 I'm Rym. And I'm Scott. We are the Hosts of Geek Nights. It's a podcast. Google for it if you want to find out our deal. And we are here today at the Penny Arcade Expo East to consider a question. Can competitive, as in like competitive players, competitive game mechanics exist in the same games and spaces as casual players and casual mechanics? You look around these days, right? A lot of the conflicts that happen in the communities are between these two groups. You have the competitive people and, you know, blatantly insulting the casual people. You got phrases like filthy casuals and stuff like that. And then on the other end, you got people throwing out phrases like sore winners and try-hards, right? So there's clearly some sort of battle going on here. Can we resolve this conflict? Spoilers, the answer is almost definitely no. But we gotta back up to a very different time. We gotta back up to 2019. The world was a lot different back then. Weird to be here now. But in 2019, Fortnite released an update. Let's not worry about what this update did just yet. But let's just say they released an update, added some cool stuff to the game. The fans overwhelmingly said, this is great. The loudest voices on the internet said, the game is better. This is the best patch you've ever released. But Epic, Fortnite, they had data. And the data showed that despite what people were saying on the internet, people were playing Fortnite less and less and less. And the only change was that patch. So something happened there and it happened around this conflict between competitive and casual players. It got so bad that Fortnite undid these changes to the anger of all their very loud online fans. And it turned out 90% of the people who play Fortnite aren't very loud online. They just play Fortnite and they were a lot happier. So we're gonna use this as kind of the example to explore this space, but you don't need to know anything about Fortnite. Because when we first wrote this panel in 2019, I had never actually played Fortnite. I still haven't. Now I have. I don't know why you don't. That game is so up your alley. I don't wanna install the Epic store on my computer. But this is such a common story. Since the dawn of time when you could play an online game with someone else, you would make rules and agreements or you'd wanna have that casual game. We'd play Command and Conquer. And I wanted to sit there and build a base for 20 minutes. Well, they build a base for 20 minutes. And then we fight and one minute in, a whole bunch of little tanks just appear at my doorstep and I lose. I mean, that doesn't even just happen with video games. That happens just kids playing around, right? Is like, they'll put all sorts of rules into four square, a kickball. Like you can't do this and you can't do that, right? In such and such. You get that kid who's way too into tag. It also is a common tragic story in that we talk about this a lot in other panels, the idea of the air hockey problem. If you play air hockey occasionally, you're probably bad at air hockey. And so is literally everyone who you would ever play air hockey with. So air hockey is super fun. If you are really good at air hockey, guess what? There are professional air hockey players. You're off in that world. If you play air hockey more than your friends, but not enough to be a professional, it's the same as being the one person in your group who's a little better at Street Fighter than everybody else. No one will ever play with you again. Right, if I try to play air hockey, I can pretty much only play air hockey and have a good time with RIM and no one else. If I play with a really good air hockey player, I just hurt my hands. It'll probably be bleeding. I'll just get scored on and it'll be game over without me even doing anything. And if I play against one of my other friends that isn't RIM, who doesn't care as much about air hockey, I will just score on him directly a whole bunch of times. You're hitting that puck so hard it's startling. Right, so we're not compatible. Even if we all want to play air hockey, we all enjoy air hockey. We are not compatible together in the same game. But this has been a thing for as long as humans have played games. This is an ancient famous painting. There's a lot of talk about this in the history of games. The word that arose in the 1700s was sharp. Someone is a card sharp. Card sharp with a K came later. They used to call them card sharps because if someone was playing a card game but they were getting a little sweaty about it, they're playing a little too hard. They're trying too hard to win. They would be considered sharp play. You ever play a game with your friends where like you're playing settlers and people get mad if you do the obvious smart thing instead of being nice with everybody else? Like, oh, put the rover in the desert. Some nonsense like that. So gamers have always been fighting about this for as long as there have been games. And what this really comes down to is community. Star Wars has a community around it, right? What's that community about? Is it about Star Wars? Well, it depends, right? If you look online, most of the communities on the internet and real spaces are formed on the basis of what people like, right? These people all like Star Wars. Therefore, they all come together in the same space. But do those people really have anything in common, right? Some of those people like Star Wars for different reasons. One person maybe is like a big time cosplayer in the 501st and that's how and why they like Star Wars. Someone else is all about spaceships. They're making model spaceships. They're playing X-Wing on their computer, right? Another person's writing fanfics. So you get these three different fans. They all love Star Wars, right? Do they have something in common? Yes, can they get along if they waste people? Yes. But do they really have that much in common? Will they be compatible if they all join the Star Wars Club? Probably not, right? What event at a convention would all of the Star Wars people go to? But if you were to make, say, a fan fiction club, it might have people writing Star Wars fan fiction. It might have people writing Undertale fan fiction, my little pony fan fiction. Even though those people like different things, the what they like is different, but the how and the why that they like those things are the same. And those people will have more in common and find more compatibility and more community, right? So when we have games, especially online games, we are creating communities around what game people play and thus the border around the community is drawn incorrectly. You have people who like the same thing. They all like Fortnite for completely different reasons. They enjoy it in different ways, and therefore there is conflict. So another good example. Do any of you watch this sport called ice hockey? It's a popular game among the kids. How many of you play ice hockey? All right. I can't skate, good for you. So people who play a game versus people who spectate a game also have very different interests and considerations. Those are very different communities around the same thing. And that gets closer to the mechanical issues we're going to talk about today in games because a game that is a competitive test of skill, a game that is very high skill and not like high randomness or luck or any other nonsense like that might not be as fun to watch. If ice hockey were less random, it would probably have fewer fans. Within the community, when you have a tournament, when you have an event at a PAX, this is very apparent, especially when you see people rage quitting games, when you see people joining a tournament but not caring that much and then not showing up to the final round, which is a very common occurrence. So all this coming back to Fortnite, what actually happened with Fortnite? They added a little feature and all it did was if you killed someone, you got a little bit of extra help and a little bit of extra shield. That's it. That is literally