 I'm Rem. I'm Scott. We are the host of Geeknize. It is a radio show podcast about nerdy stuff So if you enjoy this at all, there's a lot of it on the internet and today we're talking about the rage of the quitter How many of you have rage quit a game before? How many of you have gotten mad because someone else rage quit the game that you were in? How many of you here because you want to learn how to rage quit better? That's not good So there's a very important concept About quitting and that is that games are not real life games are games for a reason games are play the Consequences are not real obviously some pet and others like what about eSports where this prize is on the line We're not talking about that You can quit games someone in the NFL could just walk away from the field There might be other consequences But they can quit the game if you're playing carcassone and someone sucks you can just walk away if you can't quit It's not a game. It's like You can quit it because it's some social fabricated construct that you're temporarily You know agreeing to participate in and you can leave it at any time now The problem is most game designers don't think a lot about quitting they think about the cool parts of the game The fun part of playing but not quitting so game designers don't consider quitting as a mechanic yet No matter what your game is. There's always the option of quit under every other menu item is press X to pay respect Press the power button to quit So there's only you know We're gonna talk about why people actually quit games and it turns out there's only so many like if you really break it down Really crystallize it. There's a relatively small number of reasons why people quit games and the primary one is that they're bored I mean, you know, you only gonna lose for so long. And what am I gonna end up living to like 70 if I'm lucky, right? Yeah, you could push 80 maybe. Maybe, right? I'm not that healthy Right? If I'm gonna sit down and play a game, right of any kind, I'm not gonna, you know, my time is valuable Why would I spend more time on something that is not entertaining me and not giving me any value or joy or anything? Yeah, so like Marvin asked me to play this card game and it seems like it's really long and boring you get bored with it And she's at home, but you're not and that's a big reason why people quit. They're just bored. They're not having fun It took too long. Now your friends are gone Someone lied to you and says that that train game where you draw a bunch of train stuff on a train board and simulate the year 1846 takes 20 minutes and you're in your fourth hour and you're about to be late for dinner or like school You know, you just left the X-Fall and you really want to go to the panel about those heat nights guys in 630 So I was like, no, no, we can get this board game done before them. Don't worry and make it in time It definitely won't fail off. You'll be cool. All right And they were right about the not filling up, but they were totally wrong About the game being done by 630 because you were totally gonna quit that biz. Yeah Now this often happens particularly because someone will lie to you like I'm not joking Someone will lobe all the estimate how long they will take because they're so desperate for you to play with them They want that game to happen and they're trying to cause your other consequences just so you'll stay and play the game Yeah, also people are really bad at estimating how long a game will take and some games are really bad at telling you How long they're actually going to take like the Omega time the kept having ties in the first few rounds The game was not what you expected And But also, you know video game publishers, right? They're trying to sell the game to you If they're honest to you about what the game is. Oh, yeah, you just gonna watch a movie and push a whole bunch of times It's gonna take you 30 hours. That's not really gonna make you want to buy it They're gonna lie to you about what the game is You have this great imagination when you look at the box or watch the trailer and the reality will often not live up to it Now often like this happened to me sometimes to like Team Fortress 2 when it came out I was really excited. I'm really excited because I played Team Fortress a lot. I was waiting for that game It was not what I wanted and that was a real bad day and I quit playing it real quick Sometimes people forfeit sometimes someone will quit a game to make a statement. This game is broken This is unfair political statements social statements. There's a lot of reasons why this will happen in this case There's a high school that is a charter school that doesn't it has to that doesn't have to let everyone into the school So they self-selected for high school football players who are as big as real football players And it's super dangerous to play against them. So all the other teams are rage-quitting. Well, not rage-quitting We're just quitting right against me. If you have a football team It's already really dangerous to play football at any circumstance But you're gonna play against this game of genetic creeps who are like, you know The size of adults who just happened to be under 18, right? You're basically putting your normal size kids lives on the line You you forfeit rather than play them right because some things are more important The key is that a forfeit occurs when there is some Extrinsic reason for someone to quit and it's performative They're doing it to make a statement not just to avoid the consequences They're saying this should not be allowed. This team shouldn't be allowed to be in the league, right? This method of recruiting shouldn't be allowed for high school football, etc Yep, or this game stop. Well, we'll get to that. Yeah They're losing a lot of people say that they want to play games because games are fun But really they want to play games because they want to win and when they're not winning they're not having fun Right now some people take this situation and their solution is to quit when they're not winning so that they always win And they never have to see a screen that says you lose your game over on it Other people handle the situation by cheating so that they always win All right, so it's just up to the individual person the individual game Which of these two roads they're gonna go down if they're the store loser type If something need to think about both as a player and a designer Why are people playing games on one side? There's to have fun on the other side There's to win and you might think those over lag they barely over lag We have a lecture we've given about how to win at games winning games is not fun So that is a score in an ice hockey game that occurred while we were in college For a while in 2002, but