 We're here to talk today about BAD GAMES. These are probably the bad games you were expecting, right? If you don't know, Supernose Arc 3D is like a crappy Wolfenstein clone for the SNES where you leave a slingshot to shoot at goats. Made very well known and popular by the angry video game nerd in his review, it's a very common thing to review games that are bad games in a funny and or yelling manner. Something that was invented by a mystery science theater. Perhaps. A lot of science mystery in the year 3000. But there's nothing interesting to say. This game is just bad in every conceivable way. And we all know about it. I like how this got haha and this was like oh. At least they know what it is. It's not like anyone didn't know what this is, right? You kids are lucky because the internet exists. When I was young, I was at a Sears department store and I had this memory of seeing a Zelda game that wasn't on the Nintendo and I couldn't figure out what it was. I wasn't even sure if I remembered it or it was just a dream. It was not until the internet that I could look it up and find out that that was real. That shit existed. More than one of them. Three of them. Now. This is actually sort of retro cool nowadays. Jack's pretty good in Salty Bed. But the thing is, the mother of all bad games. From the modern era. Is not the most famously bad game of all time. This game is famously bad. When people talk about bad games. This is like the number one game that always comes up as the great essential bad game, E.T. And it's famously bad mostly because they hyped it a whole bunch. The time this came out, E.T. was the biggest thing. The way that right now, what's the biggest thing right now? Breaking Bad is pretty big. So it was huge. It was huge in everything you could possibly imagine. You know what? It was the Star Wars of that year. Right. It was so big. So when the E.T. Video Game coming out with a hype was just enormous. They printed as more cartridges than there were Atari's. And because of that whole meta of it. And the fact that the mysterious landfill of a million cartridges and all that nonsense. It's sort of famously bad. But is the game itself actually that bad? The game is legendarily bad. But what is a legend? Legends usually are larger than life. They're not necessarily true. Someone in the audience, I overheard like, oh, you've actually got a copy. You can get this for a penny. You know how many copies of this there are? Even with all the ones they dumped in the landfill. And two, how many of you have actually played this game? Okay, thank you. A lot of people haven't. All right. All right. I have a secondary question. How many of you have played this game? Wait, now people are clapping like this is a good game. This game is no less good than this game. They are equally good. Yars of Men is sort of like retro chic. It's like famous. They're like, oh yeah, Yars of Men. That's pretty cool. Yeah, that was a good one. No, you can't freaking play that game. Yeah. Tell me what the fuck you do. By the way, you're the bug, first of all, on the left, right? What the hell is that field of static nonsense? What if you go into it and you come out on the other side? What the hell just happened? Yeah. And that little biddly bit, that's not a bullet. That's just kind of following you around. If it touches you, you fucking die. And is that, what's that around? You can't get in there where the other spaceship thing is. There's no clue what the hell you're doing this game. And what do you think? Do you think that you shoot this guy? No, that's not what you do. So what we're going to do now? What we're going to do now is play a little bit of E2. Are you guys going, oh, because of E2 or because of the pony? The pony is yes, E2 no. Okay. All right, so check this out. We got E2 here. First of all, that's pretty good music for an Atari right there. And that graphic, that is amazing shit. Look at that. That actually looks like E2. This game is as old as me, E2. All right, so this game is famously bad, right? So let's just play it. Let's see what happens. That looks like E2. E2 coming down into the spaceship, looks pretty good. I'm going to walk around. Walking around? It makes sense so far. It's not too bad. I guess I've got some live gauntlet style. Oh, I can teleport. Oh, look, if I hit the button it does whatever, I guess I summon Rome. All right, let's walk around a little bit. It's the number at the bottom that keeps going down. Oh, what the fuck? All right, all right. I guess game over. I guess I fell in a pit. I guess the pits- I think you know how to get out of the pit. Remember that scene in E.T. when he fell into the pit? The Atari only has one button. It's not hard to try to figure out what to do. So I'm going to hit the one button. It's a piece of your ship right there. So this game is pretty complicated, it seems, and the main complaint when people say this game is bad is that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. They can't understand. The game is really straightforward. Fall into the pits, get the three pieces, phone home, and wait. That's it. The instruction book tells you how to play. Are we already one third of the way through this game? Yeah, we're doing pretty well here. There's humans that pop out occasionally and steal shit from you. Yeah, that's not good. And Elliot comes around. Now that guy is going to steal my piece if you find, oh, he didn't see me, nice. I was hiding. So the point I really want to make here is that this game- It's bad. It's pretty bad. But all the Atari are always going to steal my fucking piece. Get away from me. The game's not that bad. Meanwhile, I can shoot it. That thing that came at you like lightning and was completely undodgeable? What's that static field do? All right, so what you have to do to beat Yars Revenge is go touch that ship. And if you touch it, then a laser comes out of the left and you have to aim that and fire it while not being hit by that missile and avoiding that swirl. It's just as stupid and complicated and really, E.T., get back to our point. If you just read the instruction book for any Atari game, they're not confusing at all. They are really straightforward. That page says, go get the three phone pieces. Here's what the powers do. Watch out. Don't fall into the wells. It sucks to get out of them. Be careful. Yeah, people today, right, you gotta remember the conscience. In 82, right, games did not have enough memory, enough graph, even screen resolution to give you any sort of instructions or help or anything. The game had to be completely intuitive if you just plug it in and play it. And there was a period of time on the NES SNES days, where that's what people did, you know, which is why they started decreasing instruction manuals. But before then, instruction manuals was like the first thing you did when you opened the box on the way home from Toys R Us is read that instruction manual, right? Because the game didn't have anything in it to help teach you. And if the game wasn't intuitively designed, which was only the best of the best games or that well designed, you could learn everything there was to know just by playing them, you needed to know that, right? And people play today E.T. today and they say, what the hell, this game is awful, right? Take any Atari game. Any Atari game is equally incomprehensible without the instructions. So why is E.T. so well remembered as being bad? Because it was bad at being a blockbuster game. It wasn't bad at being an Atari game. In fact, it is above average for an Atari game from that year that it came out. Right, remember, when a game comes out and someone makes a game, they have a goal, a thing the game is trying to achieve, right? Usually make lots of money for the person who made it. But, you know, there's sort of like other goals besides it. So the goal of E.T. was to be like the huge hit, right? It was aiming for the top. Like, this is going to be the game of games for the Atari E.T. is