all this patch did and that had a lot of consequences. But before we can talk about those consequences, we should zoom out a little bit and talk more about the broad picture of what was going on here because if we follow this thesis that there are two different communities playing Fortnite. At least two. At least two. We've got some sweaty people and some sleepy people. What are they after? They're after radically different things. A competitive player, someone like me and Scott, if you talk to us about games, we talk a lot about the mechanics and I want the player with the highest skill to win and I don't want some random nonsense hitting me. I don't want Thanos to be thrown out by ego when I didn't expect it. That's not to say that we're any good. We just try to win. We care about winning. I'm happy to lose games. I just want a fair, serious competition. A lot of kids playing Fortnite, a lot of people playing Fortnite, they want to hang out, have fun with their friends. They're doing things in Fortnite for fun. Winning Fortnite is just something that may or may not happen along the way. If we distill this further, this is what happened with that patch. Competitive players wanted the best player to win. That patch rewarded aggression and thus did mean the better players would win more often. Non-competitive players just got killed immediately because suddenly there's people like us running around the game killing kids as fast as possible. Right, all those kids, what did they want to do? They wanted to watch a concert in Fortnite or build a base or try out there, look at their new skins or explore new spaces, right? But you can't do that if you're dead. Remember that old Star Wars FPS? Not the one you're thinking of, one that's so old I don't know if you've ever played it. Where it was a competitive game, yes. Yeah, competitive FPS, right? We joined this game, people would stand next to each other in the middle of a deathmatch and turn and bow to respect each other before they fall. Yeah, you would have a lightsaber duel. You were supposed to bow and crouch before the lightsaber duel. I would just cut people, it's not a rule in the game. People just decided that and it's like, I was even worse, I'd look for people who were setting up a duel within the game. I'd just run out with force lightning. I didn't even pull out a lightsaber. It's like, yeah. So before we can explore exactly why this happens, we're gonna do a little bit of lesson. We're gonna explore some concepts, some terminology that'll help you describe what you like and dislike about games, how you engage with games. This will help us have a more focused conversation. Orthogame, so most of the time, people like to throw around the word game and game is such a broad term that encompasses everything from like patty cake to chess to football to whatever, right? So we like to use the word orthogame, which we learned from a book, and an orthogame is basically a multiplayer game, at least two players, in which there is gonna be winning and there's gonna be losing, right? Or at least some sort of ranking, right? D&D, not an orthogame because there's no winning and losing, right? Solitaire, not an orthogame because it's only one player. You're not competing against anybody else, right? Baseball, orthogame, right? Counter-strike, orthogame. The next time some jerk tries to make an argument with you about saying something's not a game, you can point out that everything's a game, it just might not be an orthogame. Fun, we should talk about this. What is fun? Fun, if we wanna really mechanically explore it, is what some random player of a game wants from that game. I hope no one's playing games for some reason other than fun, unless you're being paid to play games. So this is what you should be seeking, but this is where it gets interesting. Utility is a game theory term. All right, so you're playing a game and it's like the game, the design of the game wants the players to want something. That something is utility, right? I just said baseball, right? In baseball, if the game wants you to get runs, runs are the utility, right? Settlers, the game wants you to get victory points and then win, right? So victory points are the utility, right? Counter-strike, the utility is kill the other team, plant the bomb, rescue the hostages, those are the utility, right? Anything else you might do in the game is not the desired utility that is from the game design. So ideally, you playing a game, you want to have fun and seeking utility in the game is fun. That means the game is good for you. Well, when that's not true, that's where griefing comes from. Griefing is when we have players who are looking for some utility other than what the game wants them to find. They're trying to figure out how many teammates they can flash back. Yep, they're playing Counter-Strike. It's like they're team killing, right? It's like they're having fun torturing people and in World of Warcraft, they're like spawn camping and killing people who come back to life, right? They're finding fun in something other than what the game wants them to find fun in, right? Maybe they're just playing baseball and they're trying to steal as many bases as they can, which I guess could help you get more runs. Probably won't. Sometimes it won't, right? Maybe they're trying to steal a base when it's like a full, you know, that every base is loaded or something, right? It's like, it might be that idea, but they just enjoy that part of the game and not the game as designed and they're not trying to win. So there's a little aside. I'm already familiar. There's an old internet tale from many years ago. There was a dude who went by the name of Hamjo. Not Hamzo with a Z, but Hamjo with a J. This dude played Overwatch. I don't think anyone is. This is a very good story. Hamjo decided in the earlier days of Overwatch to join the competitive ladder to play Overwatch with the express purpose of being the lowest ranked player in the world. Now they would try to win, but they would try to win by making it harder and harder for themselves, playing at weird resolutions, playing in dim monitors, playing with a mouse sensitivity of one, playing with the steering wheel, playing with the DDR pad. Just anything to make the game so hard that they are going to be the worst possible player in the game. And of course they played Hamzo, which back then Hamzo was a controversial character. But the thing that's notable for this panel is that in the course of seeking this alternative utility of negative victory points, they encountered all the different kinds of players of competitive Overwatch along the way, down to hell. So at the very bottom, people were friendly and polite. They maybe didn't know D.va could fly, like they didn't know how to bind all their keys, like they were just falling off the mat, but they were generally polite and reasonable. At the upper levels, everybody's super sweaty. But there's a great quote from an interview with this dude. In the mid-30s, which would basically be the equivalent of the second fifth of players. So if you rank all players into five fifths, the second from the bottom, those players, usually scrubs, people who want to be good at a game, but aren't, people who are struggling, those silver players who freak out at you all the time when you play games online. And he said in the mid-30s, I met the angriest people in the world. And that stuck with me because those are people who say they want a competitive game, but they don't actually want one because they are playing a seriously competitive game and that game has told them exactly how good they are and they don't want to hear it. So they're angrier than people who are worse than them and they're angrier than people who are better than them. And people like this, I don't think, can ever be happy. Agency. Agency. You ever play a game? I guess magic. The best example I like to go to is the Magic of Gathering. It was a very old card. It was older than, oh, not older than us, but it was from our time