this was a hockey game where at the beginning of the third period if Newman had quit I couldn't have blamed him because yes technically they could win there is you think it takes only like a couple seconds to Score a hockey goal you win a face-off you shoot It's in the goal with the goalie socks and then you can get like 24 goals in like a minute I mean alright, he got 24 goals in a pretty short span But it wasn't impossible for them to win but effectively their probability of winning was near zero Not absolute zero but near zero right so they made as well quit why keep skating around for no reason Now you'll see some games will have like a mercy rule or some reason to like let the game end early But I wouldn't blame these people if they left much more important. This happens in games a lot especially tabletop games They've definitely lost they are mathematically eliminated for winning But the monopoly games got four more hours Yeah, there's a lot a lot of games out there where your chances of winning are not near zero But actually absolute zero you cannot win this game But because of the rules of the game, it's not over yet You know, maybe you know the time is about to run out in a game of football And you know the team they would make them go out there and take a mean why just end the game What's the point? Yep, it's generally a sign of I'm not bad design. Definitely poor design It's an overlooked thing a lot of games people get really excited about designing a game Especially a tabletop game because it's where this happens a lot They don't think a lot about what the end game experience is like and it leads to situations like this They have an incentive to quit what if a game doesn't punish you for quitting You'll find a lot of people and you saw this in the ds online era. A lot of people have perfect records Yeah, it's already Mario Kart ds for the first ds not 3ds If you just turned off your ds or quit a game when you were about to lose It wouldn't count on your record. So I had like a perfect record. I was like 40 and 0 in Mario Kart racing Yeah, the thing is whenever I was winning a race every right before across the finish line everyone else was just scared But if you give someone an incentive to quit They will quit because that is to their utility what they're getting out of a game like they're playing to win the game And if they're losing the game and by quitting they can un-lose the game They're gonna do it because they're playing to maximize their utility. They're playing to win the game They're gonna do it's so weird you could be designing a game Right, and you think who would go to the player and like hey if you quit the game I'll give you a cookie, but the game designers will make games that literally do that Like hey, please quit my game. All right So this is an important one the game is unfair now unfair I don't know that the suspect is cheating. I don't know that he has an aim bot and a wall head But I suspect That he is cheating It's I mean the suspect could just be ridiculous and good at counter strike and daisy robbin pelican No, listen mass could be really really bad or just a fk or something And I'll line up in a row with their heads just right It's possible, but I don't think so But no one wants to play a game that is actually unfair because that means that all of these skill everything you're doing the actions Are taking in the game don't matter. They're pointless Yeah, so when you're playing like overwatch or something and you think someone's cheating It ruins the experience for you You have no incentive to play unless you also cheat. It doesn't matter if they're actually cheating There's no difference between a perfect sniper with human eyes and a perfect sniper with a computer Theoretically you have no way to know if someone's cheating or not, especially as a player So it doesn't matter if someone's really good or they're cheating The reality the effect is the same you feel that the game is unfair And you're more likely to quit a lot of people quit for this exact reason Imagine if I'm playing basketball against LeBron, right? He's not just going to cheat. I'm not going to touch the ball ever I'm not going to take a shot ever. Maybe he'll let me take one and block it and then go and dump it It's not fun. Now imagine me playing basketball against someone with a jetpack. They're cheating But it's the same as playing against LeBron. It's unfair either way So here's a case study. This is something really interesting that happened. It's like a weird case of Immersion behavior and game design So there is a person who was basically the best sniper in Overwatch in the world And as far as we know not cheating just really really really really good Predator naturally good clicking on heads the best and they had to complain to blizzard There was something going on They they couldn't join games like there was a bug where they kept trying to play games And their queue time would just go up and up and up and up forever And it was only this person it wasn't like people in the area Yeah, somebody I love a certain server A lot of you work in it or something if a bunch of people have a problem That's one thing if one person has a problem and no one else has that problem That's a very different thing. They had the same problem on multiple computers in different places So one person there's another option that's gone now in Overwatch where you could say, you know, it's an anti-harassment tool This player Is bothersome is bad in some way. They're harassing me. I want to avoid this player They took this option out What actually happened is something like the majority of all Overwatch players who would ever played against this person Said avoid this player. They free rage quit to avoid the later rage quit That is terrifying to a game designer to have to think about those contingencies So now this person couldn't find a game to play with because literally everyone was avoiding them Or at least every game that they could be inserted into had a player who was trying to avoid them And so there was they couldn't find a match anymore The opponents are cheap not cheating But doing something cheap if you remember the old Mario Kart DS It was one of the better Mario Karts except for one person That's the second Mario Kart DS reference You could play the game the normal Mario Kart way and drift around the corners get your sparks and that's fine Or you could cause permanent injury to your left thumb and your wrist And waggle the DS like this And snake constantly You can only get sparks on the turns when you drift around them in this Mario Kart DS You can get sparks on the straightaways by going like this Right basically boost around the whole track and no one can catch you now before you ask what kind of monster would