the biggest thing ever. And it failed at that, right? It was bad at the thing it was trying to do. It was bad at a lot of other things as well. But it's good at being really funny, right? Every game is good at something, no matter how bad it is, right? And no game is just, you can't be generally bad, right? Every game is bad at something. So, the whole point of this panel, a lot of you probably thought we're going to do just an angry video game, Nerd Eagle Raptor. Let's tell them about bad games. Yeah, you can get them inspected. Unless you know us already. People who know us already. You can watch that on YouTube. Yeah. We're going to talk about the fact that games are not bad. They're bad at certain things. So if you want to say a game is bad, and you can't say why it's bad, or what it's bad at, then shut up. A lot of people in the internet, they don't have very, I don't know, intellectual discussions. Oh, you're already crapping all over the crap. I am. How well did that go with the Q&A on Friday? I don't know. Hope these people weren't there. So, let's go through some games and talk about what it means for a game to be bad. Now, Candyland is bad at being a game. It's really not a game. If anyone still remembers the rules to Candyland, all you do is basically reveal cards and do what they say. You don't make any decisions. So who wins and loses Candyland is based on the shuffle of the deck and who goes first. And when I was a kid, even as a kid, I understood this and I stacked the deck to give me Queen Frosty immediately. Cheater. Queen Frosty is the best. Now, here's the thing. We're saying this is bad at being a game. It's not a game. Gamers will usually say Candyland isn't actually a game. But yet, colloquially, it is a game. The word game is used to describe that. That is a board game. It's usually the first board game that any kid plays with their family. In the United States, at least. Yeah, in Europe, it'll be like, I guess, Uncle Wiggly. Yeah, maybe. But it's good at these other things and it is a game. For us to say that it is not a game is a no-true Scotsman because the word game can mean a lot of things. It can mean a competitive test of skill. It can mean some thing you shoot and you go hunting. It can mean a series of interesting decisions. It can mean an interactive amusement. If we play Patty Cake, that is a game. So to say that this is not a game is the thing that gamers like to do where they want to shit all over something they don't respect. Like, oh, mobas aren't games because they don't like mobas. F1 is a sport. Like people say, something's not a sport. It's like they're just trying to shit on it. And it's like, no, there's a definition of sport. Does it fall in that definition? Yes, then it's a sport. So Candyland. It's good or bad or anything. Candyland is good. Our sports get sucked or a lot of things in our games get sucked. Candyland is good at introducing kids to numbers and counting and the idea of a game. Candyland is good at teaching a kid that, oh, maybe this game is random. Smart kids early on realize the game is random and ask for better games. It's good at teaching kids to recognize colors. It's good at bringing a family together to do something fun. It's good at having all these memorable characters and telling good stories about the good old Candyland. So the real trouble is the word game. Candyland is bad at being an ortho game. This is a word that Richard Garfield, you might know him from Magic the Gathering. Yeah, he wrote a book with some friends. And ortho game is a word he coined. Ortho means straight. Like a straight game. Orthagonal? Diagonal. So an ortho game is a game that is primarily or is a competitive test or skill. A game that has some sort of way to win to rank. So tennis is an ortho game, right? Settlers of Catan is an ortho game, right? We're competing against other people to win. Candyland is bad at being an ortho game. And look, now that we have this word ortho game, I'm not going to make anyone mad if I say this isn't an ortho game because we have a very specific definition and it doesn't impinge upon someone's self-identity. If I tell someone they're not a gamer because they only like games like Candyland, that's impinging on their self-identification as a gamer. That's mean, that's not productive. You're not an ortho gamer is a perfectly legitimate criticism of someone's life of game. Instead of going being mad at you, they'll just be really confused by you. Let's get to a real game, though. Monopoly is bad at ending. Now, really, Monopoly is also, it's interesting because people talk about Monopoly, we're at pack, so everyone remembers Monopoly as this terrible game. It's like an archetypical bad board game and yet it's one of the most popular board games in the entire world forever. Yeah, I mean the good things that Monopoly's goal originally was to teach people how capitalism sucked. Right? And apparently it's done the opposite. So it failed at its goal. It was bad at what it was trying to do. You're supposed to win this game and feel bad about winning like, wow, I just won because I got all the properties first. It's like, no, I won because I got all the properties first. I was the evil landlord who friggin' ripped off all of my tenants. But why is this game bad at ending? Why does it go on forever? One, most Americans play the game wrong. I don't even actually read the rule book as opposed to being taught by someone else. It's packed, there's people who know. Yeah, not everybody. Not everybody, so yeah, you're not supposed to put any money on fucking free parking, guys. It's not in the rules. In fact, the rules say don't do that. Also, in your original Monopoly, when you landed a property, you don't just buy it, you auction that shit. Well, you can buy it. If you do not buy it, then it gets auctioned off. So look, people who play Monopoly, the game has this legend, this sort of oral tradition of the rules. Parents teach children, the children grow up, have kids, and teach their children, they teach the wrong rules because none of them have ever read the rules. What I own Monopoly as a kid, there weren't rules in the box. They were lost, like, when my parents were young. My parents had the deluxe edition, we had twice as much money, which was really helpful for putting lots of money on free parking. Yeah, you know what I did? I played with it. I played with the calculator. Yeah, me too, eventually. So Monopoly is good at all these things, like, you know, family, same things we said about Candyland. But it's bad at being a good game. It's bad at being an ortho game. It's bad at being fun because it goes on forever and it goes on forever because of the way it's designed. It has a bad end-game mechanic. Right, this is what's known as a hostage game, right? The game that keeps you hostage, right? You've lost. That guy over there has boardwalk and park place and all the oranges and all the yellows, and he's got a huge pile of money. You've got like 500 bucks left, but you have to sit there for another hour as you roll the dice and wait until you've randomly landed and won his spaces so you can actually kill you off. Or the game is trapped you. You, if you were losing, can trap him hostage. He knows he won. He did win, but you sit there and say, let's keep playing. If you quit, I win. The game is trapped everyone there, right? It happens in a lot of games and the way this happens in games is when the games don't end as soon as they're already decided. If you look at something like Starcraft, right? In Starcraft, there would be situations where it's like, okay, that guy won, but he's hiding one unit somewhere, right? And it's like, you got to go find him and that's, you're being held hostage. So what do they do? They added stuff to where it's like, okay, yeah, we're just going to auto light up that guy so he can go shoot him down, right? They sort of had a solution to their hostage problem. You'll hear game designers usually use the term win