 But we're here today to talk about winning. You guys, you're packs, you're gamers. You want to win games, right? You try them. People don't care about winning. They're just like to play. How many of you care about winning? Okay. You want to win? Okay. All right. Who doesn't care about winning? Like, Adam and the Crab? They're here for the cheating. They're just people who don't win. So they just tell themselves. Like, they, you know, if you can't win, you're like sour grapes. Like, Adam needs to win. But one thing that's very important is that a lot of people play games, and ostensibly you're trying to win. But you're not, you don't really want to win. You're not putting in the effort. You could put in. Like you're playing a board game in tabletop and you're not 100% paying attention to the game. You're not really trying. In Overwatch, maybe you just give up instead of pushing it that last second. Sometimes this makes sense, right? Like, not every game you play is a game where you're supposed to win, right? If someone who tries really, really, really hard to win like tag in the back yard with the kids, that's not cool. That's me. Yeah. That's me. If someone who tries really, really hard to win a game like Pirates Against Humanity or D&D or a game where you're not supposed to really win is just sort of fun, right? That's a problem. But a game where you're supposed to win, you should be trying to win. So I want to give you some real fair warning about where this panel is going. If you follow the advice that we're going to give or if you do some of the things that we're going to tell you not to do, you'll probably win a lot more games, but there's going to be some serious consequences to your life and you speak from experience. First, you're going to experience the air hockey problem. It's funny because the pex style game was air hockey. We had predicted air hockey so many years that it never was air hockey and then we forgot. We're like, yeah, it's not going to be air hockey. And then it was. But no, the air hockey problem is you play a lot of air hockey and your friends only play it like once in a year, if that. So when you play it against them, you always win and now they don't want to play with you anymore. And now even though you have a lot of friends and you're good at air hockey, you have no friends to play air hockey with. But simultaneously, you're not training and dedicating your life to air hockey enough to go to the National Air Hockey Championships, which are a thing. And you go there and if you do go there, you just lose because you're not actually any good at anything. So you'll be like us. We're both really good at air hockey and I don't think I've played air hockey in two or three years. But we're not pro. If anyone's actually pro, we're just going to get cramped. It's like that friend you have when you play Street Fighter, you don't want to play against them or anything like that. You're going to become that person. So if you want to turn-taking problem, you're going to realize that your friends are stupid. Not really, but your friends, you will watch someone sitting across from you at a game and they'll take 10 seconds to take their turn and that will be an eternity, an ageless death for you. Right, because like if you're really good at a game and you see that someone else has turned and you can see it's like a board game or something and you can see, oh, this is what they should do. You already know what they should do and they're not doing it. You ever watch like a Twitch stream of someone who's not pro? And you're like, do this, do this. Or you watch someone run into the first goomba in Mario 1 and you're like, oh! That's what will happen to you when you get good at games because you see people being bad and it hurts inside. Matrix problem. You're going to start hating a lot of games. You're going to start seeing through the mechanics of games. We're at the point, we sit down at a new tabletop game, we read the rules, we look at each other and we're like, yeah, I know the deal with this game. You want to review it? Let's not even bother playing it. Right, like Settlers is the biggest deal in the universe. Settlers at the time. We played that from the year 2000 for Adam Halmog and it was the funnest, bestest game and we were like, oh my god. And then eventually we're like, oh, I see how this game works. And now it's the most boring useless game for us. It's still fun for other people and I understand why. But for me, it's like, we sat there, I'm like, you're going to do this in your turn, you're going to do this in your turn and it was over. Yeah, four turns through the end, you're going to win. You're going to win the stuff like the end. But there are two paths here because if all these bad things happen, one good thing will happen. You will not just be a gamer anymore. You won't just be someone who's good at Overwatch. You'll be someone who's good at games. Once you start to be good at the concept of games, you start to build this broad repertoire. You will be a player of games, which is a very interesting place to be at a place like PAX. We're tabletop, PC, console, all these things. There's physical sports going on like a Roman Sebastian Jowsk was on down there. You'll be pretty good at every game you play. Or you'll become a monster. This panel is going to be progressive. So we're going to get deeper and deeper and deeper into monster's things, but first we got to be very clear. Game, what is a game? You keep saying that word. I do keep saying that word, but I do know exactly what it means, and it does not mean that. It does mean that, just not today. We're using Richard Garfield's definition of game, ortho game, which basically means a competition to do more players and a period of time set of rules and a method of ranking. So everything we talk about for the next 54 minutes is going to be that. That is your goal. You want to win a competition. There's this, not just you. There's rules, and you will be ranked higher than everybody else. That is your sole goal in life. If there's some game you're thinking of that doesn't fit you for things, we're not talking about that kind of game today. Yeah, don't tell me about your, like, gone home speedrun. That's a great game, but it's not the kind of game we're talking about right now. So we're going to start with the basic stuff, the clean stuff. Nobody can fault you for this, but sometimes they will. When I was a kid, I'd play games like Life with my family and they get really salty if you tried to harm. Like, if you looked past a branch in the board to see where your role would land you to choose the better option, that was seen as unfair. That was seen as cheap. As a kid, I pretended that I had already decided and I sort of like be one, two, three, four, and that was kind of cheating, by the way my family wanted to play. So even if you do this stuff, your friends might start accusing you of being cheap. There are also some people who get mad at certain things again. So you're playing sorry, right? It's like, well, I could choose to bump you or I could just choose to move this other piece over here and not bump you. It's like, well, obviously bumping you is a better move and it's within the rules, so I'm going to do it and then they get mad, right? Even though you're not cheating or doing anything wrong whatsoever, you're just playing stupid. So almost all games come down to a very simple concept called heuristics. And it might seem really simple, but there's a lot of depth to this. So the best way to explain it, this is a nice visualization of something called the gaze heuristic. Human beings cannot do differential calculus on the fly in their heads. I cannot calculate a ballistic trajectory yet. If I just threw some piece of garbage out there to the audience, whoever I threw it to would probably be able to catch it. Or come close. Yeah. And the way we do this is that we can't actually predict if Scott throws something. I cannot easily predict where it will land, but if it throws it to me, I can easily catch it because what I do, what almost all humans do is we will instinctually lock our neck at a gaze looking directly at the object and then we will move forward and backward running. And as long as we keep that angle constant, the ball is guaranteed to come into our hands. It's a very simple rule that you can follow that guarantees you'll catch something. You can't calculate the answer. You can't like suddenly do some math and say, aha, the thing will land here, but you have some other thing that you can do to sort of end up with the answer and get the result you want without actually doing any math or hard stuff. So you're