when we were in middle school, right? The game was the early to mid-90s. Yeah, called Stasis, right? The Stasis card, if you don't know a magic, basically, it made it really hard to untap anything. So what would happen is generally your whole deck would be tapped and you couldn't use any lands, you couldn't do anything, right? You had no more control in the game. The game was just sort of like, even though it wasn't officially over, it was over, right? Like you just couldn't do anything. You couldn't play your cards. You had no more input as to the course the game would take from that point on once the Stasis was in effect, right? So when that happens, we like to say the player has lost their agency, right? They are no longer an agent in the world of the game. Scale. Now, scale, a lot of people like to have different dimensions of scale, but it's actually very important to understand agency first. Scale is what the game is testing to determine who the better player is over which those players have agency. If we play Paper Rock Scissors, unless somehow I cheat or I'm psychic, I have no agency over actually winning Paper Rock Scissors in a meaningful way. Coinflip, I have no meaningful agency unless I learned how to fake a coinflip, which is actually pretty easy to do. Basically forget cheating, right? We're talking about non-cheating situations. So if you are looking at scale, scale is the thing the game is testing. So for example, Counter Strike. You're playing old game Counter Strike. That game is mostly testing. Have you memorized a map and can you click on heads very efficiently? There's other stuff in that game, but that's the scale that matters the most, right? A game like poker, right? What's it testing, right? Well, against people who you can read, it might be testing how well you can read faces, but mostly it's testing, can you do math, probability and statistics very, very quickly, right? Did you memorize all these formulas and know your odds of winning and calculate your bets appropriately, right? It's quick mental math is the scale that is being tested in poker. Incentive, what does the game reward with utility? So think back to that Fortnite example. Fortnite was rewarding, killing another player with direct utility, something that would help you eventually win the game. So that is an incentive, meaning the game is not only saying it wants you to want it, it is rewarding you for seeking it. Casual player. Maybe we should have a definition for this. Someone who plays a game because they wanna have fun for their own reasons. Nice and simple. They're playing a game, we don't really care why. They just, they wanna play this game for their own extrinsic amusement. The game is just a context for that fun and we leave it at that. Keep it a broad definition. No, there's nothing wrong with that. All right, everyone can enjoy anything in any way and it's all valid. You could play the same game in two ways. I could play Fortnite and be super sweaty one night. I could play Fortnite and just be hanging out another night. Yeah, there's no right and there's no wrong. It's just some people are different. Some, even the same person is different at different times, right? But someone who is a casual player or is currently playing casually is somebody who's playing a game and isn't deriving their joy from the competition and the trying to win and the trying to get utility with their skills. They're just enjoying it for some other reason that's their own reason. Maybe they just love the art and sound in the game. Maybe they love the story in the game, right? Some other reason is bringing them joy and that's fantastic, right? But they are not competitive, therefore they're in the other bucket casual. It's just a word. Competitive players. We can have a very precise definition of this. A competitive player is anyone who in playing a game strives to maximize their utility above all else. Think about it. They care about winning and that's it. Think about the person you know who maybe is a little too into Pokemon and they're IV training and EV training and doing all that nonsense. They are sacrificing their health and their happiness in order to maximize that Pokemon utility. None wrong with that either but these are very different ways to engage with games. So return on effort. This is a more complex topic but I'm sure you're familiar with a card game called Hearts. This applies to most card games but Hearts is a good example. This is a chart showing the reward the game gives you for engaging a certain number of stratagems. Now what do I mean by that? Say you're playing Hearts, a one-ply stratagem would be I'm going to keep track of whether or not the Queen of Spades has come out or not because that's really important to know where that card is. You don't wanna get it. A two-ply stratagem, they are strategy meaning I'm employing two stratagems. I'm keeping track of that Queen of Spades. I'm also counting how many Hearts got complained. A three-ply stratagem, I'm also counting every single spade that got played. I'm memorizing every card that got played. If you notice in this chart, the important thing, taking even one strategy into account makes you way better at the game. You are rewarded heavily. Chess has a similar thing. Learn an opening to chess even if you are terrible at chess. You will do so much better overnight is kind of funny but three-ply, four-ply, applying more strategies is a lot more effort for diminishing returns. The more effort you put in, doesn't mean you're going to be rewarded more to employ that nth strategy where you literally memorize every single card that was played at any point and have all the odds in your head. That's painful to do in your brain. That is annoying to do in your brain. I love Hearts and I don't even do that. Now the thing that's important here is that somebody who is going to go up against the best of the best like the grand championships of the entire world, you need to do as many plies as you can get because they're going to be doing the same thing. So even though it's a diminishing return, you need all the returns. If they're doing 10-ply, you're only going to become the grand champion of the world if you do 11-ply, right? You have to do everything even if the return on that is very minuscule because it will make the difference against the other person who is the best of the best. But if you're just playing against normal people at PAX, chilling in the tabletop zone, if you employ even one-ply, you will dominate, dominate because everyone else is zero-ply or half a-ply, it's like negative-ply, right? They're not trying to win. So even if you are not amazing at a game, if you put any effort whatsoever into thinking about winning, how do I maximize my utility? Just come up with a basic strategy that's effective and correct. You will beat everybody and they'll be like, oh, this person is too good. They're no fun to play with. I can't do that, right? Even if you're barely trying. So what about different games? I mentioned chess earlier. Most games have a similar scale here, but look at the difference between chess and hearts. Chess requires, it gives you more reward for putting more effort out, but that plateau is way higher. There is so much more strategic depth to the game that you need to push further and further and further into that graph to get significant rewards against skilled players. Hearts plateaus earlier, you get less reward on skill earlier in that curve because it's a simpler game. There's only so many plies. It's a deck of 52 cards. There's not that much you can apply to this game. What about returns on skill? Notice before it was effort. Putting in effort doesn't necessarily make you win. Scale is what is tested. We talked about this before. So return on skill is how often does the highest skill player in a given game actually beat a player who demonstrably has a lower skill in that game? Games have randomness. They have luck. Sometimes they have other things that factor into weather, golf. So somebody