more. There's winning and then there's winning more. Win more ends a game that's already over, like advanced wars. If I'm losing, I'll just start pumping out mechs. It'll take you hours to fight through them. The win more is he starts pumping out bombers. Bombers aren't useful in the mid-game, but they end the game. So it seems like what we're saying is that these games are all bad, in a sense, because they don't involve skill. They're generally actually pretty random and they take forever and all these things, but yet Longshot is a game that is almost completely random. Literally, all this game does is like you bet on horses. You can go to the horse track and basically bet on these little plastic guys that actually calming or involving any real horses whatsoever. And it's the same damn thing. So this game is great despite being random bullshit. Well, it's great at having a huge party time. You bring this thing out and people go crazy. And when we played this, we named all the horses and we were like, go, derp, derp, derp, derp, derp. Derp's in the lead, derp's in the lead. I think number five is like rainbow dash. It's like, go rainbow dash, come on, you can do it. So we're not saying games have to be these hardcore tests and still games are supposed to be fun. If you're not having fun, don't play a game. A game is, if a game is bad at being fun, it is a shit game. Right, a game has a purpose. It's like you have this game and there's a thing you want to do right now. Maybe you want to laugh. Maybe you want to see who's smarter, me or him. Maybe you want to, you know, see who's got faster fingers. Right? There's a purpose of a game. There's a goal of a game. There's a thing that it is for. Right? And a bad game is a game that is bad at the thing you were using it for. A lot of times, a game is good at something and people just use it for something else. Right? So they think it's bad but it's not. Right? Like if you use a fighting game that, you know, for funniness, I mean, I guess there's a few funny fighting games. Well, dive kick. Yeah, Shaq Fu, right? But it's actually, that's a skill game, though. It's real good. Right? All right. So, speaking of games that people use for the wrong thing, we're kind of famous for having run this lecture at like five packs that's called Beyond Dungeons and Dragons where we love D&D but we crap all over for an hour because Dungeons and Dragons is great at a particular kind of game. It's great at going into a dungeon and hitting things with swords and doing maximum average damage every round. It's really bad at most other stuff. If you want to play the Elven Court Drama, this is the worst system you could possibly use for that. Well, it's not the worst but it's among the worst. I guess Kobos Ate My Baby would be worse for Elven Court Drama. Kobos Ate My Baby would be great for Elven Court Drama. All hail to the Torg. But Dungeons and Dragons is bad at story-driven games. It's bad at the role-playing stuff, but yet, people who play role-playing games and don't enjoy them and you've all been in this boat. I was in this boat a lot. Playing D&D, the combat starts and everyone else looks like they're having fun but you're not. You're bored. You want this fight to end but you know it's going to go on for like four fucking hours. Like in the fight to end? I like in the fight to end. I like in the fight to end. At RIT, I started playing pacifist. Whenever a fight started, I was like, I'm pacifist, I'm not fighting. My character runs away and hides and then I went across the street and played Counter-Strike until the fight was over. It's your story, bro. Now, Dungeons & Dragons, while it's good, what it's good at, the problem is people who say Dungeons & Dragons is a bad game say it because they're using Dungeons & Dragons to do things it's not designed to do. Right. You know, think about this. We just showed Monopoly, right? We could role-play Monopoly. Good, sir. You have my Atlantic Avenue. You'll be owing me $750 now. Atlantic Avenue's run down and I refuse to pay. In fact, I'm hiring an army to take it over. Really? Where are you getting this army from? I got a dog. I got a warlock. All those soldiers are drunken in my bar. I have a dog. I have a dog in a car wearing a thimble. You've played D&D. How often does your game master just say, all right, dude, you're talking to this townsperson? Role-play it out. Just role-play it out. Let's see where this goes. That's bullshit. Are there any rules in the Monopoly rule-book about role-play? No. There's nothing in there about role-play. Are there any rules in the Dungeons & Dragons rule-book about role-play? There's one. It says you guys should role-play. You do whatever you want. If I go into the Monopoly rule-book and I write, you guys should probably role-play while you play this dude, whatever you want. Does that make the Monopoly role-playing game? No. All right, you can role-play frickin' anything. A role-playing game is when there's actually some frickin' rules in the book about role-playing. Like, you must role-play this. Tell a story. All right? Not the friggin' Dungeons & Dragons doesn't matter. All the rules in that book are about stabbing and magic-ing and blowing up with the fireballs. Every single one of them. Treasuries, that kind of shit. Not a role-playing game. So cards against humanity. Now, a lot of people had fun with this game. But I'm gonna say that it's actually a pretty bad game. And here's why. Apples to Apples was the first game that was widely known that did this. And you all played Apples to Apples. It was stupidly popular. But it was broken. After the first few rounds, everyone ran out of cards, and all they have left in their hand are proper nouns that they don't recognize. Yeah, I don't know any of those frickin' famous people in Apples to Apples. So I'm just like, uh... It's like celebrities from the early 2000s. So I'm like, okay, this card... I don't know who it is. None of my cards go with that. Just whatever. I just want to get rid of this and draw a new one. But you played Apples to Apples. And what was the most fun? The inappropriate answer. It stood out. The inappropriate answer was the whole reason anyone ever played Apples to Apples. And it was actually kind of funny because Apples to Apples wasn't overtly dirty. So when you had a dirty answer, it was always an innuendo. So that just sort of amplified its power. But it didn't happen often enough. It happened maybe three, four times a night. Yup. But from a game design perspective, it was actually bad at being a game. Most people didn't even read the rulebook. They kind of just played. And like we said, you'd run out of good cards almost immediately and then the game was boring and you're stuck there playing with your family. This game took the good part of Apples to Apples and made it the entire game. So the first few times you played this. Holy shit. This is incredible. Right? I mean, you just played this. Every card is dirty. Every card is hilarious. Right? You're just... Everyone's peeing themselves and falling over with laughter. Right? And then you play it the second time and it's still good, right? You see some repeat cards and we'll see it's still good. And then you buy some expansions. But even with the expansions, you played it seven, eight times. It's like, I've seen all these cards. There is no combination. Maybe once, there'll be just a combination of cards you've already known, but not in that combination. It's funny once, maybe. And the replay value is like... If you play this game a lot, one, it's not a good ortho game. It's not a test of skill. I mean, you could say that... But it's not trying to be that. It's just trying to be fun party time with friends. And it succeeds at that. But only for a very short time. That's why I think it's most popular at conventions and places like this. You play it once a year, twice a year with a big group of strangers, slightly drunk in a hotel lobby. It's great at that. But if you play this every