 So we'll move on to our second of three. Oh, part two. You're getting a three-for-one deal, guys. That's like, we're saving you like two hours of gaming here. So a competitive test of skill. We have to first try to understand what a game is. What is a game but a miserable pile of secrets and big jokes. So there are many different definitions of game and we could talk for hours about semantics and everything. We only have 20 minutes. We're going to go right into this. These are the three definitions of game we use in most of our lectures, most of our panels. I think these are very good definitions. You left off the one about the animals. So yeah, so we always made a joke when we show a pheasant and we joke about pheasants for like a minute. We just did. Now we know we did a meta-joke about that joke and later I can do a callback to the fact that that was a meta-joke. But no, we're talking about this one. So this is not the place where we're going to talk about your single-player RPGs, your experiences, all these things. We're talking about games that are competitions. They are competitive tests of one or more skills. So we have to lay a few ground rules first to really understand what we mean by a competitive test, let alone skills or games. All games, every game you will ever play, breaks down. It is either a game that can be solved or a game that is random. Now one guy, I tried to tell this to someone once and they're like, no, no, no, no. You can't solve a game. You never know what the other guy is going to do. He could do anything. There's not like an answer like there is to a puzzle, right? It's not like there's a right answer to do and then you win the game. And I'm like, all right, let's play a game. It's called tic-tac-toe, right? It's like, yeah, games can be solved, right? It doesn't matter what the other guy does. You know what to do. So for example, checkers, chess, these games, to use game theory terms, perfect information, complete information games, checkers in 2007, Thursday, weak mathematical solution for checkers. I bring this up a lot because it's one of my favorite examples. In 1989, a bunch of people got a bunch of computers together and started calculating every possible checker's move. And it turns out that both sides can guarantee a draw no matter what and neither side can force a win. There is a solution to checkers. You can guarantee that you will, at worst, draw with the other player. Random. Yahtzee is at its core a random game. It's just a matter of did I roll a Yahtzee? Now, it doesn't matter. You know, you could be really dumb at Yahtzee and you could roll like all sixes and score that as a zero in the ones column if you really want to. But, you know, once you sort of understand how Yahtzee works, who wins and me and Rim play Yahtzee against each other, and we both try to win and we're both not kindergarteners, you know, whoever's going to win is going to be determined by the dice. What happens, you know, we're going to play and we're both going to win about 50% of the time. There's no, if there was a game of skill, the better of us would win most of the time. Now, this is where it gets interesting because that's game theory. They're either solvable or random, but we're humans. Two things that humans are really, really bad at are statistics and acting random with. So, in terms of statistics, even though checkers is solvable, you have to memorize the solution. You can. And even though Yahtzee is random, if you have it solved Yahtzee and you don't know how to play optimally, then there is a strategy. There is a solution that you have not yet discovered. So, there is a blurred line between these and humans. In fact, with humans, there's actually a third kind of game that is not random, it's arbitrary. Citadels is a game like that. Basically, I'm choosing a role and Scott's choosing a role. They're all equally good in different ways. So, there's no real way to logically say I should choose this role over that role. My most optimal strategy is actually to act random with. Usually what I do in Citadels, unless there's some really obvious move, I just shuffle the cards up and pick one for the next guy. I could explain to you the rules of Citadels if you want to play a game. I would shuffle them openly behind my back and randomly pick one and not even look at it. Now, one time I cheated in Citadels, well, cheated, right, is what I would do is before everyone learned how to do this, I would select a card and hand them to the next player remembering the order of the cards. They would fan the cards out and select one like that. And I was like, he picked the third one. I knew exactly what card everyone had. We thought Scott was psychic for about a half hour. But look at this, an arbitrary game. Paper Rock Scissors is an example. So the optimal strategy, we solved it. Act randomly, you have the best chance of winning. But you're a human, you can't act randomly. So if you want to be little kids at Paper Rock Scissors, I always had this mnemonic that I've used my entire life. Consider how many steps away from an idiot child a person is and iterate through Rock Paper Scissors. A child tends to pick scissors because scissors are forbidden. Scissors are dangerous, scissors are strong. So a little kid is going to pick scissors most of the time, so you just pick Rock and you win. A kid who's a little smarter will realize that people pick scissors all the time and he'll start with Rock. So you want to start with Paper to beat the kid who's one step away from an idiot child. So Scott is, I think, 18 steps away from an idiot child, so I can iterate through with some modular math to know exactly how to beat Scott because he can't act randomly. He's a human. Yeah, unless I have a D3C with these citadels, I can shuffle the cards