who might be higher skill and putting in more effort might actually only win the game against someone who's lower skill with lower effort, I don't know, 10% more, instead of over 50-50. It's not a guarantee you're gonna win 100% of the game just because you're better than them if there's lots and lots of luck. Yatsi, very random game, yatsi. You might have the perfect yatsi strategy to know exactly where to score each thing. And if you play 100 games of yatsi against someone else, you'll have a higher total score than the less skilled, less effort person, pretty much guaranteed. But in one game of yatsi, they might roll five yatsis. You can't beat that. It's just dice. It has nothing to do with your skills or your knowledge or your efforts. What about randomness? We just talked about that. In general, if you add randomness to a game, the more randomness you add, the less return on skill there is in that game. Just internalize that chart. More randomness, less skill. It sounds simple and obvious, but thinking about it in these terms and thinking about it explicitly helps interrogate what's going on with Fortnite. Because what happened in Fortnite? What's the real deal? Fortnite, before the patch, rewarded you for killing dudes. Fortnite after the patch, rewarded you sooner for killing dudes. You got more rewards over time for killing dudes. And it led to this point to where the people who were willing to employ those extra strategies who would be more aggressive, who would seek utility of winning the game by killing other players faster, ended up being a snowball in that the 10 super predators in the match would basically be untouchable compared to everyone else because they were given a slight incentive to kill other players faster and that incentive led to a higher return on skill. And not only that, but when they killed dudes, the incentive that they got was an incentive that made it easier to kill more dudes. If you kill one dude, then you get health back in case maybe they shot you one time before you killed them. And now it's really easy to kill the next dude instead of going around with 90 health instead of 100. And you're back to 100, like the game started again and you got better weapons. And then you show up as this giant monster and Johnny 10 year old trying to build his little fort with his friends. You just burn it down while he's inside of it and now nobody's happy. Well, I guess you're happy, he's not. So all that, I think let's go a little deeper because what happened with Fortnite was instructive. What happens to games generally if we make them reward skill more across the board? Because the short version of this is that every game becomes Fox final destination, no items. Worst players will always lose. We're not saying worst players will lose most of the time. Worst players will always lose. Very high skill game, basketball. If I play against LeBron, I will always lose. There is zero chance, literally zero, perhaps negative chance. I probably won't even get to touch the ball. Maybe when he scores and I get the ball back and then he'll immediately steal it from me. And that will be, I won't even get to dribble it one time. But it's even worse than that, you brought up LeBron. Worst players can't even play. Imagine if Scott and I tried to play basketball against LeBron, we would never touch that ball. I said that, we never touch the ball, can't play. Think about that South Park episode where the little kids play against the Detroit Red Wings. Like, how's that gonna go? Now see, if I was a casual player of basketball, which I am, right, very rarely, I could enjoy the game because I'm not very good at it. I'm not trying to win. As long as I get to dribble, move around, take a shot, even if it misses, right? If I lose, I'm still happy at the end of the day because I'm still playing basketball. I am deriving my joy from playing even though I'm not winning. Meanwhile, if I play Street Fighter with Scott, I'm never gonna touch him. Not once. I don't get to play. I'm gonna hit buttons that don't do anything and then I'm gonna die. And I'm not very good at that either. Efficiency will begin to win out over fun in all cases. There's a concept in game theory of a Pareto frontier meaning there's a lot of options in the game, but generally there is a line, an edge, a frontier of options that are objectively better than other options. So you might trade like A and B, the difference between A and B might be one's a little faster and one's a little stronger, the kinds of things you expect, but C right there, just worthless. You are literally better off playing any other character than someone that is behind the Pareto frontier in a game. So if a game rewards skill highly, nothing that isn't directly on that frontier will ever be touched, will ever be used. And so this again ruins fun for people who are not serious competitive players. Serious competitive players don't care which character they pick. They just wanna know which character is the strongest. Someone who's just a big fan of Kirby in plain smash, they wanna be Kirby. But if there's another character who is just better than Kirby in every way, just does more damage just faster, just stronger, just superior, Kirby is not competitively viable unless you ban the other characters, but whatever. And now this person is no longer compatible with the competitive scene, because they're a character that they derive joy from being Kirby, and this is instead of deriving joy from winning, and therefore they cannot derive joy in a game where other people are trying to win. This is a big one. And baseball is such a perfect example of this. There was an era in baseball where fielding mattered a lot, where pickles would happen pretty regularly, like people are running back and forth on the bases and pulling shenanigans and trick plays and all this nonsense. It happens in little league, it happens in lower leagues, it happens in the major leagues occasionally, but it's very rare compared to the olden times, like a century ago, where it was extremely common, like multiple times a game. Yup, so imagine a video game that has a fun city building mechanic and also a fighting mechanic. And what if the fighting mechanic is all that actually matters, which is often the case in a high return on skill game. Most of the systems in most games don't actually matter that much. Very high skill players will maximize the systems that maximize the utility they get. And as a result, there's a reason you don't see a lot of base stealing in modern baseball, because the meta, the objective strategy that is best is to always hit home runs. If you can always hit home runs, the rest of the game does not matter at all. You don't even need to know how to play the rest of the game. Only a few skills even get tested. Counter-strike has all this stuff going on. You're, you got a team, you're communicating with each other, you might want to rotate between sites and have strategies and cover someone and all that fun stuff. But the reality is, if the suspect is better at clicking on heads than anyone on your team, they're just going to click on your heads. And none of that stuff I just talked about mattered. All the fun parts of Counter-strike disappear. Right, and you log in and die. But if you have two teams of pro Counter-strike players who can all click on heads, just as well as the suspect, suddenly all those other things do matter again, right? Suddenly the strategy does matter. The teamwork does matter because everyone can click on heads. But if one person can click on heads and no one else can, then none of those other things matter. The clicking on heads dominates. It is the primary skill being tested. And even worse, this creates a higher barrier to entry to people even playing the game at all. Because now one person who is better at the skill that is tested the most in the early parts of this curve will dominate any other player no matter what unless those players also attain that high level of skill. This is why a lot of early MOBAs