not going to be calculating the solutions to games usually. That's actually really hard even for surprisingly simple games. You're going to do some other thing, some method you've developed like, aha, do this and then this and then this and then I will result in winning even though you didn't do the math to figure out why it works. Now, this is the kind of thing that deep-mind the AIs that are beating people ago do and they split everything into two kinds of heuristics. Directional heuristics for very straightforward. How do you decide what to do next based on the information you have? A simple directional heuristic might be, I'm using the much safer looking bridge. That's not bad. Maybe I have a more complex heuristic but in the end you have to have some sort of rule you follow for what to do next in a game. Always go left because I've been going left and it's a maze so I'm going to keep going left until I can't go left anymore so I'll see everything in the maze. Always attack the person who's in first place. That's a really great directional heuristic that works in almost all games. Positional heuristics are actually the more complex one. This is figuring out who is currently winning. Right, what might have the directional heuristic if I always attack first place? But who's in first place? Sometimes it's really easy. Oh, they got a higher score by the Mario Kart. If it says first place, then that's not first place. Yeah, whoever's in second place is in first place unless they're too close to the person in first place so whoever's in third place is in first place but if the person in fourth place has three red shells they're probably in first place. And if they're far away from the end of the race well then who knows but the closer we get to the end of the race the more likely it is the person in first is actually in first. So what you'll do just to be better at games is you over time start with very simple heuristics both directional and positional, separate them in your head and spend a lot of time thinking about how can I make these better? How can I make these more accurate to the reality of the game? So this is more difficult than it seems. Who's winning that game right now? Well A is closer to the finish but B still has the possibility of getting to the finish right away. I don't know. Yeah, a very naive heuristic might be whoever's further along in the score, whatever that is, is winning. But a more complex heuristic takes into account other factors. This image is from a book by Richard Garfield and two other people. I always forget their names. Skaff and a lot anyway. It is a book called Characteristics of Games. If you're interested in any of this stuff at all this is like Game Design 101. That's your favorite book. This is a seminal book on game design. Pareto Efficiency. This is a mathematical concept that you don't need to worry about the math on. You just need to know the concept. It doesn't need to have to do with games it mostly has to do with economics stuff but it's still a basic rule that still applies to games right? Imagine if F1 was like speed and F2 was strength right? Down here is a perfect God character that's infinitely fast and infinitely strong. Right. So obviously you know guys like A and B it's like okay those are valid chases right? It's like they're pretty fast and pretty strong but C is just slower than A or B. There's no reason to ever pick C. So imagine these are all characters in a fighting game. You would only pick the ones on the red line right? You would never pick any of the great ones because they're just worse. You could get a better character by picking the ones on the line and that line is on the frontier. The idea is that all choices are differentiated in some way otherwise it's not a choice it's the same thing. So if you have to give something up to get something if you can get something without giving something up you have to do that thing it is always better. Now these might be three, four, five dimensional but you just always think about that concept. This is what the meta is. That line is the meta and everything that's beyond that line is garbage. So if there's an obviously OP character always play that character. Always. A lot of people will try to like shame you or like ban and it's like no if it's legal and you can do it just do it. You want to win why would you not do it? There's no shame in picking something that's OP. No shame whatsoever. Now sometimes OP is valid. Let's say you played Quake 1 back in the day and Counter-Strike and Active Quake and you're an expert sniper at FPSs. You should play Widow in Overwatch. You should be the sniper in Overwatch and just use that to your advantage even though that is super unfair to everybody else who is younger than you. If it's a pay-to-win game spend the money. Just pay money. Buy the best tank. Or don't play that game because you want to keep your money but if you got the money and you want to win just pay. Why not? Don't let anyone shame you it's like flaunt it just make it rain every time you play Quickstream or whatever. So grinding, we have a whole panel that's on YouTube where we talked about what grinding is for an hour but it boils down to that definition that Scott came up with. I think it's a really good definition. But the idea is that if a game has a grinding mechanic and it makes you better and the game is competitive you gotta grind. Ivy train, EV train. That is your life now. So it's the same thing with the money, right? Or it's like if it's a pay-to-win game and you want to win just spend the money or don't play same thing. It's a grinding game and you want to win either grind or don't play, right? So if you're playing Pokemon just sit there for like three days or three weeks or three months however long it takes to get a whole party of Pokemon with perfect stats until you got it. Yeah, just do it. But Rym and Scott, that's not fun and we're not here to have fun. We're here to win. No one's end-winning is fun, guys. The secret of this panel is that if you think about games the way we do games become less and less fun. But you're trading the fun that you have while you're playing the game. See, while you're playing the game with that OP character or you're grinding that part isn't fun. Instead you trade the fun from the beginning part to the fun afterwards where you've won and you've got a trophy and you say, eat it. I'm the king. So another definition of grinding is things that reward you for costless, riskless actions. So if there's buffs always put on all the stupid buffs. We were playing Hero Quest at RIT. God, this was like 16 years ago. By the way, Hero Quest is a bad game. Don't play it. I had fond memories as a child. The game doesn't hold up. But anyway, we were playing Hero Quest. As adults, we had read the rules and we noticed something. So we clustered around the door to go into a room and Scott said, we all keep rolling dice and not doing anything until one of us rolls a six and then we're going to start going in there. Right, because the rule is when you roll, you don't have to move all your full roll. You can move zero if you want. And bad guys won't come out of the room until you open the door. So we're like, oh, well, we'll just keep staying in one place outside the door and rolling the dice until we get a six then we'll open the door. If something costs you nothing, always do it. In a game that is like a candy box or like Pokemon Go or any of those games, just do the thing that doesn't cost you anything except time and do it forever and you'll be the best at that game. Stugro Sports. So what's your game? Sorry, nerds. Sports have heuristics just like games do, but some of them are seen really dumb. It might seem like, oh, what? I'm going to tell someone to punch the other guy in boxing? Like, yeah. I guess that seems obvious. Put the biscuit in the basket. That's heuristic. Do it faster. Skate faster. There you go. Yeah. Just skate faster. Sure. So the rules, there are four things to do to get better at sports. By sports, I mean games like Overwatch or Counter-Strike or football. They're all the same. Play a lot. Like, play all day. Yeah. Play a lot. When I was in college, I played Counter-Strike 10 to 20 hours a day on a weekdays. Because I didn't go to class. You have to play it more than the people that you want to beat. If they play it more than you do, you're not going to be able to beat them, right? They learn more, they practice more. Everything is like, even just like playing guitar. It's like, well, someone who practices more is going to be better. And sports, where muscle memory and those sorts of things are the only way to level them up. You can't