skin in the game anymore, so to speak, your potential to screw things up for others is pretty high. (Note that this is NOT what's going on the badminton case right now.)

Swiss. The kind of Swiss that at some point cuts to  single elimination (for a more exciting finish) is full of lame ducks and kingmakers. In this format, you need a certain win/loss record to make that cut, but you can keep playing against more opponents even if you have a win/loss record that is *guaranteed* to NOT make the cut (lame duck). It's entirely possible that you will face someone who still has skin in the game: if they win they will make the cut to the top 8; if they lose, they won't. And you can decide that by forfeiting or not, with no effect on yourself, because you are definitely going to lose the tournament either way. Magic: the Gathering uses this format. You'd expect it would lead to shady situations because of all the lame duck / kingmaker stuff. And it does.

Round Robin. In this format every player (or team) plays every other player (or team). It has the very same problem as Swiss: lame ducks and kingmakers. You can be in lame duck situation yet determine the fate of your opponents. This is just ripe for their being under-the-table payoffs. Round Robin also has problems with the order that matches happen to occur in. If you have to play all your matches right at the start, you don't have the benefit of knowing the results of all the other (future) matches, so you don't know if you can get away with losing on purpose. But if your matches happen to be scheduled for later in the tournament, you do know the results of so many other matches that you can now do shady things. So all players don't even have equal access to the shady tactics, as it depends on the luck of scheduling.

Back to Our Story

And now we come to the actual problem with the Olympic badminton situation. There are "pools" of round robin play where the top 2 finishers from a pool advance to a single elimination bracket. Further, the system of seeding in the single elimination bracket is known ahead of time. This creates the situation where you could playing pool matches but *guaranteed* to make top 2 by your record. If you win, you will qualify and play team X. If you lose, you will also qualify, but you will play team Y. If you think you have an easier chance of beating team Y, you absolutely should lose on purpose. If you don't, you aren't playing to win, and you are kind of a bad competitor. You also happen to be playing in a tournament with absurdly bad rules.

I hope it's clear by now that tournament systems absolutely can have incentives to lose. And if you are holding such a high profile tournament as *the Olympics*, then I hope you'd deeply understand all this and design a system that minimizes or removes all incentives to lose, and adds in the failsafe of encouraged forfeit rather than fake matches if there was some overlooked edge case. It's LAUGHABLE to put even the tiniest amount of blame on the competitors who are playing to win here, when the tournament rules so clearly, so obviously, and so predictably have major problems. That is, you wouldn't need to even hold a tournament to detect this problem. You could just read the rules, see the clear and major flaws in them, then you'd want to direct your blame at the rules writers and correct the system.

It's doubly laughable to actually disqualify the players involved—how about disqualifying the judges? They don't seem capable of making competent decisions about tournament practices. Those who conspired to disqualify players for playing optimally inside a bad rules system are doing the sport a real disservice. Hearing about fake matches in badminton should make our opinion go down, but hearing about the sport's inability to see glaring problems in its own tournament structure should make our opinion go down an extra ten notches.

It's an embarrassing time for Olympic badminton. But not because some players lost on purpose—because someone created horrificly bad tournament rules and then tried to blame the competitors for playing to win.

John Cleese on Creativity

John Cleese gives us an excellent lecture on his notions of what creativity is. 

I completely agree with Cleese on all counts, which is to say my experience lines up exactly with what he's saying. Creativity is a frame of mind that can be cultivated and practiced. It's ruined by some kinds of people, so be sure to kick them out. It's a shedding of that "closed mode," as he says, for a while. You need the closed mode to get things done, but you need the "open mode" to get the wacky ideas that eventually turn into the actually good ideas.

I think the thing that strikes me as most true of all is the part about sticking with something, and putting in more time. That goes against the stereotype, as we might imagine really creative people instantly have amazing ideas. In my experience though, it takes a huge amount of persistence to solve creative problems. When others give up or take a kind of mediocre way out, you should instead keep at it and at it. He suggest 1.5 hours at a time though I think you can actually do much longer stretches than that once you've developed the mental stamina for it.

The other kind of time is just as important, the time you "aren't working on the problem," yet your unconscious is. In project management, this is sometimes expressed in "number of showers." For example, if we can choose to pay for 20 people to work for a 2 months on a project or for 10 people to work 4 months on it, an advantage of choosing 10 people for 4 months is that every person involved will take twice as many showers. Good ideas happen in the shower.

And while we're talking about showers, Paul Graham has spoken about that subject too. He's interacted with more startup companies than just about anyone and he once mentioned that when a startup goes into fundraising mode, they tend to get way worse at making whatever it is they're making. He said at first glance that's because if they spend X time on fundraising work and planning, they are spending X less time on making the product. But that's NOT it, he says. It's that they think about fundraising in the shower. What you think about in the shower is often what your unconscious mind has been grinding and grinding away at. So if that very valuable resource (your unconscious mind) is thinking about how to get more money, then it's not supplying you with the creativity necessary to make good products.

Thanks to John Cleese for articulating what creativity is, or isn't. I think this message is especially valuable for those people who "aren't creative," because it explains that you can solve that by setting up the right situation for yourself and getting into the right frame of mind. You can be creative.

A Discussion of Balance

Here's an episode of Extra Credits about "Perfect Imbalance" on Penny Arcade. While I appreciate that the topic of game balance is getting covered, I don't think the arguments hold up.

First it makes these two points, which I agree with:

1) The two sides in Chess are similar enough that we can call the game symmetric. ALSO, Chess requires a huge amount of memorization to play, and he wishes that you could play in a more adaptive way and have memorization be less important.

2) Starcraft requires a huge amount of APM click speed to play at a high level, and only players who are super great at that really get to innovate in the strategy space (also bad players playing against bad players can get away with more strats). He wishes that thinking about new strategies had more relative importance to the common player than high APM does.

I have posted and spoken many times about those exact two issues, so I agree. But there is then some strange leap lof logic happens. The problem of how "solved" parts of those games can feel at times is claimed to be BECAUSE they are well-balanced. The problems involved are actually 0% because the games are well-balanced. Well-balanceness is a wonderful property and should not be blamed for these problems.

Chess

Chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer also agreed that Chess had become too rigid and that memorization played too large of a role. He wanted Chess to be a game that reward moment-to-moment decisions more, strokes of genius more, adaptability more, even general grasp of fundamentals more, and memorization less. To achieve this, he created Chess960. The starting position of the pieces are randomized (according to a few rules) and then mirrored on the other side, so the game is still symmetric. He strived to keep the "perfect balance" of Chess while addressing the problem. I think it's a great idea.

The same problem that bothered Fischer and Extra Credits bothered me too. In addition that problem, the problem of too many draws bothered me, as did the slippery slope nature of the game causes it to end with conceding which is kind of anti-climactic. And in addition to that, I think asymmetric games are just more interesting than symmetric ones. So to address all of those issues, I developed Chess 2.

Chess 2 has 6 different armies (for asymmetry, creates lots of matchups) and a "midline rule" that

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Oxytocin and You

Oxytocin is a short-lived substance your body produces that has to do with feeling connected to people. Though it is perhaps more associated with females (especially relating to childbirth, breastfeeding, and maternal instinct), it's important to all people, male and female. I think it's even correlated to overall happiness, which is perhaps unfortunate for me as I've felt lacking in oxytocin for years.

Anyway, more recently ocytocin has also been linked to morality and trust. Here's Paul Zak's short (16 minute) presentation on that topic:

I find it really interesting to learn about the neurology and biological basis that drives people to be how they are, so maybe you'll find that interesting too.