day, you're gonna get really fucking sick of this game. So, the other thing I'd like to point out is that this game, you know, we're talking about ortho game. Maybe we need a word for this too. Cards against humanity is really an ideal game. I-D-I-O. Ideal means... That's the word rim made up. I made it up. Because it's really trying to be cool. But it's not. I want this word to be used. Because it's useful. Ideal games are games. Ideal means unique or personal. It's a game that you play that might not be a test of skill, but that causes a personal outcome. Our game right now, at this point in the row, we play Cards Against Humanity. Our set of cards and our set of jokes was a unique experience. It'll be slightly different every time people play. It wasn't about winning or losing. It was about creating, you know, something. Like, Dwarf Fortress would be an ideal game, right? You play it alone. And it's not about winning and losing. You're going to lose. Losing is fun. Dwarf Fortress, right? But it's about creating. You know, you create your fortress, right? There's your story that happened in the course of that fortress. That is unique. No one else is going to get that exact same Dwarf Fortress, the exact same thing happening, right? You're just sort of almost... It's like writing a story just for you. That's an ideal game. So, Yodsey, how many of you have played Yodsey? Who doesn't know how to play Yodsey? Wow. All right, respect. For some reason, none of our friends know how to play Yodsey, so you're expecting sort of the opposite result. Yeah. Yodsey is a bad game by most gamers' perspectives because you've played this game. You know the odds of a D6. You know the odds of a 5D6. I hope you do. There's a million games that have this mechanic. You know, how many times you teach someone King of Tokyo, oh, it's just Yodsey with a couple of pieces. Yeah, you play. What's the... Not ground floor, the other one. Oh, Skyline. Skyline. It's like, it's just Yodsey with building. Roll through the ages. All these games. Roll through the ages just Yodsey. Yodsey is fantastic at teaching you how to be good at games. Because you, if you're a young kid, you have to figure out the odds of the dice. You have to figure out the odds of rolling a full house versus four of a kind. You have to learn that you never go for an inside straight. That'll help you out a lot later in life. Yeah. The thing is that Yodsey, what was Yodsey trying to be? Well, it's starting to be a family game. That's how it was marketed, right? But it was trying to be an ortho game, right? Who is the smartest in this group? The problem is the skill cap is really low. If we played Yodsey with some of the people in this room, we all know the same things. We equally have the level of smartness to make the best possible moves at Yodsey. Therefore, it's just random luck in the dice will win, unless somebody's Dig Blue Jones and just freaking roll whatever they want. Right? Now, there's a trouble here, because bad at being an ortho game is still not nuanced enough. Yodsey is good or bad depending on the level of skill of the players. If you're all kind of dim, or you're all in like third grade, Yodsey is great. If you're a little bit smarter, Yodsey is not a good game because you're just, you're not making any decisions. You're playing your perfect odd solitaire. But there's still one more manifold level of Yodsey paying attention to how well everyone else is doing. So to ask yourself this question, is there any reason not to play Yodsey in parallel? Is there any reason for me not to just do all my roles in a role while Scott is simultaneously doing all of his roles, and then at the end we tally up our scores? Is there any reason not to do that? We don't have the dice. And the... If you really don't have 10d6, really? I think I've got 10d6 in my pocket. So, the answer is that it does matter. Yodsey still has things to teach people who are otherwise pretty good at games because all games have this idea that you can apply one or more techniques or heuristics. Each one has a return in terms of its sort of your skill or a return on how likely you are to win. Right, because remember, when you play Yodsey with other people you're not just trying to get the highest score possible, right? In which you would be pretty conservative in your rolling, right? You're just trying to beat the other people. So if Rim gets mad unlucky and has to write his zero and his four of a kind, then it's like, ooh, now I can take a risk on something, right? Because he failed so much. If Scott's crushing me, I'm gonna go for decreasingly good odds. I'm going to take bigger risk. Taking bigger risk will be fine. Otherwise he's not gonna win. He's already can't be conservative. And you see the same thing in a lot of games. Really like NFL football. It's like, we're losing it. There's 30 seconds left. Let's try that on side kick. We got no hope, right? We got to try that on side kick. We got to try to hail Mary, right? You've never done that in the early game. You've never done that in a close game, right? So Yodsey teaches you that same thing. When you're behind, you got to take a big risk, right? When you're ahead, you can just lock it down and make it even harder for that risk to succeed. So when you say a game is bad at being an author game, you still have to think about the audience and the context and realize that there are, like for example, chess. Here's a great example. The first order technique is act randomly. You're probably not going to do so well. Your second order technique is try to anticipate one move ahead. Try to guess if I do something, what is the thing the other person will do. But try to read three ahead, four ahead, five ahead, 20 ahead. The more you read ahead, there's a lot more mental effort involved and a lot more memorization and a lot more skill that you have to bring to the table, but there's a decreasing return. The difference in your chance of winning between reading 10 ahead and 11 ahead is much smaller than the difference between reading one ahead and zero ahead. Very few games actually max out at a point where you cannot get better because we're humans. We're fallible. We're not perfect. We fuck up. It's got more than me. Sure. Soccer. Oh, I fucked up the slides. This is the wrong picture. Yeah, that doesn't look like soccer. That looks like soccer to me. Soccer is awful, right? Soccer could be good, right? But the major problem with soccer is, of course, diving, right? Most soccer. And while we were there, of course, we stayed there a while. We're not traveling all that way for no reason. We went to an AFL game, right? Footy. Australian rules football, the footy, right? Basically, these guys are playing nonstop with no pads. And as far as I can tell, you can do anything you want to anyone at any time. Tackle people. A dude who jumped up in the air to catch the ball. A guy wrapped his arms around his legs and made him slam his body into the ground. He just got up and kept running. The ref was looking right at him and just didn't even blink. See, I thought that sometimes when soccer, they're diving and sometimes they're not. It's like, no, they're just always diving or they're super pussies. It's like a guy barely kicked you in the leg and you tripped and you lay it on the ground crying and you're like twice the size of me. Now, even better, I did a bunch of research for this panel because when you're going to shit all over a really popular game, you've got to be ready to defend yourself. So, with soccer, there's posture. When you fall to the ground and you hurt yourself as a human being, you make certain movements and you take certain postures that are very hard to fake. Soccer players, when they're diving, tend to take this particular pose where their leg goes up in the air and they push their chest out. Humans do not do that when they're experiencing pain. So, there are ways to detect with technology if someone is diving or not. And studies show that