level them up like a Pokemon, right? You can't do that. You only way to level up your own human body and the only way to do that is by practicing and training. It's a deal. Learn. Don't try to read that. Learn not just heuristics, but this is a paper. You can email us. I'll send you a link through it. But the idea is that there's a concept of fast and frugal heuristics. So in a board game, heuristics don't have to be fast and they're not free frugal. I can take forever on my turn. Unless it's chess or the clock. Yeah. But if there's no chess clock, most of you didn't bring a chess clock to Pax, you could just take forever on your turn. Well, you're limited by how long Pax is. You're limited by how long your friends will put up with you. Right. But basically there's nothing stopping you from sitting there and thinking forever and coming up with the best possible move. But in a sport where things are real time, you need to come up with the best move you can in lesser time. His fist is coming in my face. Well, should I dodge left or right? Well, let's say he's left-handed. Dodge. This paper is fantastic. But what it boils down to is you want heuristics that are lean in that you don't need a lot of information or a lot of calculation to figure out the answer. And you want heuristics that are fast, meaning you can figure out the answer quickly. It is very often that doing something sooner, even if it's not the best possible thing, doing something that's like pretty good sooner will be even better than doing something that's even a little bit better later. Like there's an example. This is a Wikipedia article, but one of the great examples is the take the recognize option. If you have two options and you recognize one of them and you don't recognize the other one, go with the one you've heard of. There's probably a reason you've heard of it. Obviously, there's a lot of problems with that heuristic, but it pans out in a lot of situations. Heuristics don't need to make a lot of sense. They just have to work. You're also limited in your mental and physical energies. So, you know, you get tired or especially in something that takes a long time. Let's say cricket, right? So the less thinking you do early on gives you more, you know, resources later to think when it matters. So if you just do whatever comes to your mind, the quickest thing now, you're going to be better off in the long run. And you want to learn about this stuff? Read papers on sports medicine, sports coaching. You can go to college for this stuff. This is a formal academic field. There's cool stuff in here and other people did all the work. Just read their papers and beat your friends at games. Analyze your play. Don't just play, but record yourself and watch it. And many of you, have you ever recorded your own voice and then heard it and it's horrible? You're going to have to deal with that. You're going to have to watch yourself being a moron forever to get better at games. I watch myself play over and I overwatch every night after I play overwatch. You ever watch a Twitch stream and you're like, no, don't do that. Oh my God. And the whole Twitch chat is like, do this, do this, do this. And the streamer does not do that. And it turns out the Twitch chat was right the whole time. And then you go to play the game yourself. And of course, yeah, when you actually have to play, the Twitch chat yells at you because you're doing it wrong, right? But even if you're not streaming yourself, just record, right? Or even if it's a board game, you can't be there and record it. And then watch yourself play that game again later. You're like, oh my God, look at that stupid thing I did. How did I not see that when I was actually playing? But if you watch yourself mess up enough times, the next time when you're actually playing, you won't make that mistake again. Now even better, you can do this simply. Just like when you count cards in Blackjack, you don't count every card. You keep sort of a soft card. You do that sort of stuff. You use a simple model. So when you're analyzing your own play of board games is a great example. Write down who won and by how much and a note about what strategy you use. Something real simple like that. I used to do that with Settlers of Catan and with another game called Puerto Rico. I'd be like, did Rick Wood went second, came in third place? Did Rick Wood went first, came in first place? And eventually I figured out when I should pick Rick Wood and when I should pick Grain Sheet. And we'll talk about what that means later. Coaching, you can't just play. You can't just study. Professionals need to help you or you will never become a professional unless you happen to be a talent. There's such a body of knowledge of things that are already known about pretty much every major game and sport on earth. And if you find someone who has been there before and already knows those things to teach those things to you, that is going to help an enormous, enormous amount. This is Boston. You have New England Patriots here. I think you know what coaching does. Like some crab meat quarterbacks from nowhere can become a god because of the coaching. So obviously it's kind of hard to find a coach for say, Puerto Rico or settlers, but there are still people who are better at it than you and they'll be happy to help you because it's not super competitive. I got a friend who's been watching my Twitch streams of Overwatch and she gives me a lot of feedback mostly about how dumb I am and how I keep running away from my team. The most valuable thing about coaching compared to just studying is, you know, when you study you can get the knowledge the coach has but the coach can watch you and see what you're doing wrong even things that you couldn't see that you were doing wrong, right? And that's why coaching is even better than studying. They can also give you two very important things. Rapid feedback because if you get delayed feedback your brain's not good at associating that feedback with the thing you did wrong, especially if it's muscle memory. And two, the coach will have, they will be able to give you exercises. They can tell you to train on something, you know, like a credit kid, exactly like that. Buy the best equipment, but don't use the best equipment unless you understand why it's the best equipment. Unless when I was learning how to ski I tried to buy skis. I go to the guy and I'm like, what kind of skis should I buy? And he said those. I said why? And he said because they're the cheapest and because you asked me. And I said what about those? He said they're blue and they're $400 more. And I said, well should I get them? And he said no. And now I know better and I get fancy skis because I can explain exactly why I need them. Right, I mean obviously equipment isn't going to make you better. If I buy the best golf clubs on earth I'm still not going to make it par. It's not going to happen, right? But if I was a pro golfer and I had shitty clubs and the other pro golfer had awesome clubs, it's going to make a difference, right? If there's a bicycle race, it's like yeah, I'm not as good as anyone who's a real pro cyclist. But if they're riding a big heavy bicycle and I'm on a nice road bike made of carbon fiber, that's going to help me a lot. But at the same time, advanced equipment also has advanced execution requirements. Just like taking the weird character in a fighting game is really hard to use but that can pay dividends if you're good at them. If you buy really, really fancy skis and you're not a good skier they will throw you to the ground and possibly kill you because they're really hard to use. But if you're an expert, they give you a huge advantage. So think about weird fighting game characters. It's the same thing. I guess that's why I'm really good at bulldo. Sure. You love that bulldo. Most games are comprised of smaller games. Right. There's a lot of games out there that have Yahtzee in them. Right? So for example, we played there was a spelling game I had when I was a kid that had Yahtzee in it and there was more a spelling-related game around Yahtzee that was rolled through the ages. Yup. I'd say 20% of all indie tabletop games from a certain era were basically Yahtzee. Right. There's a lot of games with, like, Yahtzee in them and it's not just Yahtzee. There's a lot of other games that are small that you see inside of other larger games and just get good at those small games and now you're good at every game that contains those small games. Like I expect you, if you want to be a good gamer, even if you just want to be good at sports, to be able to play Yahtzee perfectly. There's even a website you can go to where it just makes