and act randomly, right? But if I don't have a mechanism on hand, like a D3 or something, or maybe a random number generator on my phone, how can I randomly choose Rock Paper Scissors? My brain is going to pick one of them. And it does never have a random number generator. So psychology and other factors end up affecting games that are arbitrary in a way that is different from games that are random. So what about this? My favorite picture in all of hockey. That's my second favorite. He's trying to do it. Where is hockey? I mean, Scott, do you know the solution to hockey? Put the biscuit in the basket a lot of times. All right, all right. So there's a fourth kind of game with humans. Execution. I might know the perfect strategy to beating you if you're playing ambison as Street Fighter. It doesn't mean I can pull it off. Yeah, I know the perfect strategy to beating DDR. Step on all the arrows real fast. And what we're going to say here to save everybody a lot of time is that when we talk about execution, that is where skill is involved. So what is skill? And the problem is there are thousands of definitions for skill and every field of study has a different definition of skill. So we're going to talk about a few examples that are useful in the real world instead of academic ones. Knowledge skills versus execution skills. All right, you'll see this a lot in especially modern games. People will confuse knowledge for other kinds of skills. For example, I don't know, like an MMO. If you get into an MMO and someone else will be a lot better than you, why are they a lot better than you? Well, it's not because they can click faster or they're better at solving strategic puzzles or something. It's just because they've learned where all the places are in the game. They've memorized what the weapons do. They've memorized what the other classes' abilities are. It is no, right? Imagine if there was rock, paper, scissors. Well, everyone can remember rock, beat, scissors. Scissors beats paper. Paper beats rock. What if it was a rock, paper, scissors with a million things that all went against each other, right? You know, it's not any different from the base game of rock, paper, scissors, but winning and losing comes down to how much of that chart did you memorize? Now, as opposed to, say, an execution skill where I know what I want to do, I'll put that thing in the toad hole as you all learned at PAX East. I guess they weren't at PAX East. But I know what to do in a sport. I know I want to hit the arrow over there. You know Mario's going to jump over the hole, but every time he falls, it's like one pixel shurn. Now, there's a very soft definition between knowledge skills and execution skills. For example, chess is primarily a game of knowledge in that if you haven't memorized the openings of chess, if you haven't studied chess, you're probably going to lose against someone who didn't, no matter how smart and how tactical you are, because they have these patterns already set. They can move on to a higher level of play than you could. Yeah, when you're playing, say, Go, a lot of the professional Go people just memorize these patterns. It's become knowledge to them. They know things, so they just recall it from memory and then it doesn't take execution skill to put a stone on a piece of wood. Anyone can do that. But at the same time, memorizing and holding those things in your head is, for humans, a skill. I mean, I can read Bobby Fisher's book on how to be the best chess player in the world. I'm still not going to beat Bobby Fisher at chess. So the line between these is blurred. The definition I like to use is that if I give you gnosis, if something is a knowledge skill, it means that I can give you the knowledge and you are now on equal footing with me and revealed it to you. For example, if you're playing Trivial Pursuit and you've read the rules of the game, which includes every one of those cards, you're going to win because you know all the answers. But if I tell you again, Mario just jump over Bowser at the end, that's actually kind of hard to do. Well, think about it this way. If I can give you the strategy guide to like a JRPG and you read that strategy guide and follow the instructions, guess what? You're going to beat the game with maximum everything. If I give you the strategy guide for Street Fighter, it's going to help you shit. I'm the example of that. Scott can beat me in Street Fighter and with Ambison and just jabs. Yeah, I guess. But you know, if I try to just jab, anyone actually knows how to play. Let's talk a little bit about skill caps. So we talk about games testing one or more skills. But how much relevance does a skill have? In, for example, a game of Yachty, the primarily relevant skill is being able to quickly calculate the odds of six-sided dice in aggregate. That is a skill. But that only gets you so far and then the randomness takes over beyond that. Right, so like, I can pretty much play Yachty perfectly and the rim can play Yachty perfectly. We can't learn anything, we can't improve any skill to improve our chances of winning at Yachty. We have maxed it out and whether we win or lose is now up to randomness, right? Settlers of Katan, Surro. I can play both those games effectively, optimally. In fact, we were in a Surro tournament at the last packs and the two of us ended up having to go into multiple tie breakers and Scott won by random bullshit at the end. I have a medal, it's gold, this is packs on it. There's no argument to that. But you look at, say, the Olympics, right? What's the skill cap, you know? Usain Bolt is faster and faster all the time. What is the limit? How much more skill can he get? And, you know, there is no real limit yet. I mean, I'm sure it's somewhere around 9.7 seconds, but, yeah. So we get to Cyborg