do that I did that You did that every time And the problem was you got into the situation where this is a perfectly balanced strategy that's been built into the game It didn't act the game no game genie. No nothing It was it was totally legit. It's not hardly not even an exploit or a glitch and Nintendo never catches out or anything You know that's correct. So Every time I played online I'd start snaking and the other people would just quit immediately So I started not snaking until the third lap and then I'd say and they'd still quit And then eventually I gave up and I would join other people's games where they named the game like no snaking And I would snake and they would all quit And stop you It's the same situation as no rush 15 or no rush 10 if you're playing starcraft So what's meant by cheap right is that there's something that's very powerful Right that's very easy to do usually when you have a game Techniques or skills or strategies that are very effective are very difficult to do right? You have a magic card play magic together and it's a giant creature like a 10 10 It just cost a lot of mana to put that out of the table right and doing snaking is like oh It's a 10 10 for one green mana. No drawback No, okay Just like the perception thing before it doesn't matter if the strategy is actually cheap Snaking was actually really really really hard to do Oh physically hard to not you know, well so strategy wise it was actually pretty difficult too on some of those sneaky maps That's why you play dry bones drive armor only sure But it does not matter the it's like a magician It doesn't matter how hard the trick is to actually do all it matters Is how hard the audience thinks it is to do? It's the same thing with this if the audience is losing to mbison mbison is cheap And that's the end of that the appearance of cheapness is the same as the appearance of cheating and people will quit So Esports are a thing now like esports are really really big and this is a real problem in sports people get hurt If you hurt yourself quit the game Don't power through real injuries because you're not getting paid when someone the nfl is getting paid I don't think anyone here is getting paid to play any game So it's like your body, right? We're all sadly humans who are very fragile right and not going to survive forever I've already discussed this If there's something wrong with you and you know, it's not right And you need to go get help even if it's just going to the bathroom or you cut yourself You need a band-aid or you're vomiting or who knows why you broke your leg You really shouldn't be now playing a game at this time The only game you should be playing is get to the hospital so if it's possible All right, don't play any other games Now you might say what about tabletop, but if you've ever played jungle speed with the original wooden totem Yes, even tabletop. I I'm sure we all know someone who's lost a finger to juggler It can be pretty dangerous and it falls on your headers Even just a normal tabletop game like if anyone remembers this famous incident from a fart thread like 15 years ago There's a reason why old war gaming clubs have something called the chair fund That is to replace chairs that are broken in the course of playing perfectly sedentary tabletop games And you can imagine what you will from we used to play, you know, some old war game people right upstate and they were They were you know, their chairs were not the most durable So this is a really important topic a lot of people quit games or period-raised quit games Because they're straight up being harassed someone's being racist someone's being sexist Someone's following them around and killing them just to grief them This is one of the biggest problems in games right now And we're going to talk a bit about sure people talk about it at every panel all the past since the beginning But you got to understand when someone quits a game like you're playing overwatch and someone quits Especially on the other team. You don't know what was going on in the team chat of that other team So you can't always assume the person that quits they might not be rage quitting They might be forfeiting and there's no way to know that we'll get back to harassment later in the panel So sometimes there's an intrinsic stopping point in a game like between rounds between matches at a save point in a single player game So sometimes the game itself will set a tempo where there's points where it feels right to quit And there's not that much wrong with that some people will rage quit at those points like Right before the score screen comes up. You'll see a lot of people suddenly quit competitive games You usually think of this stopping point as like a temporary quitting right like you're quitting But you're going to come back what happens to me a lot is like I'll get to some place like this I'll quit and then I won't remember to come back and that game is basically done for me I don't remember like I'll play zelda and then if I don't remember to start playing it again the next day It's like that was actually the end. I just didn't realize it at the time More important is the extrinsic stopping point that the sun rises and you have to go to work You've got to catch the last train out of downtown Seattle to get back home I guess there's no trains. You're in tabletop and it's midnight and forces kick your ass out We got kicked out last night because we overstayed our welcome We get kicked out every night But this can also I was playing Overwatch I play a lot of Overwatch lately, so I talk about it a lot But I was playing with my team. We're doing some series biz and suddenly one of my friends doesn't the boys chat very calmly Uh, my daughter vomited on me and then disconnected Can't do much about that That happens So this is an industry term This is what you're all here for but this is an industry term This is when people actually rage quit in a fit and there's two kinds of right Well, there's three kinds of rage quits five kinds five kind ten kinds the pure rage quit We've all done the pure rage quit. This is when you quit a game the controller gets thrown across the room You just stand up and run away You just scream and leave take the count whatever happens. You quit the game Usually this happens either because a someone has like some anger problems going on or b because you didn't quit earlier Right, you stuck with it despite being mad getting madder You should have quit the first time right, but you didn't you stuck with it You thought okay that mario kart race rim was snaking. He won't snake the next time Oh rims not even in this race. There won't be any sneakers then you get to the third left Oh rims alternate account is in here now So the important aspects of a normal rage