were impossible to play if you didn't play them from day one and play them constantly. This is why a lot of people who are maybe older than 30 don't actually play Counter-strike that much anymore. And to make it worse, right? Daisy Robin and Pelican and friends here getting head-shotted, right? Counter-strike is a game where once you're dead, you stay dead. So it's not just that they don't get to enjoy the game, that they don't get to win the game. Much like me and LeBron, they don't get to play the game. They boot up Counter-strike, they die. They never get to play it or enjoy hiding behind some crates or whatever they're gonna do. All the things that they enjoyed are not part of their Counter-strike experience when the suspect is hanging around. Now, if you as an aside wanna be good at games, wanna beat your friends at games, think about the games you play with your friends and try to figure out all the skills that game tests using all the definitions we talked about. What is the skill that has the most return for the least effort? And double down on that. And your friends will hate you. You'll never play games with them again. This is actually terrible advice. Or get friends who also put in the same effort. Yep, good luck. But they have to put in the same amount of effort. Even if you have a bunch of friends and you all agree, we're gonna play Marvel Snap. Nobody's allowed to spend money. Someone's just gonna grind out more cards faster than everyone else. It's still gonna happen. Meta. Kids hate Meta. Everybody hates Meta. But Meta will always emerge. There is no way to avoid Meta. Well, there's one way to avoid Meta. Symmetry. Ah, symmetry. Everyone doesn't have choices, right? If everyone had the same of same six Pokemon, right? At the same exact level with the same exact... It's the Geodude's Callous. Exactly. Then you don't have any Meta to evolve. Everyone's got the same thing, right? But most games these days let people choose their class or their character or something. Cause that's what's fun, right? You build your deck or you're performing some sort of self-expression through your choices in what you're going to play as in the game. I think almost everyone enjoys that, myself included. But it results in there being a Meta due to asymmetry. So as a result, a casual player, say you're playing Overwatch and you really like playing Torbjorn. Like that's just you enjoy what it feels like to play Torbjorn. If Torbjorn is like, you identify with that character. You're like, I am Torbjorn. I will do a Torbjorn cosplay. That is my thing, right? But if Torbjorn is not in the Meta, you're just gonna lose all the time. There is no point. Torbjorn might as well not even be in the game. Now, we said that most systems won't matter because you'll suddenly have in a high-skill game a prime skill, the thing that gets tested the heaviest. But as Scott pointed out, you'll get to a point where all the serious players have maxed out that prime skill. Counter-strike, everyone can click on the heads. Now we move on to the advanced game. Just like watching two advanced Street Fighter players play against each other is very different than watching two amateur Street Fighter players play each other. You evolve this whole new world of gaming. But once you get to that point, once the return on skill on those primary systems matter a lot, this is where you start wave dashing. This is where you start increasingly exploiting the worst parts of games, the things that weren't even intended to be exploited by players. These are the parts of games that are, in many ways, not fun. Yet, if you wanna win, you damn well better use them. You have no choice. And the opposite is also true. When a game is not testing skills, a low-skill game, something like Candyland, right? A no-skill game. It's a game where it just happens. Zero agency game. Right, everyone plays the same way. You don't see any difference no matter who's playing. It doesn't matter, because the game is just playing itself. Case in point, early MOBAs once again. You know, MOBAs, and some of them still have this, had that last-hitting concept. Whoever hits something last gets the XP for it. And the gold, too. Yup, that was not really a game-designed decision. That's just because the first MOBA happened to do it that way for reasons. So as a result, serious-skill players would have to calculate and be very careful to make sure they got the exact right last hits at the exact right times. And that is not a fun part of the game. That wasn't intended to be part of the game itself. Some people think it's fun. Some people do think it's fun. Some people think EV and IV training are fun. I personally do not. This one is the one that hurts both players and spectators. High-skill games, truly high-skill games that return that reward skill highly, almost always end in draws. Because you're gonna hit the top meta of what humans are capable of, way sooner than you think in most cases. We see this in chess right now. Pretty much any chess tournament, computers win by default, no matter what. But if we keep computers out of it, most serious chess games end in draws now for a lot of reasons. Part of this is because when you're playing a high-skill game, games often have attractors. We didn't get to a definition of that, but sort of states that the game likes to fall into and high-skill games like to fall into draw states often. The main reason for this is that if players are good at the game, a player can't necessarily force a win over another equally good player. But they may be able to force the game to go on forever and force a draw. So a highly skilled player who has even the remotest chance of losing, who believes that there is a 1% chance they might lose, they have no reason to continue playing. They might as well go for the draw on purpose, force that draw and play another round. And in games where draws aren't possible, say for example tennis, instead of getting draws, what you get are very predictable results. As I mean, it's a sport, so age comes into it and injuries come into it, but barring age and injuries, like it's a clay court. Nadal is going to win, at least for the past few decades or until recently. It's like, that's how it's gonna be. You know what's gonna happen. The excitement and the drama are gone because you know who has the most skills in that particular setting and that's what's gonna be. This one's a funny one. I remember way back, there was a huge MOBA tournament at taxis. I thought it was West. I thought it was East. I think it was West. It's not even West. Last three years, all these packs has just blurred together. It was way more than three years ago. This is just one long packs. But there was a MOBA tournament and there was on all the screens, big e-sports thing at a tax. And I remember a moment where something big happened in the game and maybe a fourth of the crowd all cheered and nobody else reacted at all. And then everyone else started like clapping along slowly with the people that were cheering because they assumed something big had happened but they didn't understand it. And I looked at the screen and I just saw fireworks and I'm like, I don't know, what's your fireworks? You ever watch American football with your friends and there's the one person who knows more about the sport than the other person and like people get confused about what's going on. Someone who's never been to a hockey game and then the goalie leaves and you're like, wait, you can do that. What's going on? So games that are very high return on skill tend to require an expertise in the spectators to understand what's even happening at that level of play, especially in video games. Sports can avoid this to a small degree, partly because we hit the limits of humans and partly because sports are often more about the exhibition of raw human skill in the physical world, but a video game with a million numbers in the background and a million MOBA mobs and things running around, the advanced play might be to get a special last hit on a