you play Yahtzee for a while and then it tells you how efficient you are to do a perfect AI. You should be able to be as good as that AI and you can because we both are. We tested ourselves. I don't think I'm that good anymore. Yeah, I think you can still do it. Tabletop games are also good for another reason because much like when you're doing weight training, you exercise very specific muscle groups. Tabletop games are constrained by the fact that you can't just write a bunch of code the players don't see. The code is physical pieces. There can only be so many pieces on the table. So as a result, the game is something that you can digest. You can understand the relationships in a way that might be impossible in a video game European Universalist story. Yeah, there's a lot of video games and you have so many numbers that you can't contain the entire game in your brain at once. But any board game is small enough, usually. So you can put the entire state of the game in your mind and conceive the entire game into everything. Conquer Tabletop and you conquer the world. So you need to be able to recognize arbitrary decisions. This is something that a lot of people seem to really bet on even though the human brain is shockingly good at this. So who cares about the rules of this game? But you can see it's a very simple game that illustrates how Tabletop is good. Call them Rocha Mahex and in turn one, you've got to put your time somewhere on the board, right? It is about how many states is on your phone. Five plus eight plus six, like 19 spaces, right? So you think, okay, I have 19 different decisions to make. No, no, you don't have 19 different decisions. Those are the only options. There's only four possible places to put that piece. Because everything else is identical because of symmetry to one of those options. A lot of people might sit there trying to decide between one space number two and another space number two. And they're basically deciding between 200% identical things for no reason because they don't understand what's going on. This continues. Say now I'm placing and someone already put a piece there. There's actually even less decisions to make now. Even if the board is now asymmetric, you can almost always eliminate options. I mean, those are all the places I could put. I can ignore every one of those spots because they are literally identical to another spot elsewhere on the board. So use that superpower of the human brain. The human brain is amazing at identifying bad ideas and recognizing that they're bad ideas. Yet somehow when we're playing board games, we just totally lose track of that and agonize over this stupid decision. Look for symmetry and take advantage of it. Whenever we play a game, we spend half as long as the game arguing about why we won or lost that game. This is something that's like super valuable especially in any sort of multiplayer competitive situation. When the game is over, talk to the other people you played with and even if you didn't win or you did win, be like, oh yeah, I won because on turn three I did this and that was like boom, the big move and they're like, oh, I couldn't stop you from doing that because of this and this. Why couldn't I stop you? Oh, because I spent all my money on turn one doing the dumb thing. No one's talking about what's going on in their mind during the game because that gives away what they're thinking, right? But once the game is over, now you can figure out what everyone was thinking the whole time and it's like, oh, the enlightenment you get from that, right? And you can only do it as soon as the game ends because that's when it's fresh in people's minds. We try to ask them later, hey, what happened yesterday in that game? So they don't remember. They're like, oh, I lost. I don't remember if I won or lost any of the games I played today. I won New York Slice, but we messed the rules up. I don't even remember. Play a lot of games. I cannot stress that enough. You need to play tons of games across tons of genres, across tons of platforms and sports and everything. The more types of things you do, the better you'll get at everything. So let's talk about some sharp things. If any of you grew up in Michigan, there's the concept of sharp cards. You hear the term card shark? Well, another way to say that is card shark. The idea is that there are things you can do at games that are not necessarily against the rules, but that are frowned upon in convention and in poker tables or in casinos or in the games that normal people outside of PAX play, they may specifically try to disallow these kinds of behaviors. This is where we get into a little bit darker territory. Yeah, this is the reason you came here. So if anyone plays Citadel's, the most powerful thing you can do in this game is literally act randomly. Look at the other players in the eye, take your cards, put them face down, shuffle them, pick one randomly and pass it to the left. This is a game where it's like, which poison is the cup in? There's a lot of cups. There's a lot of poison. There's a lot of poison, too. So people are trying to think, ah, he would pick the merchant, because look at all the green buildings he has. That would give him so much money if he took the merchant, which means I'll take the assassin and kill the merchant. But I didn't pick the merchant, I just took all the cards, shuffle them and pick one. You can't figure me out because I didn't even figure me out. I just took whatever. It might be the merchant, it might get screwed by luck, but odds are it's only one in government. I've already said this in my games not fun. Once we played this game a few times, literally everyone did that and the game was done. Even more powerful, wait your options first. Don't just pick completely randomly, pick two options, one that's great for you and a random one, and then randomize between those. That makes the odds of getting a great outcome higher, but it also makes the odds of getting a terrible outcome higher, but it gives you some sort of choice, it gives you control, it's not just completely random. This is very game specific as to when and how you do this, but randomness is very important, very difficult for humans to do, but if the game gives you cards and you can just shuffle them in front of you, do it. In Netrunner, which I play a lot, they made a rule specifically like yes, you can use dice to randomize your decisions, and it's like I wish that they had decided differently to make force people to make the decision themselves, but they didn't. They said you can use dice, so I got dice now and I play Netrunner and I'm always rolling them to make decisions randomly and it's like alright deal me then. If there is a degenerate strategy, if there is something cheap that works, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it. If someone says no rush 20, no, okay, okay, okay, you're coming right in. Right, so this is Mario Kart DS and if no one played Mario Kart DS, there was a way to snake, to basically get the orange sparks to be there constantly. By holding your DS and doing this. It hurt your hands, but you could do it. It was originally designed that you would only do it like on corners to get like one boost after turning perfectly around the corner, so you could just do it on a straight way back and forth and not stop. And if no one did that, you would just win the race no matter what. I would join games where people said no snaking seriously and of course I would just snake. What are they going to do? What are they going to do? It's not against the rules. Just saying no snaking isn't going to make it stop. No rush 20 is one of my favorite things on earth. So most tabletop games, this is kind of a dick move, but it's also really effective. A tabletop game, some random board game when you're playing with your friends, you're going to play it three to five times probably and probably not play it again with that same group anytime soon. There's usually a really simple way to get victory points and a really complicated way to get victory points. Sometimes the more complicated way is better. You can win with that, but it's not as easy because it's complicated. The complicated strategies usually require you to have a lot of knowledge about the game and usually are only necessary when everyone else is really good at the game and no one's good yet. So you need to look at what the most obvious way to get points is in the first time you play a game and hammer the hell out of that. And your friends will probably get bored with the game before that strategy stops working. Read the rules before everyone else does and learn the game. If you read the rules to Timbo 