quit which is much more acceptable than the next one is that It's just to stop experiencing that bad feeling people rage quit like this because they feel bad And they want the stimulus that's causing that to go away. There is fire fire bad fire That is this This is a much more interesting situation I like this kind of blurry you can you can there's some good environmental storytelling here You should find this video on youtube is good this video is great But the destructive rage quit is so much more sinister. It's like if this is second degree murder This is first degree murder Because when someone destructively rage quits, they're not quitting to stop the bad feeling They want to ruin the game for everybody else. They want to harm other people There is a performative component. They are quitting as performance They want other people to see them quit It's an aspect of vengeance going on here, right? Because basically this other guy on the right Is you need to find the game by the rules doing some ridiculous combo that wins the game or something, right? And it's making the guy look really upset because well, there's nothing we can do about it Uh, and the guy on the right is totally chill, right? He's just like i'm just type magic here I'm just good at magic where you know, but it's like he wants other people You know, it's to get revenge on that guy, right for doing this evil thing to him But he also wants people to see like oh, this guy's doing something really evil screw this guy So this guy just harms himself and that's fine Like we all like people have anger and things happen and they quit, but this requires Specific malice. You didn't just have a peak of fury and ruin your computer and then you calm down You keep that anger burning and hurt other people for as long as possible There's a third kind of rage quit They don't actually quit The body keeps playing the game, but the mind has different objectives now This is the guy spinning around in a circle and spawn playing rick assley in the voice chat forever until the round ends Right, you're playing a racing game, right? You don't actually want to quit, but you know, you can't win the race He just turned around his drive back It's notable that in the new mario card, locketune won't let you do that He picks you up and says nope and you keep doing it. He keeps saying nope Of course you're lucky to Now this we have a whole other kind of a long time ago on briefing and trolling the difference between the two But a lot of those behaviors one of the main reasons that happens is because of this So we already saw we had a second degree murder second degree quit. We had first degree murder This is like a step beyond this is like Sherlock Holmes murder Like you stuck around and you're gonna murder everybody. This is egg of the christ Right, you know, you can't win the game. You're gonna lose so you don't you know If you keep obsessing about trying to win it's only going to frustrate you more because you're striving to come up this mountain You can't very sycophian task, right? So instead well, you could just quit and do something else But instead you find another way to have fun, right? So even though you you know, you could have quit and done something else fun But instead just have a new way to have fun with the thing you're already doing Now this isn't always bad We used to play a game natural selection one a long long time ago And in the maps like there'd be a room like a ready room You get your players an FPS and you have your players in a ready room and there's this block of cheese just like on a table And independently if you hit f4 in the game that quits to the lobby It's like a way to concede you can always teleport to this room with the cheese Yep, and you can rejoin the game from there So when people would rage quit like the marines are losing people start spamming f4 in the chat And they'll all jump into the ready room So the game keeps going unless everyone concedes but rather than rejoin the game when no one else conceded They'll just jump around in that room and have a little party and hang out because it's fun for them They're making fun for themselves playing the game playing the game for fun That is not in the rules of the game is literally the definition of griefing We often would play a different game, which is how many people can be stacked on top of the cheese So here's another anecdote if any of you are familiar with this there is a gentleman Uh plays hanza, hanza may, of course You can't tell rims pretty much playing one game these days I have doubled down on overwatch. I'm a ron heart man. I'm really proud of this So this person played hanza spell hanjo And he had a goal a very specific goal to be the worst ranked overwatch player in the world Now at first this is really easy. You just join a game and just you know lose, right? It's not hard to lose But then how do you lose when the other people are really really really bad? And there's a whole story here But there's a very interesting part because there's a long interview you can read if you google for it And he talks about like all the experiences and he says something kind of interesting in the mid 30s That's like the ranking that's basically like the left fit like near the end near the bottom He met the angriest people in the world these people Not happy people now the people below them Who are so bad like they didn't know diva could fly and they didn't know ron heart and have a shield They were happier than the people in this little valley of death And this is why they these are people who care about the game. They play the game. They care about it They want to win if they didn't care they would have made it up to 30 right They would have been lower with us having people they think they're better than they are They have a poor positional heuristic meaning that they can look at game of overwatch and not really understand Who's winning or losing or why they're winning or losing they have no sense of how the game is progressing But they feel like they do they think they know like oh, this is how you're supposed to do this And this is good and this is bad like they feel like to understand the game They know all the rules of the game right there's like but they don't see the things they don't know right They don't know what they don't know but they know what they know And they're doing what they know and it's not working their skill isn't going up Right their rank is still 30 something so they met but most importantly they have played the game a lot They have played the game probably more than i've played the game But yet they like many gamers and gaming kind of primes us to do this if you don't know a lot about how games work They can play time with effort time with training just because you