Olympics. That'd be the best. So we talked about a whole bunch of stuff. Let's talk about some actual games and try to understand what skills they are testing. Start with Dominion, because this is a perfect example. Dominion is a game that literally is a test of how quickly you can solve it. You get a different layout of cards. Every game is a different board. And the goal is just based on these cards, which you've probably never seen in this particular combination before, how quickly can you identify the most optimal way to generate victory points and end the game before everyone else. And people have done some startling analysis on this game. The game could easily be solved for almost any combination if you put enough simulation to it. And, in fact, there's a great article about how big money does not win this particular board. There's, in fact, a better engine than no one plays. We don't have time to talk about that. So Dominion tests your ability to parse the actions that happen from a number of cards and then to construct a deck in real time that will maximize victory points over time. It tests this very specific deck-building skill. Let's talk about a more interesting game. Quake II Deathmatch. Quake II Lithium Deathmatch, even. This was the deathmatch that I played for many, many years. Quake II is an old-school FPS. Characters are very small and very far away. The maps are enormous. And everyone moves really, really fast. Imagine Team Fortress 2 ten times faster. That's how fast this game is. Go on YouTube and search for, like, old, original Team Fortress games, like Mega TF and watch how fast people go. It'll be like, here's the two forts. It'll be like, that's how fast they move. And you got to hit someone with a rocket who's moving that fast. Now, even better, in Quake II Lithium Deathmatch, you got a grappling hook. It was three dimensional. I could be flying through the air. And it turns out, if you look at what skills are primarily being tested, it's head clicking and precision movement. Nothing else matters. If I'm faster than you, I can click on your head faster than you can click on my head. If I'm faster at monkeying around on the ceiling with a grappling hook, my APM in Quake is very high, I'm going to win. All these other things, teamwork, capturing the flag, coordination, none of that matters. One low wolf with a very high skill in precision movement and head clicking can carry his entire team. Now, memorizing the map has a little bit to do with it, but it's like, come on, it's two maps. You can take me ten minutes. Because the skill cap is so high on the head clicking, Scott's not that good at Quake II compared to me. No, not really. Even if he gets the quad damage, because he timed it, he's not going to help him. So what about weapons factory? It's not the quad armor. Quake II weapons factory is a mod. This is in the era of Team Fortress Classic, Mega Team Fortress. The games that eventually became Team Fortress II, this was probably the most complex of them. This consumed years of my life. This is one of those games where if you wanted to play it, you had to script your controls from the console. Yes, I made this graph. Now notice how it's the same game. It's still Quake II, but every character has like ten weapons, three grenades, and some of the grenades are things like, yeah, it's a turret that sits there for 20 seconds or a minute, or it's napalm that blows up after a delay. Every class is completely different. So it's added this additional complexity of maximizing your character's loadouts, memorizing the maps, and scripting. Quake II, and I'm going to feel old here, did not have off-hand grenades. Quake I did. I couldn't be shooting and then hit a button and have a grenade pop out like I couldn't Quake I. I wrote a goddamn script. Switch weapons, throw grenades, switch weapon back. And that script, you think that'd be simple. That was like a hundred lines long to make that word fluently. But think about the advantage he got in that game from this perfectly legal not-cheating script, right? Because it didn't do anything you're not allowed to do. You're allowed to switch weapons. You're allowed to throw grenades, right? It just did it so fast that, you know, it totally works. So you'd be like, shoot, shoot, shoot, and the grenade pops out while he's still shooting, basically. But think about that. Team Fortress style game and just a deathmatch capture-the-lifestyle game, and suddenly these graphs of what skills are being tested at their core is very different. So Team Fortress II, now, we're not saying it's a bad game. It's a bad game. Not because weapons boundary is also a bad game. Team Fortress II changed a lot of things. They reduced the number of weapons. Increased the number of hats. They slowed everything down. They made the character models bigger. They made the match smaller. They removed the grappling hooks so there is very little old three-dimensional component. They changed all these elements. And what happened is that suddenly the coordination with your team matters way more than everything else. I'm a really good FPS player. I think I can play Team Fortress II optimally as an individual. If I join a server, I'm getting the maximum headshots I can get per minute. But it doesn't help my team win. It helps a little. But if I'm great, and the rest of my team is terrible, I cannot pull my team through. But the other team is going to win if they coordinate better. In this game, if I'm super good, it doesn't matter how good the rest of my team is. I can single-handedly carry the team because the skill caps are so high that if I am that transcended in one of these skills, I'll win. I'm not that transcended. But in this game, you can't do that. There's a skill cap. The game is testing very different