2, you can come up with a game theory mathematical solution for what you should do on every turn and win that game the highest percentage chance that you have possible. We came up with, we figured out the first time we played it, right? And it was just, I think Alex came up with a turn before us. I came up with a turn one. You came up with a turn two and Alex came up with a turn three. And at the end of the game, it was first place, second place, third place. And the other guy was like, what the hell is wrong with you two? But the point is, if you study a game in advance, you just know it better than other people, right? If you know rules that they don't even know, well, you're going to win, right? You're going to take advantage of every possible thing that it is. Count cards. People don't do this. Now, maybe a hard count, maybe a soft count. Because there's a lot of effort, right, to count cards. You don't want to. But if you want to win, someone who puts in the effort is going to be. Yup. Now, if that seems like too much effort, but other people are doing it, obviously there's a trick they're using. So you got to think about the game. Like when I'm playing Hearts, which is a card game, I don't count all the cards. That would be almost impossible for me to keep track of in my head. Especially if someone distracts me. So you don't want to keep track of the hearts and the aces. And I don't keep track of anything else. I guess the ace and the king of spades keep track of. And the queen of spades. But don't keep track of everything. Use a rule. Use a soft rule. In a game that has victory points that are hidden, don't keep track of the exact number of everyone has because I'm going to forget. I try to remember Scott's winning. Oh, now Chris is winning. Oh, now Scott's winning again. But I don't actually remember the numbers because it's not that important. You might be slightly off, right? You might think that Chris pulled ahead when he scored a bunch of points. But as long as you're close enough, that's better than knowing nothing. Right? When everyone else knows nothing. If you're playing a board game and your friend leaves over a little too far and you see their cards, that sucks for them. Use that information. It happens. And if you say, look, that's cheating. Why do you think in poker tournaments, people are like, there's a reason. If you see it, it's fair game. You can't make yourself forget it any more than they can make you forget it. So either just be like, oh, well the game's ruined. Now let's start over. Or win. Or just use the information you saw. If you saw it, use it. I mean, you might be honest and try not to see it. Be like, oh, you see someone like knocks over the little hiding shield. They go, right? Like this. But if you saw it, you saw it. Just do it. Yup. So here's a case study of some sharp play. I'm assuming many people have played Carcassonne. If you haven't, you should go play it like right after this panel. But here's some examples of things you can do that will lose your friends. So in this situation, red's in the city, green is obviously going to put this here. So the question is, do they put the little guy or the big guy in there? If you don't know the rules of Carcassonne, I'm sorry. But if you put the little guy in there and the city gets completed, you share the points. If you put the big guy in there and the city is completed, only you get the points and they get dick. So you're basically hurting red, my dude. So the answer to this depends on how smart red is. If red's doing very poorly, oh, red's in last place by a lot, you want to share those points. Right, because now, not only are you going to get the same number of points as you would have gotten otherwise, and red getting a bunch of points doesn't matter. They're in last place. It cares. But now red is going to help you finish it because they want points. You have doubled the chance of that city finishing. It might get them from last place to not last place, but you don't care. You're in first place. The only place that matters is the not losing place. If you put the big guy in there, they're not going to help you. In fact, red's going to hate you even more. They might try to knock you out of first place. Right, so you put the big guy, if red is in second and you're in first or you're in second, red's in first, and you need to fight with them. Right? Then if you share points with them, then you're basically leaving the whole city worth zero. Right? But putting the big one in there when you need to beat them. So say red gets a pothiled that's basically worthless, like a road that you can't really get more than one or two points on, or like it's your last meeple. If you can't get yourself one point, you might as well deny a bunch of points to someone else. Hurting other players who are ahead of you is way more effective in a lot of games than getting points for yourself. So you just want to remove that liberty. Make it real unlikely that thing's going to finish. Yeah, they might use games blue and green like minus how many points each. That's the same as you getting plus that many points. Yup. Now this involves having more complex characteristic than just this. You're looking at not just points that have been scored, but points that may be scored. So, form a coalition, how did red get in the last place in the first place? Let's say this is a four player game. If the three of you agree to just ruin player four in the first few turns, you've all increased your percentage chance of winning the game. Yeah, we might as well four player game from turn one you have a 25% chance to win. But if really yellow and blue make a city and finish it, red can catch up to that but you're not having a 33% chance to win. Awesome. I've played a lot of games where I go first and I look at Scott and I attack one of our friends because I know that Scott will know what must be done. But, Ram Wayne, do not play, do not do anything that benefits Ram ever. So, speaking of telling everyone what to do in a game, all games that are more than two players and are not races are political in nature. Meaning you can interact with each other and those interactions will have some effect on the game. So, as a result, you're effectively playing a game where you vote who is going to win the game in the end. If you're playing risk and you get attacked less than everyone else, on average, you're very likely to have won that game of risk independent of all other factors. There's some games that are literally not trying to hide the fact that they're political games, like diplomacy or this game. This game is just vote who gets eaten by the zombies every turn until someone wins. There's a lot of games where you literally vote who wins the game. But there are some games that are effectively vote who wins without actually being vote who wins. Like any war game with more than two players is like, okay, you gang up on a friend, you all together agree of basically who's going to win even though you're holding a bunch of dice and doing a bunch of math. It doesn't matter as much as the voting part. So, be aware of that and think about what that means. Has one player been attacked or interacted with more than the other players? Settlers is a great example. Every time you trade with another player, one, you're probably dumb. Trading is a terrible thing to do in that game if you're high skill. But if you trade with someone, you and that other person both get a bonus. So if I trade with Scott once and Joey Jojo trades with Scott once I got two bonuses. Yeah, now Scott's winning. I'm winning now. So in a game like risk, you're going to have allies. Yo dog, don't attack me in Asia and I won't attack you blah. We got a plan. Always, always betray your friends the turn before they're going to betray you. In a game like, say, eclipse, right? Usually what you do when you have an alliance is you move all your troops and units over to the people that you're defending it to move it to the front where there's a war. You don't keep extra troops on the front where you have an alliance. That's the safe area, right? But no, that's also the other person's weak area. You can totally open if you go there and you're going to have to because after you both jointly destroy your mutual enemy, you're going to have to destroy your friend. So do it first. Now there are exceptions. Some games have joint victory into a game that's joint victory. Always go for it because it just makes your odds better. It's way easier, yeah. And some games are cooperative. We can't get into that too much but the difference between a cooperative game and a non-cooperative game, game theory talk, is that cooperative