people dive more often when they're losing or when a game is close or when they would get a scoring opportunity. People also dive more often in the offensive zone than in the defensive zone because then they'll be granted a penalty kick. In soccer, it's very hard to score a goal. It's a super low-scoring game. So, even one goal is super important and it's really hard to score a goal just in the regular soccer play when the ball is live. One soccer league that I couldn't get a lot of numbers on this stuff because a lot of soccer leagues don't publish stats. Because they don't use computers. And football do. But the stat I found was that in this particular soccer league in the UK, 30% of games were decided by a free kick. In other words, 30% of games are decided by flopping. The game is just that bullshit. The game incentivizes. The game is bad at being a pure test of the skill because part of the skill that you're testing that people don't want to talk about is acting and faking it. So, this is a problem because it bubbles up in all the other parts of the game. Now, conversely, what's soccer good at? Soccer is really good at building up a crowd or robbing hooligans. It's really good at creating international rivalries and, you know... And international bonds. Soccer unifies the entire non-United States-ian world. It's really good at that. The community, people just start playing soccer at a young age and grow up. People watch soccer, get into it. What are they saying in Costa Rica when they start a new town? Oh, so I was in Costa Rica and our guide basically said, yes, we passed all these little towns and villages. Like, oh, that town was just built. In this order, any town that gets built in Costa Rica gets a church, a football field, a doctor's office, and a grocery store. So, soccer is good at a lot of things, but because it's good at those things, that's why it's bad at fixing this problem. The community aspect is more important to the people who are fans of soccer than fixing the diving problem. In fact, a lot of soccer fans see the problems with officiation in soccer as a good thing. It adds drama, it adds randomness. It makes it more like a long shot. What's the most famous play in the history of soccer? When the guy frigging hit the... The hand of God! Right. You can't use your hand? The most famous play was the guy cheating. Most likely. Because he didn't get caught and people love that aspect of the game. Of course, in the NFL, the most famous play was also cheating. Yeah, but NFL tries to fix that. Soccer has to fix this problem. Soccer likes it, graces it. Let's talk about another sport. So... Who knows the rules of race walking? Okay. Race walking is such. You have to run a race, but both your feet have to be on the ground the whole time, so you don't like... Not lift up your back foot until the heel of your front foot hits the ground. Then, your back foot can completely come off the ground and go forward. Also, the leg that is touching the ground has to remain straight, and then you bend it in the after. You can't take your feet to the street like you're walking. You just basically walk as fast as possible. This has been an Olympic sport. This is a super popular sport. It is not an Olympic sport any longer. It's because as bad as the Olympic Committee is, right, and they're super bad, they know this isn't a sport. No, no, no, no, no. Some people already point... Now, there's something funny about this picture. Anything funny about this picture. Anything going on in this picture. Zoom and enhance. Now, zoom and enhance. I do not cherry pick. That is the picture on the front of Wikipedia about this fucking sport. And it turns out that everybody cheats at this sport. If you want to be a race walker, just go jog. And basically, your job is jog when the rest is not looking. Now, this is bad at being a sport, and here's why. It would be trivial to stop the cheating. Fencing has the electronics. If I hit Scott the millisecond before with my right away, those big lights and everything go off. A lot of these sports act like we don't have this technology. It's not precise enough. It's like, no, we fucking invented all this shit. We have everything. We can know if one nanometer of the soccer ball has crossed the line. We can know that. We have that ability right now. But yet, in race walking, we can trivially make shoes where both of them are off the ground at the same time. It just shows up on someone's computer. You're disqualified. Now, the community around race walking actively fights fixing their officiation problems. The judges, they're human judges. They're not allowed to bend over. They're not allowed to use mirrors. They're not allowed to use binoculars. They're not allowed to use cameras. They are not allowed to actually report that they have caught someone doing it in real time. They have this whole complicated system of individual judges have to walk over and tell the head judge, I saw number four cheating. Even if everyone tells you, you might just not find number four before he crosses the finish line. Yeah, they have to physically go and get to number four who cheated and stop him before the end of the race in order to do something about this, right? And cause a penalty. Now, I would postulate that if they officiated this sport perfectly, it would no longer exist. Because everyone walks at the same damn speed. That's why we have running. So, Settlers of Catan is a pretty bad game if you're smart. Yeah, it's pretty awful actually. We're not even being sarcastic here. We talked about Yopsey, but I mean, you play Settlers, it's a great gateway game, but it's bad at being a high level test of skill. You play Settlers a few times, you'll start to notice, notice I'm in the tournaments for Settlers, once you get past the first few rounds, nobody's really trading with each other anymore. Because there's no incentive to ever trade unless you're ripping the other guy off. And if you're all good players, you're not gonna let anyone rip you off. And if you're trading perfectly equally, then it still doesn't have any impact on the game. Right, imagine if you trade perfectly evenly with someone, say you have four players, players one and three trade evenly with each other, so they get ahead of players two and four. Why would player three help player one widen the gap against player two? They wouldn't. There's no combination of two players that would trade with each other to boost themselves up. Maybe three and four would boost themselves up together. Okay, so now they're no longer three and four, they're now two and three, but it's like, okay, the number four guy just helped the number three guy go to two. He didn't get himself to one, right? So it's really just sort of voting on who's gonna win and it's not gonna be you. Now, with Settlers, the thing is, you might think, oh, I can be clever. No you can't. Settlers is bad at having a high level end game. There's a point where if you play it enough, you'll be as good as the human can be and there's nothing you can do to be better at the game. The only thing you can do to be better at the game is be really good at rolling dice so that your number comes up all the time. Now, this game is still a great game until you get to that point, but once you get to that point, it's no longer a good game for you. The reason you can't be clever is because game theory, this game's actually pretty simple to analyze. In game theory, you assume that all players are equally clever, so if you think, oh, I could trade with this person, then this person in this pattern and I'll come out ahead, they realize the exact same thing you realize and there's no way to be more clever than someone else. Yeah, we're talking about four perfectly smart players, which is us. But again, look at the levels. This is a great game. It was a great game for me. For years, I loved this game, but I have no desire to ever play it again. Yeah, because I figured that shit out. Again, figured out, keep