play counter strike for a thousand hours doesn't mean you're gonna be good at counter strike If you're someone who wants to get rewarded just for investing time you should play an rpg or an mmo or something right Is where it's just it doesn't matter how good you do as long as you spend time on it It's good. You're gonna rank up right, but this is a skill game You actually can't it doesn't matter if you spent your whole life doing it You actually have to improve your own human body and improve your own skills And if you don't then you're not gonna get any better Another interesting observation he had was they're astonishingly bad. That is they quote. They are astonishingly bad at the game right and this person who's trying to get a rank zero this handrail like was good at the game But it wasn't like a pro player. It wasn't something ridiculously good, but it's like Good enough to recognize how astonishingly bad they were I imagine him feeling like that that that classic question How do you resist the urge just to go around killing everybody and just winning the match on your own It's that question of how many five-year-olds could you fight if you had to fight a room full of them Like I feel like that's what it's like down there Now the crazy thing is that I've experienced that a little bit because one time I solo queued all my ranking matches So I got put in silver. I'm not a silver player. I got put in silver Let me tell you those people are real bad But they're also astonishingly serious They really really really care about overwatch more than the people who are better than them And more than the people who are worse than them and last but not least They think that the other players on their team are the problem They literally think that they would win but every round is bullshit And someone they put on a team with these bad people and they're ranked wrong and it's their fault Right. I want you to think about someone who's like at home watching football yelling at the tv like my family And it's like you don't know person who sits on the couch more than a football coach whose job it is To win at football right and of course not all coaches are equal some are much better than others But even some low ranking college football coach knows more about football than couch guy And couch guy knows nothing But if couch guy thinks he knows something and he calls in the sports radio Hey, you should make these trains. Why didn't you call this play your bum? It's like, that's who these people are They think they know But they don't know And the worst part about these people is they can see all the bad things That other players are playing just like them are doing and they can't see it in themselves Or they see someone else doing something. They think it's bad. It's actually good And they think the thing they're doing is good when it's bad. They see.com. They're like, what are you guys doing? We're gonna lose So what do we do about quitting? There's only two important questions Can the game continue? Can a winner be determined? Those are the fundamental questions from your game design perspective when someone rates points So let's look at some examples. This is an interesting example to try to do something outside of our typical ground June 4th, 1974 in Cleveland, Ohio, which is already a place that has Magical Cleveland Ohio is like There is a promotion where they would sell beer glasses be able to pop Plastic cups of beer do they have plastic in 1974? For 10 cents now 10 cents in 1974 was more than 10 cents in you know But imagine even in 2017 if you had dollar beer night, right? dollar beer packs would even be a problem So you can just imagine what this looked like and now we'll show you what it looked like What could happen in a baseball game where they sold beer for 10 cents that could prevent that game from Oh teams quit Because they formed a circle and fought off the angry fans with baseball bats. I am not joking Nor am I exaggerating The result is the home team cleveland Right was declared the loser because it was their responsibility to not have 10 cent beer night. So there was a rule To decide what to do If 10 cent beer night happens 10 cent beer night happened they followed the rule the game could not continue Nope, not not a winner was determined and for this sport for this game That was the most important thing who won the game. What were the stats? That's what bad Yeah, I mean this is a real professional baseball game not just some like game at a table and pack somewhere Right, it's like you needed to determine who won or can replay the game or something. You couldn't just you know do whatever So what about overwatch quick play or hey, I'm on a game that has a casual mode. Is that four overwatches now? I don't know there's gonna be like eight more overwatches So in a casual game like this if you're playing lights and sunsakes and someone quits Who cares there's probably a million people in the queue Trying to join games grabs a random person stick them in the game. So the game can continue. Yes Can a winner be determined? Yeah, the team that was out of player was only out of player for like 30 seconds tops That's not going to materially affect a casual game of overall It's not the omega ton final, right? You can just be like, oh, whatever. We don't care who won. Just man Yep competitive game Serious business so can the game continue technically it can But it's much like that Newman game. You're not going to win five on six, especially in a brand to manage So what overwatch does is once someone quits all the players on their team They have the option to also quit and not get penalized. The person who quit gets punished severely We'll talk about that But the person who is on the team that's someone else quick phone They're allowed to just leave a winner is determined that team just loses that sucks We're sorry But that's because there's no point in continuing the competitive game because while the winner can't be determined The winner effectively was already determined by the player quitting that ended the game It's very interesting that jeff cacklin, you know, look like the game director of overwatch This is a quote from recently from him where he said very clearly They would rather not have leavers playing the game at all That is an unequivocable statement, right? As a game designer someone whose job it is to make and sell games is saying I would rather have you not play my game Right. Do not play but do not play the game that I made Casual competitive and I tell people to listen to our podcast But this is someone who's making money on something telling you not to give them money, right? If you're the kind of person who'll quit Yep, because when you quit a game, especially a multiplayer game, you got to think