particular frame in a certain part of the map and the nerds in the audience who play the game are gonna be watching for that and nobody else even knows that's a thing. Yeah, I mean, if you don't believe this, what you should do is everyone knows GDQ, right? And GDQ is famous for having spectator or, you know, commentators on the couch explaining to you what the heck is going on, right? Because if turn those commentators off, if they're playing a game that you've never seen before and you just watch it, you have no clue what's going on, right? Yeah, or even look at the speedrun. Look at the modern scene of Super Mario Bros. 3 competitive real-time races. That's a whole scene. If you're unaware of that, it is cool, but if you don't know the meta and you don't know like what happens at that level of play, you're gonna watch this round and Mario's like doing things that you didn't think Mario could do. It looks like everybody's cheating and the game is glitching. If you look at the chat, everyone's like, oh, how many hands are they gonna get? What are hands? You're confused and the guy next to you is like, oh, he's got a good sub-pixel. You're like, what's a sub-pixel? In a high return on skill game, there is no possible way to catch up to anyone. All right, so everyone, look at this picture and tell me, is A in first place or is B in first place? How many of you think A is winning this game? How many of you think B is winning this game? How many of you don't know and are willing to admit that? Because it turns out it actually depends on the rules of the game. If say this game is every turn, roll a D100, then the answer is very different than if on every turn it's roll a D2. So it depends on what percentage of the game would be impacted by this. How likely is anyone to land on this? How rare is this? But the point remains that if that ladder is there, then this progression doesn't matter as much until both players have gotten past it. This is a roundabout way of saying that if you could have caught up in a high return on skill game, you were never behind in the first place, you just misunderstood the real score. That is a difficult thing to internalize because it feels like you can catch up in games. You have to drop that illusion. You were never behind all along. If you won, you weren't actually behind. You leveraged the game. You've leveraged the rubber band mechanic. You did whatever you had to do to win. Now, the reason this plays into their discussion here about competitive versus casual is that if these players are competitive, based on the rules of the game, they might realize that A somehow was really unlucky and missed the ladder. B already won, game over. Unless B also misses the ladder. But if let's say A is competitive and B, all it matters is that B isn't a competitive player, they might not realize, they might feel like that they can get ahead here. They're still into the game, but they might not be, right? It might already be over, right? And then once they find out it's over, they're gonna be very sad, but they should have known earlier. This also messes with the drama, especially among spectators, because you all know who's in first place in Mario Kart, the person in second place because the blue shell is gonna come out at some point. So spectators knowing that reduces the drama and the tension of watching the match because they've sort of baked all that in. They've priced that in. They've taken all those factors into account already because they needed that level of expertise to understand what was going on in the first place. A low return on skill game? Yeah, anyone can win. It's anyone's game. You could catch up through the pure randomness. So this is the sort of hard truth. Most players of games across the board, everywhere that we've ever seen, do not actually want skill to matter that much. They will say they want skill to matter. They will say it a lot. In fact, the people who say it the most often want it to happen the least. So games that are very high return on skill, they lack something very important. You're probably wondering why I got a picture of Evangelion here. Remember what that's called, the AT field? Well, what is that? That's a shield, right? Games that have randomness or low returns on skill have ego shields. If I lose to Scott in a game that I perceive to be random, then I don't feel that bad about it. Oh, I just lost because it was random. I didn't lose because I'm terrible at this game. I lost because the universe hates me. And if a game, on the other hand, if people perceive the game to be a game of skill and someone wins at it, then the loser often feels like they're a worse person. Like that person is better than me. I have been defeated or the person who wins gets all gloaty and high and mighty. Like I'm a better person than you. I'm smarter than you. That's why I beat you at this game. Clearly that's proof that I'm smarter than you and I'm just better than you. You should feel bad, right? Now those attitudes are bad on sportsmen like attitudes that people have and they shouldn't. You don't have to have those attitudes. We play games competitively and none of us feel like we're better or smarter than each other except in that very small world of the game. Yeah, yeah. Not seriously, right? No one feels like they're a better person than someone else just because they beat them at a game. Because you are a better player of that game on that day, at that time, in that mood, right? In those circumstances. You're fine entirely in your kitchen? Yes. Can you see it? No. But people, a lot of people can't get away from taking the results of games personally, right? And so they get lots of negative emotions, unfun emotions, right? Not enjoyable things, right? When the winning and losing happens and they can't put the blame for the winning and losing onto something else other than themselves. Now you might say, why don't we just solve this socially? Yeah, we probably should but that's a way bigger topic than we can cover to PAX and also we're not experts in that by any means. We're not experts in this either. We're experts in getting free PAX badges. But I mean, in the history of the universe, if someone's a little upset or sweaty about something, has telling them to calm down ever actually caused them to calm down. So games will include these random elements or at least these ego shields, however they incorporate them and a lot of games do this, just to make sure that winners and losers, losers are given an opportunity to blame something else so they don't internalize it and winners are reminded that, yeah, you won, but yeah, you got a really good corn draw. So maybe the corn won that game for you. Or at least well-designed games. A well-designed game should bring joy to all the players whether they won or lost. There's also a very important point around the limits of skill because the reality is if you maximize the game, say we have a game that is really important has a high return on skill and humans played for another few hundred years. And we get to the point where we are playing it perfectly. Think about some of the world records in speed running like they literally mathematically cannot get better. Those records are set forever. Once you hit that limit, something really strange happens to games. There are only three possible kinds of games on earth. Ortho games, of course, we're not talking about other games, but there are only three. Anything you can think of, any category of game you can think of in the world that is an ortho game will have one of these three outcomes eventually if players maximize their skill. Might just be random. Two people who have the maximize skill, they can't get any better at the game, they're the best as you could possibly be. Every time they play, it might as well save their time and toss the coin instead of playing that game because they max it out. Case in point, a top tier Texas holding player will crush me instantly. I'll lose all my money before I know what's happening, but two top tier