games you can make binding contracts in the game. So if you make an alliance of I won't attack you for 10 turns, that's part of the game. You can't break that. You better be ready on turn 11. But in risk, if I say that, you better be ready on the next turn because I'm just going to immediately attack you. If you're falling behind, get crazy. Mess the board up. The further behind you are, the more crazy crap, the more randomness you want to interject, the more desperate strategies. In hockey, if you're falling behind and the game's almost over, just pull the goalie. Right. Get an extra man. As you fall behind in a game, right, if you're ahead in a game, you don't want to do anything risky because you might end up losing. You want to do everything very conservative. Make the safe play. It's the play where you're not going to lose much points, right? If you're way ahead in football, just run the ball, take a knee, punt it, right? If you're way behind in football, you're like, oh shit, Hail Mary, onside kick. Let's do what we got to do. The game's almost over. Go for it on fourth down, right? Because losing because you don't know what the way to win, you have to do the high-risk, high-reward, you know, strategies when you're behind. So like, Wizards, this is a hard game we play and you can get higher and higher scores. You can also go negative by overbidding. You can get more points and the losers will have negative a billion points because if you're going to lose, you're going to lose. Go for it. If I'm behind by five points, that means I need to get five more points than he gets in the last round. If he bids three, he's going to get three, which means I need to bid eight. Even if I can't possibly get eight, you know, I got a bid eight and I lose negative eight. It's like, all right, I didn't get the eight. I wasn't going to win anyway. So what does it matter if my score is negative eight or not winning? You better know what the tiebreaker is of your game. That often matters a lot and pay attention to that and more importantly, exploit them. In chess, we're finding as time goes on increasingly chess masters are forcing draws because you can turn a losing game into a draw way easier than you can turn a drawing game into a win. And if it's a draw, you still get you a half point or whatever. So be aware of what ties a game. Be aware of what stalemates a game and be aware of what the tiebreakers are or in the case of football, at least know that there is the possibility of a tie or that there might be a tiebreaker. Alright. So we're about to go not condone anything we're about to talk about. But you do all these things. I don't do all these things. You do a lot of you done all these things. I've done some of these things. So you need to talk in your own brain about which of your friends are smart, which of them are not because you can get away with stuff with a dumb person dumb in the context of the game not in terms of like real life or anything but if you know someone's bad at overwatch you're going to if they're good at overwatch you're hanging way back at the choke point the strategy is very different depending on how clever your opponent is in the context of the game. Alright. There's a little game called Hive. Does anyone know this game? Little bugs move around. I have the strategy with the beetle and basically whenever I play someone in this game but the first time I do the beetle strategy and I tell them before the game starts I'm going to do the beetle strategy. Watch out. And the beetle strategy always works and I wait and the beetle always wins so I do it. Again, someone doesn't know what they're doing but again, someone who does know what they're doing if I go for the beetle I'm going to get destroyed so I have to know how good that opponent is and use the appropriate strategy based on me judging their intelligence like a dirt. So imagine you're playing poker and you're doing a really complicated bluff and your opponent is not good at poker one, you're wasting all that energy and two, they might call your bluff for the wrong reason and that's a disaster so you've got someone who does not realize you're bluffing them you cannot trick someone who doesn't realize you're trying to trick them and like chess is a good example if I'm playing against someone who's not good at chess I will put a piece in a place where they could take it because I think they won't notice that will not work against anyone who's actually played chess where are they looking on the board this game this game is hide-and-seek basically if you've ever played this and in the box when you buy this game I never had a verge to take with a pack a verge not even a cardboard visor and the reason it came with a cardboard visor is because the person who is hiding is going to look at the map like this and if you are smart enough to not look at the map but look at their eyes and see that they keep looking to the left you go oh I guess he's hiding on the left side of the board isn't he yeah, yeah he is but no one's looking at anyone's eyes or thinks to do that unless they're evil like us so if someone is staring at one part of the board for like the entire right you're playing risk and you're like hi is he going to attack me in Australia we'll just look at him for like a minute he keeps looking over in Australia oh and now he's looking at his hands he's looking at his cars he's looking at Australia again alright I'm putting more troops in Australia and then the guy goes oh I saw he got frustrated because I messed him up he was definitely thinking about doing that maybe in a game where you have like Tigger's new freighter you have a hand of like basically colors I got four blue tiles in my hand and then watch and see if they then look down and start looking at their tiles watch and see how they react watch and see if they look at the board and start counting and you can start to figure out what's going on behind that shield sometimes people have a hand of cards right and when you start a game and if you're dealt a hand of cards you'll rearrange it right or shuffle it so we'll play six nymphs okay someone plays a card you see they played it from the left side of their hand and it's a low card the next turn they take a card from the right side of their hand go ha rim played a high card even though I can't see it yet he played a high card so I'm going to play or even better that was the furthest card that's his highest card I've got him now shuffle your hand before or pull from under the table don't let people know cause that means one they don't understand something you can exploit that two they're about to make a ruckus and you can try to head it off there's a lot of reasons someone might be looking at the rule book midway through again if someone's going to the rule book and they're reading the rule about a certain like what does that card do I wonder what card they have could it be the one that she's looked up on the rule for I think it is one of the weird ones you can do a process of elimination to figure out what it is what a straight strategy if anyone's played in tournaments of settlers of Katan you know that there are only two strategies in that game there's the brick wood and the grain sheep sometimes people call the grain sheep the tripod strategy there's only so many ways to win games learn that shit if you're going to play chess memorize an opening even if you're bad at chess if you memorize a classical opening you'll be almost everyone people have no problem going to facts or strategy guys or anything like that for a single player video games you do it all the time especially with this hidden nonsense like if anyone's played ogre battle 64 it's like oh you want to get the angel people and I forget to go to the beginning town on a certain time on a certain day it's like there's no way you will know that without this strategy guy you can get strategies you guys or board games or any kind of multiplayer game to read them study them and practice that build order against the AIs so members that act randomly way more powerful but again only works on clever people act like you're acting randomly but totally don't and always pick the thing that you really want to get if I convince Scott that I'm acting randomly he will take that into account if I didn't act randomly my odds just skyrocketed this is a game where basically you're trying to smuggle stuff like the king's goods bags and looks you in the eye and says you said you have four apples in there I don't think you have four apples and they can choose to open your bag or not yeah if they catch contraband you're apt if there's no contraband they're apt this is a real fun game