about this Even the mere act of quitting harms all the other people playing the game And if you play a game and repeatedly people keep quitting games and ruining your experience You're not likely to continue playing that game. So game designers have both a monetary Design incentive to prevent people from quitting their games What about a light board game like carcassonne like I'm playing like me scum joe joe joe shabadou We're playing carcassonne and joe joe joe joe since I'm a chicken bone What do we do we take joe joe to the hospital? Well, we finish the game first sure, okay But say a player leaves a simple board game like this You could probably just keep playing the game and while that changes the strategy like in carcassonne Now we're gonna get like more tiles than we would have otherwise gotten So like my strategy might not work out as well because we're playing the game by different rules But we can continue the game and it'll probably be pretty bad The game is structured in such a way that it's not completely ruined just because someone walked away from the table I don't know if they thought about this when they were designing it It just happens to be the way the game works If we're on your tile, you put a tile and you put or don't put a meeple So if someone gets up and walks away saying okay, that person's score is locked in and everyone else keeps playing tiles without them You can just keep going But what about a complicated board game? So a big difference here is that a simple board game You can figure out the state of the board relatively quickly and play Probably nearly as effectively as the player who quit So if we find some rando to finish our game of carcassonne while joe joe joe is choking That's probably going to be very similar to the game that joe joe joe played in You can walk up to our carcassonne and just start playing even if it's halfway done already But if you try to join this game, it's going to take me an hour just to figure out what the hell's going on Which color am I but you know what happened, you know, like this hidden things It's like what you know, but the other previous person may have memorized But now you don't know what they are because you're in there when you saw them This is a three hour buffet that a bunch of people have consumed in bits and bites over the course of three hours I can sit down and eat the whole thing in 30 seconds and start playing It's not going to happen. It is almost impossible to replace a player in a complicated game What am I ever a netrunner me and Scott are playing netrunner and Scott quits Scott takes his ball and goes home. He owns his deck. He owns the physical cards. We literally cannot continue the game This is why you shouldn't you know, if you have friends, you know Usually there's one friend who owns all the games, especially if it's a tabletop situation, right? Make sure that that's the good friend Right, you know, you don't if you have if the bad friend that you don't kind of you kind of don't like You know, like going to the house if they're the person that keeps buying all the games You should start buying more games and become the good person who owns all the games, right? Because otherwise, you know, Cartman takes his ball and goes home and then you can't play anything without them And you need to keep this bad person around all the time I've been in tabletop games with a person who owned the game quick and they just packed it up in the middle of the game What are you gonna do except not be friends with them anymore? I mean unless it was, you know, a real reason to leave So there was sort of an underlying question we didn't ask Not just can a winner be determined, but does that win count? Right now obviously sometimes it matters if the win counts and sometimes it doesn't right 10 cent beer night It matters and quickly overwatch it doesn't right, but if it does count Right, if we need to make sure the win counts, it's important. How do we determine whether it wouldn't count? And here's this people This is something that you can all use if a game something weird happens in a game and someone quits We got to deal with it to prevent the butter rage that causes everyone else from quitting the humble askers Simply say all right this game. Jojo Jojo choked to death. So obviously there's a problem with this game We'll keep playing it and yes god wins in the end, but there's an asterisk next to his win I know there's something weird. I won this imperfect game You can do this asterisk even in situations that aren't related to quitting like oh, we got a rule wrong Let's keep playing with the rule the wrong way because we were stupid and we didn't read the rule book properly But we'll keep playing the wrong way and we'll just put an asterisk this win doesn't count so much It counts a little bit before I realize the power of the asterisk I'd been in games where I rage quit like personally I quit because we got a rule wrong And once we learned the gnosis of the correct way to use the rule I would have been winning but now I'm losing and now I'm salty and so I quit But if someone sent our rim asterisk on this game, I probably would have kept playing This is a super powerful tool and it is highly effective The asterisk can remove a lot of rage from people right especially right It's like oh, I don't have to be so mad about losing this that personally won with an asterisk, right? It wasn't a real win. I didn't really lose. I can feel better about myself I don't have to be so mad even if I'm a sore loser to lose an asterisk game All right, and if someone's a sore winner you can say to them. Hey, you didn't really win It was asterisk. Yeah, you won but you're drawn extra cards for half the game Now actually the best question to ask because we're none of us. I hope none of us Maybe I hope you are we're not all professional eSports players where this is our lively move We're playing games in packs So it doesn't really matter if the win counts all that matters is if you finish the game Was the satisfying did it feel like you played the game because that's all Do you regret playing if you could go back in time? Would you have chosen not to play the game right and do something else instead? Did you make a mistake or was that a good time and you spent your time wasted? So here's a case study from the original Left 4 Dead Uh, if anyone's played this game, there's a multiplayer mode where it's 4 on forward You play your game and most people will play the game with like one or two friends and join some randoms There was a very specific death spiral that would happen in this game It was pretty amazing to watch it happen so consistently So if you're on a team that wins The team that played is likely to continue to play together and thus be cohesive and keep