Texas holding players, it is probably a nearly 50-50 shot which one of them wins any given tournament. That skill basically bought them a ticket to play at that level, but at that level nothing matters but what cards you draw because everyone's playing perfectly. Maybe someone makes a terrible mistake, but most of the time they don't make mistakes. They play the odds perfectly. Sometimes arm tray. Does anyone know why I'd have a screenshot of an N64 here in this particular? No old Smash Brothers players? All right, oh, we got one person who might know. So in original Smash Brothers, the N64, let's say Scott and I are both playing the same character. We're both Mario. We both are standing next to each other, a good distance apart, and we throw a smash at the exact same frame. We are 100% identical. We are playing perfectly. We did the exact same thing at the exact same time. Who gets hit? What happens? It turns out the final factor in Smash Brothers is something called port priority. Whoever's controller is plugged into port one wins. That sucks, right? Well, guess what? That's because humans broke this game. Humans got so good that they exhausted the possibilities of skill. And there's another type of arbitrariness that a lot of people don't recognize and you all can be very good at games. Politics and game theory does not mean politics in the real world. It is a special noun. Politics means interaction in games. A good example is the balloon popping game. You have five friends sitting in a circle. Everyone's got three balloons. Every turn, pick one of your friends and pop one of the balloons. Whoever is last standing with the balloon wins. Is there any way to be good at that game? Not really. That game is actually just random. But, politics enters. I might pop Scott's balloon because it's really funny if Scott loses. I might pop his room balloon because it's RAM. And of course I'm gonna pop his balloon three times in a row. Our friend Emily then pops my balloon or Scott's balloon because if we're fighting with each other, that's funny. Bring them down first. The end result is you have a game in which it's not skill or randomness or arbitrariness, but the players themselves are just voting on who wins. So we like to call it a vote who wins game. And there are a lot of games that just boil down to vote who wins. All their game mechanics, right? They don't actually mean anything. They're just there for fun and playing around. It's you're just voting on who's gonna win. If you sit down to play diplomacy, you could save yourself several hours by just saying, all right, we got five players. Let's vote on who wins. I vote me. And that would work. It's the same game. Now, politics, here's another tricky part. Politics exists in all orthogames that are not two players. Or two teams. Or two teams. Or that are non-interactive races. All right, so like if you have 100 meter dash, right? It's five people, but they're all running separately. They don't interact with each other. Yeah, you're not allowed to just trip somebody. Yeah, you're not allowed to do that, right? So it's like, yeah, there's more than two players, two teams, there's like five, 10 people, however many, but they don't interact. So it's not vote who wins. So why don't we add some politics? Let's talk, we'll use a foot race as an example. It's 100 meter dash. We're gonna have the plaques open, 100 meter dash tournament. And we want to reduce the return on scale. We add some politics. We let people trip each other. Let players interact. Now, I would watch that. That would be fantastic to watch, but that definitely reduces how good you have to be at running. Another example would be chess boxing. That's a real-ish sport. If you're really good at boxing, the chess doesn't matter that much. If you have, but that is not a political game. Let's say we had multiplayer chess boxing. It's just 10 people in a room and you can punch someone or you can make a chess move against them. You're probably just gonna punch people so they fall over. I think a simple way of explaining it would be if pro wrestling was real and you had a royal rumble, the best wrestler might not necessarily win, right? Because there might three weak people might gang up on them and toss them out and that's the end of it. Many of you might be the person your friend's always gang up on and thus you never win games anymore. Even though you might be the best. Or they'll draw. And this is what we said before about chess. This is happening in chess to a ludicrous degree. Many games are experiencing this. Older games that have high return on scale are hitting the absolute limits of what humans can do and what you'll find in the end is that that is exactly how a games will end. All games are either gonna be a draw with perfect skill, they're gonna be arbitrary, whoever plugged their controller to the right port wins or it's actually going to be random. Skill disappears once skill is maximized and skill becomes nothing more than a ticket to come and play the game in the first place. At least on a serious level. Yeah. So what did Epic Games do with Fortnite? So they had a ton of data and what they found with that patch was that play in the modes where they had added that siphoning mechanic dropped off radically. People were just playing the game less and less and less and Epic basically decided, look, only 9% of our players like this patch. We wanna make money. Yeah. That's why we're here. So we can make that 9% who seem like the vocal majority of the players but really they're just the loudest people on Twitter, happy in our game and everyone else will quit or we can just ignore that, kick them out of our game or just say, you know what? We're not gonna cater to you. You're welcome to play Fortnite. We're not gonna reward your skill. If you don't like that, please play a different game. Everybody else will be better off without you. We are going to make a game that does not reward skill that much. We're gonna make a game that has lots of fun stuff to do. Cool events and wacky situations and you can get time to actually build your base before you die and suddenly everyone loves this game and it's like the most popular game on earth or close to it. I don't know if Candy Crush is ahead or whatever right now, but you know, it's huge. It's pretty big. It's up there, top 10 at least, top five maybe, right? If they had blown the other way, that would not be the case, right? I would say that this is the exact reason why PUBG lost to them, right? Because PUBG designed its game with skill in mind, right? It is a skill game that you can only really be any good at it if you are trying to win. It rewards people who are very good at aiming, right? And such and such. And guess what happened? It lost, right? There are less players for that game. It's really not as popular as Fortnite, not even close. Yep, even though it was first and it was great and a while ago we tried to play it again because it was free and we downloaded it. We played some PUBG and you won't play Fortnite for the dumbest reason. Why should I? I said I'm not gonna install the Epic Store. He won't install the Epic Store. That's it. That's the only reason you won't play Fortnite. Yeah, why would I? Even though Fortnite is like the R example of everything you want out of games. No, it's not. My life isn't anywhere else off. But so I played PUBG, Scott had played PUBG. We enjoyed it. If I had to describe the difference between these two games, one that highly rewards skill and one that barely rewards skill. So PUBG, you're basically hiding in a dirty hot alone trying to hold your breath and hoping no one finds you and then eventually die. In Fortnite you were running around with a ninja sword and a flamethrower riding a dinosaur screaming at people. So what if we try to break audiences up a little bit? We've got the casual players, the competitive players, the spectators. Think about everything we talked about. Think about Fortnite as the example. So Fortnite now in its current state where they