things. What about Counter Strike? Counter Strike just came out again. It's pretty much just head-clicking. I love this game. But the tactics of, like, we're going to go in this way, we're going to, you know, like, send a squad that way. They matter. They matter a little bit, right? Like, you know, okay, so you're running down a hallway and you throw the new fire and send your grenade down that hallway to prevent them from going in that direction. So more of their team is funneled the way your sniper is camping. You know, some of that matters a little bit. But what really matters is, can the sniper click on that guy's head before he dies? If he can't, it doesn't matter how many guys are going down there for him to aim at, right? He just shoots and misses. Now he's dead. This is where things get interesting. Yeah, head-clicking is the primary test of skill in Counter Strike. But among skilled players, everyone's equally adept at the head-clicking with a very small margin. So as soon as you've maxed that one out, all these other things really matter. So among very skilled Counter Strike players, the decision to go banana versus going apartments is a really big deal. But a bunch of scrubs, a bunch of nukes, it actually doesn't matter that much. All right, you're on a public server. Head-click. Well, guess what? He has a zillion points and a zillion frags, and his team always wins. And the other team can't even live because whatever they go, he finds them and they're all dead. But if you get five on five all head-clicking masters, suddenly all those things, like did you throw a grenade at the right time? Which path did you take? Did you plant the bomb? How fast did you plant the bomb? Where were you hiding? All that stuff now is what really decides the game because the head-clicking is even across the board and you can't humanly be better at head-clicking. Kind of like how in chess, among two chess masters, chess is this extremely strategic game of bluffing and counter-bluffing and fakes, all this stuff, but for me, none of that happens. I'm spitting my dupes around trying not to lose. I gotta, okay, if I kill his dude and he kills mine and I'll end up with less dudes dead than him, oh yeah, let's do it. So, to really illustrate this point, let's look at Super Street Fighter 4. Now, this is the game where I'm terrible at, and Scott is actually really good at it. I'm not really good. Compared to me. I played it for like 10 minutes more. So, among, you guys have played in Street Fighter or fighting games. Among skilled players, they talk about the faints and the same kind of stuff in chess. There's this very high-level paper-rock fist strategy of how do I meet the other person? Like, oh, he started to charge the attack, he digged out of there, canceled, whatever your nomenclature is depending on the game. What about this game? This is Street Fighter without the execution component. These games are the same. Except in Yomi, I play a card that does the combo. In Street Fighter 4, I have to manually input the combo and do the timing perfectly or it doesn't happen. So, skilled Street Fighter 4 players are just playing this because they've already maxed out the movement and the combo and all the sort of physical mechanics. So, I'll never be that good. Right, so Yomi is sort of like, you know, what if you could play Counter Strike, but everyone had aimbot, right? That's what Yomi is. You don't have to be able to push the buttons really fast for the fighting game because you automatically do the right combo. It just happens and now you're playing the game that the high-level Street Fighters get to play. So, what's about to come up is called a callback. So, where are we going with this? So, think about the way people talked about Team Fortress 2 when it came out. I waited 10 years for that game. I was playing Weapons Factory in Quake 2 and there was this rumor, like, yeah, Team Fortress 2 someday. When it finally came out, I almost took it out of work. Glad I didn't. I really don't like Team Fortress 2. Not because it's a bad game, but I don't like it. But I think I can articulate all these sort of mechanical reasons why it's not the game for me. But when I watch most people... Don't want to get the Team Fortress 2 fans mad at you because there's a lot of them. When you watch people talk on the Internet, they go crazy about this. People argue, you know, Team Fortress 2 is great. Team Fortress 2 is terrible, or they can play just a better game than Team Fortress 2. You can't really compare apples to oranges in this case. And to understand what makes a competitive game tip, you've got to understand what skills that game is testing. Until you can say definitively, this game is testing these five skills, you can't argue about the merits of that game from a competitive standpoint compared to other games. So, why would you want to do this? You'll get better at games. As soon as you understand what skill the game is testing, you can practice that skill and you'll get really good at that game. When I learned how Street Fighter worked, I didn't realize I could load up Hadoken after I'd already sent another Hadoken down. Yes, I never figured that out. As soon as I learned to start practicing it, I started understanding how fiddly the game was and suddenly I started getting better. You'll get better at arguing about games. You can go into the packs and stand up on a stage and say TF2 sucks and not get too many people yelling at you because you sort of learned something, maybe. Yeah, and most importantly, you'll start to see games from what they are. A lot of games that feel really competitive or that you really like or that I really like, when you start to analyze and start to look at what's going on, you might not like what you see. And that is called a segway.