winning Right. You have four people you won a game. You stay together. You win another game It's like, oh, we got a good thing going here. Yeah, let's keep this biz together You keep rolling meanwhile the other teams you're playing against and they have a rage quitter and another rage quitter And then a random person joins in and then a rage quitter and then a random person joins in a rage quitter So all these people trying to play Left 4 Dead But the vast majority of the time they're going to be placed on a losing team Right with people quitting it that's that's no cohesion against a team that is stuck together and doing very well So if you're trying to join random games instead of joining with a team of four Three arranged people you're not going to be joining in a good situation. So think about this They're more likely to join a game where they are losing. That's one of our things that will cause people to quit They feel the game is unfair Someone else quits on their team It's a perfect storm and you just leave the situation where I would say that 100 of the games of this that I ever played resulted in someone rage quitting at some point It's very very hard to randomly just get into a game of Left 4 Dead You know without your friends and go into a good situation. So what are we what a game designers what a game players? What do we do about quitters? What are the ways to deal with this situation and there is a bunch of them first off? We talked about mitigation design games that have ways to deal with people who have left Like simple board games might have a rule saying if someone quits the game You know this and this and this happens have a way to deal with it I'd make it easy for someone else to join a game that someone is quit have it easy in a video game Like say overwatch didn't have a ton of players So where you couldn't reliably pull someone from the rando queue and stick him to an empty slot Have an AI have a bot that will automatically join any game where someone quits and play okay Just to smooth it over to mitigate mitigation doesn't mean face doesn't mean for men It means mitigate make it less harmful There's some games out there like set and I've always played set you can just walk up to a game That's that in progress and start playing and just walk away from it It can just leave it on a table and this people randomly do and it's great Right, it's not a lot of games that can do that, but if you can make a game do that, why wouldn't you that's awesome Escalating punishment if someone quits a game, especially in online game You don't necessarily know why they quit so you can have some sort of punishment like oh you quit So you can't play again for 10 minutes But if they keep quitting if someone reliably quits games over and over and over again You have to increase the punishment to continuously further dissuade them from quitting Or at least prevent them from continuing to harm others by quitting It's a classic carrot and stick right if the carrot of the fun of continuing to play the game Isn't preventing people from quitting in the first place and they quit apply the old stick Sometimes you need a bigger stick so you quit a casual game Whatever if you quit a bunch of casual games Then overwatch starts taking away your experience points They start denying you all the stupid lucre crap that they got built in there You don't get a perfect record like Mario But more importantly, if you quit a competitive game You have harmed people far more than if you quit a casual game So if you quit a casual game, whatever, it's a quit We harm you a little bit If you quit a competitive game, the punishments need to be devastating And they can they can lead right up to being banned from the entire competitive season Gracial exits we talked about this a little bit There's some games that just by the nature of their design If someone quits it does not materially affect the progress of the game This is usually happens a lot in games where you're not interacting with the other players directly like a race You know if you're doing a hundred meter dash and somebody just stops running. It's like, all right That's fine. In fact, you might be happy you're in your reading chance has literally increased by a percentage So this game factory fun, which is hella fun. The name is not misleading In this game, it's kind of a race. You're all building machines Independently on your own boards is someone just gets up and walks away. It's like, okay. There's score is there's score They just won't build any more parts in their machine and everyone else keeps building Okay Much more rare and this is something when we review games on game guys when we talk about games This is something that I look for because if I see it it implies that the game designer put a lot of care and thought into their game If there are rules for players quitting If a tabletop game has a rule that says if someone wants to quit the game Here is what you do because then quitting is part of the game It's an option that is explicit and in the rules You can't fault someone for using it and the game has a canonical way to continue to remove the asterisk And it just makes everything great. It is so rare I am hard pressed to name like three games that do it. Are there surrender rules and diplomacy? I think Uh, no diplomacy All remaining players can unanimously vote To make the entire game a draw And you can quit all together You can quit all together so everyone's a draw and all the people who are eliminated have lost Yeah, there are a lot of war games that have more than two players where this is surrender rules Like I surrender go ahead in civilization. You can do that. You like here. I'll gift you all my cities Yep, right and then on whatever now. You're probably thinking I can think of a ton of games where you can quit Most of the games that have rules for quitting are two player games There's a reason for that if someone quits a two player game It does not need to continue a winner was determined that winner. There's no asterisk involved It's just someone won someone lost Bottom right buddy Yep And in fact having a concede button in a two player game is great because that way the person you won Can move on to win again as opposed to sitting there while it says opponent disconnected waiting You can immediately end it and not sit around and waste your time instead of washing that rope just burn down Every single turn they have to sit like connected to do that to you Some games just kick you out so this game is age of steam Which is a really really brutal train game And the way it works is at the beginning of the game. You got to take loans out for the bank to pay for your train Yeah, you don't start with money. Yeah, you're your tycoon. You got to take loans. You don't