don't reward that high skill play very much, Spectation is probably better because spectating extremely high skill, high return on skill Fortnite was like spectating PUBG. It's not actually that interesting and it requires some knowledge. You have to care a lot. But with the new Fortnite, spectators can just sort of enjoy the spectacle. Casual players are having all the fun in the world and competitive players we don't actually need to care about at all. I suspect they're all still playing the game. They're just mad about it. Or they're playing a different game. Yeah. As a game designer, you should think a lot about how you're going to address these three audiences. Is your game something you think people will watch on Twitch live streams? Is it an eSport? Do you care if there was a community around your game focused on watching people play your game? You may or may not care, but you have to think about if you care or not. Do you care if competitive players can compete with each other or not? Do you care if casual players have fun or not? Some designers make games that are aimed at competitive players only. They're not fun for people who are competitive. Think about those train games like 1846 that we play. Those games are not for casual players. They are not fun if you don't get out an Excel spreadsheet. Well, I mean, you have to put an effort just to learn the rules, right? So it's like the kind of person will put the effort in to learn the rules even though they're not that hard, right? They're easier than they look, but it's like the kind of person who will put in the initial effort to learn is the kind of person who's likely to put in the effort to win, right? So therefore, you don't get too many casual players even though there could be because it's not as hard as it looks. Yep. Why don't games just handle all these audiences together? Like, why is this so hard? Why are we doing a whole panel on this thing? Why are people not along along the way? If you, if anyone out there can design a game that is great for spectators, great for serious competitive play and great for casual play where it's the same rules for those groups of players, you will be a millionaire. You will be, you will have the largest booth in the Expo hall, your game will be huge because everyone will play that game, literally everyone. You will have a game that's 10 times bigger than Fortnite. And I mean, our hypothesis at least is that this really isn't possible, right? It just, no matter what kind of game it is sport, video game, board game, any kind of game if it is an ortho game where there is winning and losing, there is utility, right? Whatever you make the rules of that game, those rules are either going to reward skill or not and they are going to reward skill to some degree. And if they reward skill to a degree that is too high casual players will have a bad time playing that game if they are playing with other players who are not casual because they basically won't get to play. They will just have the ball stolen from them and not get to enjoy anything. And if you keep the skill cap too low or you make skill not matter in that game then a lot of people are gonna have a lot of fun playing that game but people who care about winning and losing their joy is derived from trying, practicing leveling up themselves, learning, evolving finding new strategies. They're gonna figure out everything there is to figure out about your game in two seconds get bored, see that it's a random game see that it's an arbitrary game and move on to something else. How can you possibly get all of those people to enjoy the same game? We think you can't, it just can't happen. Think about an example that got closer lately Marvel Snap popular game a lot of people are playing it I think I assume some people are playing it during this panel. Marvel Snap doesn't actually accommodate competitive play very well. I don't have every card. I can't make a deck that's in the top meta. I want Dracula, I have no way to get Dracula. I got exactly this. I can't trade with Scott because they do not want people to easily be able to chase the meta. They have chosen their audience. Another example that people like to point to that is not actually an example of accommodating these audience Dance Dance Revolution. Dance Dance Revolution You can have someone playing the easy version of a song at the same time on the same machine with the same scoring mechanisms as someone playing the advanced version of the song. You might think, oh, those players are playing together. But one, socially, do you really think the person doing like a step like this feels cool when they're next to the nut who's going like this playing the serious game? Like there's a psychological factor there you can't ignore. But even if you get past that the scoring means that as long as the player on the hard mode hits like 10 of the arrows they're going to get a higher score than the beginner anyway. There's no way to have a meaningful competition between those two. But also, the casual player doesn't care about their score. They just want to pass the song. So that score number doesn't even mean anything to them. So we don't actually have a game that is fostering a real competition that is also friendly to casual players. There is no real competition between those players in that example. And even though one of the persons enjoying the game isn't seeking competition they're not achieving community either. How are those people, if they have a discussion about DDR, even though they both love DDR and they're ways of enjoying DDR are valid but their ways of enjoying DDR are so different what is their discussion going to be? Oh man, did you see like my cool dance moves? And it's like, I don't care about your dance moves you didn't hit any of the arrows. These people cannot talk to each other they don't actually have anything in common despite both being maybe listing DDR as the thing that they enjoyed the most in the world. They're not in the same community they're not friends, probably not. So it could be though, but we timed this pretty well we have 90 seconds left. So where, what's the real moral of all this? Because if you're a game designer I hope you can internalize some of these lessons I hope many of you one day want to make games you can think about who you want to play your game but the real takeaway I think is more about community and less about the mechanical details of making games. I went back to the beginning we talked about Star Wars, right? People enjoying the same thing, right? What you enjoy is not where you should draw the borders of your community. You should ask yourself and others why you enjoy things and how you enjoy things and don't look for people who enjoy the same things as you look for people who enjoy things for the same reasons as you in the same way as you and those will be your people, right? And if you can draw the borders of our communities in such a way, that's the way we can reduce the conflict because at least we don't believe there's any way to reduce the conflict by changing the design of games. I don't think that's going to work. But again, if you figure it out, like let us know cause I want to invest in whatever the hell you're making. I hope this was enjoyable. We're out of time. Thank you for coming to our small little talk here. We have some flyers if you would like to see videos of the, oh God, we've done 74 packs. Yeah, there's only 50 packs, but some of the packs is we did more than one time. Yeah, we have, you know, YouTube. We're on the internet. If you really want to harm your own ears and brain by listening to us talk even more, that is a thing that you can do for free with a web browser on a phone or a computer or anything connected to the internet pretty much. Go to the web browser and your Switch. Does he even have a web browser on there? I don't know. We exist. We're called Geek Knights. And if you didn't enjoy this for some reason, tell packs that we suck. Enjoy the rest of your packs. The 50th packs. 50.