playing it. So, do we want games that are just 100% hardcore skill? It seems like that's what we're getting at, what we like. Yeah, this game is 100% awesome. Are you, you know, how much skill do you have? It's like even my level of skill is not enough. I mean, he has the power of cosmic and he's still cantering to beat this ghost. Really? It doesn't make a lot of sense. But Bailey, you don't know this game. It's a sideways, you know, shoot-em-up game and it's blisteringly hard. It's one pixel of like the ground touches the silver surface of the court. And you think those ghosts are just following a nice pattern? No, they're all... They're so good. That's how powerful those ghosts are. They're reaching the real world. So, this is an ortho game in the extreme. And is it good? No. Difficulty is unfair bullshit. Silver Surfer is bad at being a hard game because it's not fun at being a hard game. Super Meat Boy, if you play it all the way through, is about as hard as this in many points. The difference is Super Meat Boy is designed very well. That little mechanic where every time you die and you start over again when you finally beat it, you see the replay of your million failed attempts. How many of you keep playing to beat a Super Meat Boy level? Because you've really got to see that. The more times you've died, the more invested you are in finally finishing it. And also don't let any freaking re-try a whole bunch of Silver Surfer. It's like, okay, you have to pick which one of the guys you're gonna go for. Okay, I'll pick Mephisto's level. And I died. And now I have to re... I already beat the Lizards level. I have to redo that again, too. It's just unfairly hard. And the stuff that kills you, it's like you just memorize everything. Imagine if you had to beat every Super Meat Boy level in one shot and if you didn't, you went back to the first level. Yeah, wouldn't be a popular game. You can die three times, maybe. It doesn't matter. So go. I'm gonna say that go is a bad game. I also say it goes a bad game. So go is bad and having directional heuristics for beginner and intermediate level players. Right, so just heuristics are basically things you use to help make decisions in a game. Here's an example. You guys, you can't do math. Humans cannot do the kind of math you need to do to analyze games. When we talk about analyzing games, you'll do some calculation to a point, but you're not calculating the entire state of a game. You're using a heuristic, a sort of fuzzy logic, a sort of simple rule. Like, if the game is in this state, I will do things like X, Y, and Z as opposed to H and I. Humans do this. It's how our brains work. There's something in humans called the gaze heuristic. It's how we catch things. If I toss, oh, I already threw E.T. out. So if I threw E.T. out into the crowd again and someone wanted to catch it, they're not calculating the trajectory. Humans cannot predict where something will land based on where it was thrown quick enough to catch it. We cannot do that, but yet humans catch it all the time. How do we do this? The gaze heuristic. Human beings will unconsciously, without thinking about it, if you toss something or a person, look up at it and lock their gaze at an angle. As long as you keep your gaze locked at an angle of an object following the ballistic trajectory and move forward or backward to make sure that angle stays the same, you're guaranteed to have it hit you right in the eyeball. So you back up and then you stop slightly short and then you can trivially catch it. That's how you catch stuff. You're not calculating anything. Board games are the same way. Yeah. I'm trying to think of a heuristic maybe in settlers. You're like, if I have one of the four resources necessary, I build a settlement as a directional heuristic, as a heuristic you use to make a decision in the game. And as you play games, once you start a new game, you don't have any heuristics, but you play it and you start to say, oh, if this happens, I'll do that. And you start to build a system of one, you know, in Mario, if there's a pit, I will press A to jump. If there's a big pit, I'll run backwards, then hold B and run forwards and then press A. Now chess, a similarly abstract game has at least a tiny analogy that's built into the game for someone who hasn't read the rules of, I'm trying to kill that king. I got knights. I got castles. I got a queen who's really bad ass. I'm going to go get that guy. So you have this analogy from the real world of what to do. So you think, all right, I'm just going to move my guys forward and try to get that king. You have a very simple first order directional heuristic. Go get that king. And then you get fools mated. And now you have a second directional heuristic. Don't get fools mated. And you can build these heuristics. Then you have a third one. I'm only going to make a move if I kill more of his guys than he kills my guys. Then you get another one. I'm going to move in such a way to where he'll move to a position that I can capture a guy. You start to use these heuristics and use increasingly complex heuristics. Go, if you try to just start playing go without someone who already knows go teaching you, you're basically acting randomly for most of the beginning of the game until the game, like on a nine by nine board or even like a three by three board, some people. You're going to act randomly until you've gotten to the point to where you can calculate the rest of the game. And then you play perfectly and the game's over. Go is really bad at getting beginner players to play. Go requires for the majority of people an expert to teach someone how to play who knows how to teach go. A lot of people who play go just read books constantly so they can memorize these patterns because if you try to get, you won't get directional heuristics in like the first hundred plays. You won't have even anything to help you make decisions. You'll still be playing randomly unless you're super, super smart. Now see what we did here. Go is a great game. Go is an amazing game. But even go is bad at something. There's no perfect game. So we talked about directional heuristics, which is what do I do now? Mario Kart is bad at having positional heuristics. Who is winning? Who is winning a Mario Kart? Is it the guy who's really in first place? Is he winning? No. Blue Shell. Is it the guy in second place? Well, it depends which Mario Kart because in some Mario Karts, Blue Shell has AOE. Yeah. That thing right there, that list of who's winning, that is a first order positional heuristics. It is a lie. If you're playing shoots and ladders and one guy's near the end and the other guy's near the beginning, but there's a ladder that goes right to the end. Who's actually winning? And it turns out that's really complicated because there's no such thing as catch up mechanisms in games. If you could have caught up, you weren't behind. There was just an obscured positional heuristic. The point spread around the edge of the board was lying to you. So Mario Kart is a great game and your directional heuristics... I have a really good directional heuristic in Mario Kart. I'm going to go really fast. Yeah, Mario Kart directional heuristics no problem, right? Go as fast as I can. Stay on the road. Use any shortcuts I find. Use all my items to shoot people. Try to make them hit, right? I'm losing. Go backwards and try to ram somebody. It's called griefing. But the positional heuristic is really obscured. So people play Mario Kart and complain that... Oh, that was bullshit. I was winning the whole game. No you weren't. And then I lost because of BS. No, you were not winning at any point in that game. You just had a much simpler and less accurate positional heuristic in your brain than the actual one in the game. These games tend to be unsatisfying to smart people because you figure out a more complex positional heuristic. Usually they're really complicated. Even Settlers has this problem. Who's really winning? The