so what I tend to do in this game is people hand me all their bags and I say I'm going to open bags at random and I'm hoping I'm the TSA I'm hoping that much like airport security that doing this will dissuade people convince me and what ends up happening is people tend to give me goods that are perfectly legit and not contraband and then sometimes I'll be like you know I'm not opening any and they go oh I could have gotten the contraband through and I said right by saying I'm going to open a randomly I convince them not to do the contraband and then I don't hurt myself by opening all the non-contraband bags or even better because humans are bad at I think randomly actually act randomly and this is a technique what you do is if you can't use devices to generate randomness is wear an analog watch or make sure there's a clock somewhere divide the watch face or the clock face into quadrants that represent all your options and look at the clock and whatever the second hand is do that thing because human brains you think you can act randomly you totally cannot act randomly we are so bad at that if you tell a person to write random numbers on a chalkboard and then have a computer print out random numbers you would be able to tell what you did because it's totally not random and even humans who know that bad can't do it you can't make random things with a human brain that's not how it works you need some outside source of entropy to generate truly random numbers that they'll be able to guess if a human plays rock paper scissors there are computers that can figure out your non-random human brain and suddenly start beating you a great percentage of the time and they always work but against a computer they only win 33% of the time because that's how rock paper scissors works no is this thing called paper? is this cheating? I don't know is looking at your watch cheating? let's keep going let's go deeper this is my favorite strategy in the middle of the game I get hit I wait for somebody to hit me really hard in the game because I'm usually there saying hey everyone attack rim don't let rim man you have to scam this game sucks you know what I'm just gonna whatever I'll just take my turns for us to game I can't win you guys have fun I'll just I guess it's my total I won rim pretends like he's not winning why are you ganging up on me? come on this is the good side this sucks are you already feeling a little bit of sympathy for me? you feel like oh or you're mad at me but you don't think I have a threat anymore don't have sympathy for the guy he's like looking at your eye to figure out what card you are even better you know we talk about politics and political games be invisible we have a friend who is the master of this we'll play a game and as soon as the game is over she's there and no one attacks her and then she wins to vote who wins game just don't let people pay attention alright you remember a game called Jedi Knight the multiplayer one Jedi Knight 2 is the one that had multiplayer right and people sort of had this honorable thing which wasn't a rule of the game it wasn't in the code a video game the rules of the video game were the code by the way and what they would do in the Jedi dueling arena is they would basically crouch before the fight to like bow because it was so honorable Jedi even if they were on the dark side with their random purple lightsabers they would bow so this jerk starts to bow meanwhile I'm running at him with a lightsaber and force lightning yeah this dude bows in front of me I'm like take that right they were all mad about force lightning too like no lightsabers only no force lightning of course I use nothing but force lightning and I just be kiting them the whole time like what kick me bro oh you're not the mod have fun good luck this is great broken vengeance in the wind sweeping the leg ain't illegal dude yeah sometimes a literal sweep to the leg I remember in Mortal Kombat 1 cause none of us were any good you could just keep literally sweeping the leg and most people didn't know how to avoid that even though it's pretty easy to avoid if you know what you're doing but people aren't good you're just gonna go until they're dead and then you finish them and I would just keep doing it no matter how boring it was cause I win yep the thing that the crowd would do at might also win you the game and you know what sometimes the heal wins the wrestling match and soul count right just kept doing that you're gonna be clever with this make annoying noises during the game I'm just eating jar of peanut butter what is this bothering you I'm sorry fart like save up your farts how is that music bothering you let me crank it up yeah but if it's not against the rules like in hockey the rules are if you hit someone the wrong way you go into the box for two minutes maybe you still hit someone anyway because that's better than them scoring a goal you take the two minutes is that shady dishonorable sweeping the leg it's in the rules it's in the rules I'm not cheating yeah so get someone else to do your dirty work if someone's winning it's gonna cost you some effort or some chance of winning to take them down if you're not winning you need to convince someone else to do that guys Scott's winning guys we gotta attack Scott Scott will win next turn unless someone does this never say unless I do this make it clear that someone else has to do this usually bring it up right after your turn this happens a lot I would but it's not my turn I'd be like alright guys listen if nobody chooses that card rim will win on his turn I'm doing this on my turn do the thing that I just didn't do otherwise rim wins do it and as soon as someone's like but Scott why don't you just fart I'd be like I already took my turn it's all on you now even better this is a game where if these paradox cards appear if too many appear the game blows up and everybody loses that's fine if you're not going to win the game destroy the game I can't win no one can right we're not talking about table flipping we're talking about the actual rules of the game say that this happens right if I can't win no one can great right in the middle so let's talk about threats because the reality is it is very difficult to make credible threats in games because what am I gonna threaten you with I'm gonna attack you in risk I was gonna attack you anyway I'm gonna take out an actual knife and stab you if you don't let me win this game that's later in the panel yeah so here's an example a credible threat is one that you will follow through on the best way to make sure that that is true is either do it in a cooperative game like we talked about before or rip your steering wheel out now I can't do anything but the thing I said I was gonna do your move that is a real powerful thing to do this is a little shadier in a game like small world or risk you can tell someone hey if you attack me right now in this place I will destroy you to the detriment of myself I will spend the next ten turns wrecking you right it's like if you do this making me lose then I mean I've already lost the game basically so since I'm gonna be lost but I still get to play I will basically do everything in my power for the rest of the game to make sure you don't win now that sucks and that's meta but if you do that consistently if you always follow through on your threats like the same people in the same kind of games over and over and over again they know oh man Scott he's total psycho if you try to attack him then he will just make sure that you lose no one suddenly you're playing a totally different game but no one's attacking you and you're winning and what are they gonna do about it right you lose the battle to win the war force the draw play for the draw like I said that but this is a whole book on forcing the draw in chess I have forced draws in a lot of games and people get real salty better than forcing the draw is getting the other guy to rage quit if they walk away I win if I'm losing monopoly I'm not quitting monopoly I'm gonna sit there and keep going around that board forever they gotta go sleep sometime there's a lot of things that can make someone not wanna play a game anymore yeah just don't take your turn take forever on your turn even in Hearthstone you'll notice when people are losing they take the maximum amount of time on every turn for the rest of the game a lot of people do that to me like they'll just I beat them people's not officially over yet so they start roping every turn hoping that I'll concede and let them have to win even though they didn't win I never let them win we have delayed hold on to that rope we have been sitting in the studio ready to do geek