guy with eight points or the guy with seven points and he's one away from longest road and one away from largest army. Who's really winning the game? Once it's not an obvious thing to do it's not go fast, press A, get the puck in the goal, score the touchdown. The games become unsatisfying because the thing you're doing isn't the thing you want to be doing. You're hanging back in Power Grid to jump ahead a little later. The Vote Who Wins game. Vote Who Wins. Four people sitting around a table. Do you want Rem to win? No, do you want him to win? No, right? If you just straight up voted to win right no one would win. It would always be three votes against one for every vote in a four player game. Any game that is not a team game that is more than two players and is an ortho game is a Vote Who Wins game. It's called Politics. So if there's a three player game of advanced wars or something any two players can collude against the third player and eliminate them from the game and immediately increase their chance of winning from 33% to 50%. And the end game of pretty much any non-two player game becomes I can't win. My actual either hurt the person in first place making him lose or will hurt the person in second place making him lose. Right, so basically one person doesn't get to win because the other two players voted he will not win. And then that person who will not win chooses amongst the two players who one of them has a chance of winning which one of them will win. So it's like we got a third person here me and Rim say third person ain't winning. Now third person decides well is Rim gonna win or is Scott gonna win? And it doesn't matter what we do unless you're really incompetent that's what's gonna happen. So politics exists in any game that is more than two players. Ever notice how all the famous super high level games are only ever two player? It's because of this problem there is literally no way around this problem. Any three or four player game might not be political early on because you're still exploring the game you're good at the game the politics don't matter until it's too late. Age of Steam eliminates players that can't win anymore so they can't agree. Right, so Mall of Har is literally a game where your inner mall zombies come at you and you vote to who to kick out of the rooms into the zombies. Small world and Vinci both have this problem to a huge degree. You can pick a winner in small world. Vinci you can pick a winner it's easier than Vinci because you see the score the whole time. Small world obscures the score so you can only be political if you have a more complex positional heuristic and you're counting how many points everyone's been picking on it. It's public information the game hives it hoping you won't pay attention. Counter-Strike I fucking love Counter-Strike. I've been playing this game since before the P90 was in the game. This is my favorite god damn game and it's still a bad game. If you come to me and say hey Rip, Counter-Strike is just a really complex head clicking game. Yes. It is. I'm not going to pretend it isn't. That matters. Learning to click on heads is more important than any amount of tactics in this game. The tactics only matter if everyone has already mastered the clicking on heads. If you've got 10 guys who are click on head masters then yes all that other stuff which guns you choose which path you take where your teammates go suddenly all that stuff matters if you can't click on heads and one guy can his team wins. If I play on a pub server I walk in I'm like Neo I just walk around like bubam bubam bubam I play on a pro server I'm that guy who dies in the first 15 seconds. So Counter-Strike I just want to make this point I love this game I accept that there are some things about it that are objectively bad it has flaws it has problems if you tell me Counter-Strike has bad aspects I don't get mad at you but how many people out there get really mad if you tell them their game has a problem if you tell them that their MOBA isn't the best game for me they try to argue with you like oh it's good no you suck they take it personally because they identify with this thing that is outside themselves like I'm a Counter-Strike person you insult Counter-Strike you've insulted me and it's like no you're just not looking at the world objectively it's okay to like things everything has flaws nothing is perfect don't get personally insulted just because I insult some shit so let's go into something else Team Fortress 2 we're running out of time I hate this game and here's why it's like it doesn't matter now we need to be very specific this is why game reviewers are so important to not use numbers but to use a sort of you know explain why the reviewer likes the game because if you know what kind of person the reviewer is and you read their review and they talk about their personal non-objective 100% subjective experience backed up by objective facts that's actually a good review for you right so here's what happened with Team Fortress 2 Team Fortress 2 has like these random crits they added in so it's like randomly when you hit someone you might get a critical hit and they'll die when they did this without putting any visual indication in the beta right as they did this they were testing people liked the game more it was more fun people said they liked the game more they said whatever you change they added the random crits they said do you like the game more and they said yeah it's way better now now those crits added randomness reduced the impact of skill in the game but it made the game more fun for about 80% of the players then they revealed this is what we added that top tier 20% of players who were really invested in the skill part of the game quit because the game was more random and that was bullshit as far as they were concerned right Team Fortress 2 is not good at being a test of skill the way counter strike is well they test of certain skills it's not good at testing skill based movement it's not good at testing head clicking it's not good at testing individual skill because if you're a reasonably competent FPS player you can basically play your role or your class perfectly for all intents and purposes it is good at testing your wallet to see how many heads you can buy now as a result this game is bad testing all those things it's bad at being the kind of game that rim likes it's really good at being a team game it's really good at being fun if you play really good at being silly if I play this game with 10 friends they we have to work as a team it tests your ability to play with a team to have a team strategy you two defend we're gonna go attack with these classes here's our plan to get the uber all those parts are great those parts exist because we made all the other parts worse the tests of skill were moved to a different area and I hate that we have seven minutes this game doesn't have the movement stuff it doesn't the characters are huge the maps tend to be small characters are really slow you have limited ammo it's not hit scan there's huge spread on weapons and this old game does the exact opposite of that so you might think that this is really good so you don't even know what the weapons factory is okay so it's a quick two mod it's crazy team fortress two is the successor to team fortress which was a quick one mod then there was mega team fortress weapons factory was the peak of that genre of gaming disappeared weapons factory does the exact opposite of team fortress two in every regard the player models are tiny they move ridiculously fast ten times faster than anything in team fortress two all the weapons are hit scan you have like 15 god damn weapons and five different kinds of grenades you have grappling hooks so the game is all in 3D all the time as a result this game the team tactics mean jack shit yeah you think head clicking matters in counter strike right it matters it's like ten times more the head clicking weapons factory one guy on weapons factory it's like if I'm really good at counter strike and head clicking okay I can kill two to three guys around who aren't as good as me and then I'll die because I took too much damage right in weapons factory I will kill the entire other team every single time I will never get hit by anything ever right because I'm flying around in 3D like lightning they won't even see me on the screen they'll be like a grenade behind them I'll knock them into the air with a rocket where another rocket is already there to meet them and that's a basic play it's like the skill of the moving around is really all that matters period end of story so two parts of the game this is a bad game for people who like individual skill tests this is a bad game for people who want to have a life and it's bad for people who want to have a team-based skill game Tribes 2 possibly my favorite game ever how many of you have ever played Tribes 2 oh yes because Penny Arcade kind of talks about Tribes 2 a lot over the years and that art is actually getting kind of old Tribes 2 is a big deal that nobody talks about anymore look at how many fucking Penny Arcade comics there are about Tribes 2 now on a point something out here Barbara is saying this is a bad game because remember when they used to use reports they haven't done that in a while best game until they fucked it up Tribes 2 was bad at being a game you can still play DRM made this game impossible to play it disappeared a lot of times there's nothing wrong with the game itself there's something wrong in the meta of the game the thing around the game perhaps the community heroes ignore it there's a lot of games that have these sorts of problems and Tribes 2 is one of them the company running Tribes 2 they had a forum built into the game you didn't need to go to a website and the people who suggested things in that forum they actually visited them and did what they said and they fucked up the game they also they also gave mods first class treatment so people started playing more mods than the classic game fractured the community which meant you couldn't find a good game anymore and this requires a ton of people to play at least to play a good game of it yeah in order to play a game of Tribes 2 you need like 40 people all there in the beginning because the server was huge the map is huge you need everyone there at the beginning you need everyone to stay for like 20, 30 minutes per match right? it is really hard to get a good game of Tribes 2 it's even harder today adventure games these are not ideal games that term I used before because your playthrough is not unique the same shit happens every time you play you can pirate adventure games by watching them on YouTube I do that I love adventure games I have loved adventure games but the fact is they're just movies and the puzzles are usually really simple and really straightforward the ones that push the boundary a little bit are some of the later King's Quests the quest for glories police quests and space quests were more like simulators but they all have this problem they are great at being interactive amusements they are not ortho games they are not ideal games right if you look go and watch a lot of people who made like the great all time adventure games have given PAX keynotes or PAX story times if you go back to keynote and all of those people they were not necessarily inspired by video games they were all every single one of them in their keynote because I was at those keynotes mentioned Star Wars like number one thing those are people who wanted to tell stories they are not people who are into games they knew programming which is why they ended up telling their stories in the form of software but they didn't make games where there was competition and skill testing and all these sorts of things we are talking about with Counter Strike and what not they basically made movies they made shows they made artwork and it's good at being that it's good at being an entertaining story that thrills you or gives you all sorts of emotions or who knows what the movie does but it's not good at being a game all the puzzles are just annoying nonsense imagine if you went to go watch a movie and every five minutes it's like we're stopping the movie now solve this ridiculous puzzle and we'll let you watch more and you're like hook that bullshit you're not doing that that wouldn't fly Pandemic is a shit game Pandemic is plain of garbage like more than I can maybe soccer is worth it now all these games shadows ever can a lot even the Battlestar Galactica game because the games all have bad rules association share and as a result one smart player can tell everyone else what to do and in like shadows ever can a lot with this traitor if anyone doesn't do what he says they're obviously the traitor or they're stupid and you played Pandemic one dude could just tell everyone what to do there's no reason for it to be a thing imagine if you're playing solitaire like you know Microsoft solitaire and basically what you do is you take turns choosing what to do next that's what Pandemic is right it's not actually Solitaire game it's garbage how to be trying to be a cop game and it fails miserably how to be is a co-op game It won the spiel to see our this year game on here. Just go buy it and play it is better than any co-op board game It's an only real co-op game. I've played in a long-ass time. Mobos bad games. No Because we are running out of time Mobos have bad Spectator heuristics unless you know what the fuck is going on these games are terrible to watch I go to watch some League of Legends and it's just like explosions colors. Oh, there's more colors right now Something must have happened compare it to say Football even if you know nothing about football watching the game for a couple minutes you figure out the basics of what's going on You can enjoy football on a level we went to AFL, right? Australian folk we knew what was going on within like a minute and all we did was read like the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page Pay-to-win games magic the gathering you do all these things. We were in the Rochester Institute of Technology There's a game store called Millennium Games. There is a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament Yu-Gi-Oh is a pay-to-win game the game store owned all the cards that were out So we constructed a deck of the best cards money could buy while the game started. Yes and entered into the tournament being played by our champion here and That vanilla Coke won the game won the tournament. It's bad at being a test of anything except the wallets Borderlands has all the restrictions of an MMO But it's not an MMO I can't play with Scott because my guys level 10 and he's a little 50 even though it's not an MMO Also, you can solve every problem with patience in the sniper rifle me plaza. How many of you are playing this right now? It's candy box. This game is actually this game The game is called candy box Same game. I highly recommend you look up what candy box is and then stop playing 3ds. We wear games Also, if you want to play candy box, learn JavaScript. You can win like in five minutes So and right now the Omegathon is bad at being a test of skill. It is not for testing skill It is for entertaining all of you. So if you ever complain, oh, it's all random in the beginning. Yeah. Yeah Just like game shows We're done. They're kicking us out We got to end this obviously we can't take questions Come grab a flyer if you have a question if you want to follow up if you want to see the slides You want to see the video? We didn't make our concluding point and our point is simple if you're gonna hate on stuff Explain why you hate on it if you can't say why a game is bad Don't say it's bad game and shut up if you like a game like I like these games Except the valid criticism. I respect that these games suck in some ways If you like a game and you can't say why so you should probably look at your life Thank you Thank you