night I gotta beat this guy I just wait I'm watching that rope like alright rope me bro if you can't get the other guy to quit break the game now we're not actually flipping the table isn't doing it it's making no one play but get up to go to the bathroom oops well I guess we can't recover it now the pieces are all moved around that sucks there are other things you might do like accidentally shuffle a card into something or accidentally move a score piece oh we forgot where it was asterisk on this game if it's a video game if you know a glitch that can crash the match or do something weird totally do it I have done that so this one this was the first like for real German board game we ever played back at RIT this is a pretty old fantastic game that we brought to PAX we're gonna play tomorrow but most games for convenience will have turn order go clockwise now there's a fashion to do it a different way now but most games will do clockwise maybe counter clockwise if you're Steve Jackson and you just don't want to be weird because you're Steve Jackson pay attention to that in general you want to be to the left of someone who is dumber than you you want to take a turn before someone who's better than you and after someone who's worse right because usually there'll be like things to take or options to choose from and if people who go worse go before you they're gonna leave you on average better options on your turn if the people who are good at the game go before you on your turn there'll be less good stuff to choose from we were playing this game and we started it good at it and then one day I went to sit down and then Scott got up and moved his seat and then I got up and moved my seat and then it was a standoff at the table and our friend Luke comes in and he's like really? are I rolling dice to see where everybody sits there's an app called Twazi that we've been using to determine every game like who goes first or where people sit or all those sorts of things so I recommend it now as an aside a lot of games will have a rule of here's how to determine who goes first in the game you want to figure out before you play a game if going first is good or going first is bad generally if the game says whoever won the last game goes first or the oldest player goes first then going first probably sucks if it says youngest player goes first then going first is probably really good one game we played recently the rule was whoever is most recently made a sacrifice and I pulled the dollar bill out of my pocket and tartan too played a win how do you know they're going first is bad so radical configurations set your f... get a giant monitor and set the FOV to a billion your field of view the wider you set that the more you can see when I used to play Quake 2 I basically played in this like non-Euclidean fish bowl I turned the textures all the way down I turned the contrast all the way up I didn't cheat I didn't use cheat programs but my game was basically a black and white non-Euclidean death sphere that made me slightly nauseous but it was easier to kill people than that it was real effective set up the game use your monitor use the external tools and this is going to feel real it's too dark you can't see without the flashlight turn up the brightness on your monitor change the gamma settings on your video camera you want to feel real bad about yourself when you go home tonight use the accessibility features yeah yeah that feels real bad doesn't it unless you use that if there's nothing you don't actually have a problem that's like a convenience for someone else like parking in a handicapped spot do not do that unless you have the pass and it's legit otherwise you're a really bad person but if I use this in a video game I'm not taking it away from someone who needs it in fact I'm maybe even helping them because the people who make games are like wow a lot of people are using these that's a pretty good guys real safety maybe we should develop more accessibility features they're really smurfing is when you manipulate matchmaking to play with scrubs because that's real fun you'll win a lot if you smurf it's like you'll go play football with some five year olds you're going to win every game because I hope I hope you're going to win every game so let's talk about the whether it was cheating or not whether it happened or not right it doesn't really matter right what does matter is if you're playing a game and I say look if you take these steroids the penalty is that you're going to lose like Lance Armstrong right Lance Armstrong won no Tour de France 0 he won nothing they took away the championships right so that kind of sucks you probably shouldn't cheat because the penalty is you don't win right but it's the one Super Bowls right I'm a Giants fan I don't care but yeah it's the one the other Super Bowls but this falls down into and all they had to do was pay a fine if you tell me oh pay this fine and you can cheat it's like I'm super rich you even more cheating is not right but it doesn't matter there are two main classes of cheating if you really want to think about it one is conventional passing I feel like only someone who grew up in southeast Michigan will probably understand that but there's a game called Euker and it's a card game and you're pretty much expected to try to cheat a little bit like that's just how the culture is like I'm almost offended if I go home to visit my family and people don't try to cheat at this card game because it's really boring games you don't try to cheat but also like in football or in a lot of sports like levels of cheating that you kind of expect people to do like stealing signals yeah to try to catch it the whole thing is if you're gonna cheat in the eight-tron and that's one kind of cheating but then there's the blatant cheating it's like playing a complicated board game you're just moving pieces around taking extra points you're playing monopoly and you're sort of reaching to the bank taking a bunch of money and moving over there now I would argue that that kind of cheating you're not winning anymore because what do we say way back into the panel one of those pieces of definition and agreed upon set of rules If you play with an aimbot, you didn't win the bot one. If you cheat at a game like this, and it's not for money, you won nothing. If it's for money, cheat. And also, don't cheat at packs, because you really don't want to get kicked out of packs. I don't know, has anyone actually been kicked out of packs for cheating? I know people have been kicked out for some of these other things, but I don't know about the cheating one. I wonder if you cheated at the Omega-Thon. I'm sure if you cheated at the Omega-Thon, you would not be allowed back. It's just about out of time, so where'd we go? Where did I take you, and it wasn't Brown's Manor or whatever place he takes you if you show him Dracula's Heart? Play games, and try to win them. You know what we said in the beginning? Really try to win them. If you want to be like us, try to win. Do everything that you can do. Sacrifice your mind, body, and soul for the win. Every single turn, do the most you can when it isn't your turn to spend the whole turn obsessing about how to win. If you lose the game, figure out why. If you don't win a game, figure out why. You said build heuristics? No. You need to think a lot about heuristics. You read books on heuristics. Talk about this. I think we've brought up heuristics in every panel we've done in the last four years. Train. Don't play games. Train at games. They are very different. There's a lot of people who play Overwatch 20 hours a day. They are not getting better. Find the line. I think a lot of you, the line was that accessibility feature. But respect the line because there is a line. Be a dick. Now there is a fundamental rule of packs. Lil Wheaton says don't be a dick. So we got to be very clear here. Be a dick in the context of the game. Right. You're inside the game, right? It's not me being this dick. It's like I'm bison. He's an evil dude. He's going to do that. It's not me. When you're hanging out with normal people in the real world, be nice and respectful and all this other good things. No matter how vicious you are because you're going to be vicious. Because you're going to be a monster if you want to win games. You shake hands and you're a human being outside of the game. Because they're all human beings, at least for now. Unless the keynote is President Trump. Everyone knows and agrees when they're inside the game, you know, in that game world, you do whatever you got to do and that's okay. But in the end, win. And we are unfortunately out of time. I hope that was enjoyable.