use your own money You have to pay interest on these loans or pay them back right their loans The bank is bigger than you even though you're a train tycoon and you haven't been able to buy the bank yet Um, so what happens is every turn when you got to pay back interest if you can't you might go bankrupt And if you go bankrupt, well, you really can't win the game if you're bankrupt, right? So rather than make you sit there for three more hours while everyone else plays age of steam and you're bankrupt But you have to keep sitting there putting like one train at a time if you can even manage that The game just says you're eliminated to get up and go away. You can't possibly win the game goodbye The first time we played this game, uh scout was eliminated in like turn three And I was eliminated the next turn So and then the other people were still there like a half hour to an hour later Still playing without us Ending when the game is over in pong the game is not over until you hit 10 But the mic through second you hit that 10th point the game is Instantly over and the reason pong is so good is because it's based on the perfect game Which is tennis tennis ends exactly when it ends if you're still playing tennis you can still win the tennis Even if it's match point you can come back and get match point for yourself. It's possible Soon as your chances of winning are zero game That's there's no reason to quit tennis because if you're still standing there with your racket You can still win the way you can think about it is every second that goes on beyond the point the game ended And the players are allowed to walk away is increasing pressure in that steam kettle of butter rage Incentives games like overwatch, uh rocket league pretty much every competitive online game They give you a bunch of nonsense if you keep playing the game. Hey, if you finish the match We'll give you some loot boxes. We'll put some, you know, we'll make you salivate for this reward. That's entirely arbitrary You know, I could quit this game because I'm gonna lose but if I keep finished the match at least I get this loot box All right, I'll guess I'll just run driver on the track back as there's a side when I stream over watch So I don't open the boxes. I want to stop opening them. Yeah People get really mad when they see how many loot boxes How many loot boxes do you have only 160? So that No, baby, a bunch of them are the new summer games one definitely not open to those But there is a problem with this There is a danger if you use incentives because if you incentivize people to stay in the game to get some reward They'll stay in the game. They're going to do that griefing rage quit that we talked about earlier This is a double-edged sword incentives are very dangerous for a lot of reasons and in this case They won't actually help you avoid rage quit. They'll just take it down from first degree murder to like assault with a deadly weapon shame This is an increasingly used way. There's two ways to do this So street fighter 5 they announced that they're going to put a little icon next to the names of people who quit too often Imagine if there was a walk around patch and dunce hats. It's like, well, that would be so great You know exactly who not to play a game with But they're not going to do that another way people do this It's not quite the shame, but they'll do the hell band instead. They'll make sure that they only match quitters with our quitters And then the non quitters just get to play with great people. No, the fascinating isn't how effective this is Uh, but the fascinating thing is that if you read any article about this Anywhere on the internet any game and that article has a comment section The same comment is there and it boils down to but how do you tell if I rage quit versus if my connection dropped? And the answer to that question is they literally are the same Right. So a lot of this is a legitimate thing that can happen, right? It's really only matters your internet games your connection can't drop, you know, when you're in person, right? It's like, oh, no, I'm getting disconnected from the panel I'm at a table to a game and I'm just like, well, he's now the cyberspace VR remiss here No, if you play an internet game your internet connection can mess up and you get disconnected Especially if you're trying to use the wi-fi anywhere in this town And what happens is like, well, okay, I guess this the same as quitting, right? You left the game. We can't connect you But if we if we allow you, you know, we give you the the uh, I guess we accept your apology for your accident Right, we forgive you for your bad internet Then we have to forgive someone who intentionally cuts off the internet How can we tell we can't tell there's no way for the game server to tell whether you disconnected on purpose Or disconnected because the internet's actually bad and you live on a farm But even more to the point doesn't matter why if your internet's bad and causes you to quit a lot That harms other players just the same as if you were quitting you're harming every other player in the game Why are you even trying to play right? It's like is it really that fun to like join a game for like 30 seconds playing with a 200 ping get disconnected and repeat that open Number again, it's like what it's not fun for you and it's really making other people's days bad too Sorry that your internet sucks. It's not fair. It's not fun But you're ruining the game for other people. Please stop trying to connect until your internet is good now more importantly I'm actually very suspicious of this play Because I suspect pretty highly that the people who say this are people who do rage quit a lot and are looking for cover Because they don't want to get punched. Yeah, I don't know if anyone knows like I think the original halo You could rage quit but basically like disconnecting and it would totally work And there's no protection for it and a lot of people had cable modems that had like a disconnect button on them And they would keep like their cable would appear their feet and like rage quit with their toe Right and to cut off the internet and get back in when I played mmo's which everybody gets one Like you gotta have the spirits once and then never do it again But I played the ground which again plays about old. I am sierra's online's the realm and in that game I figured out I didn't know about computers back then if I unplug my network cable as opposed to like quitting the game The game would not would basically ignore whatever had just happened right before I pulled the cable out So anytime I was in a raid the second I died I literally had my foot like around the network cable and I pulled that tab off I would disconnect it so I wouldn't lose all my stuff So I did the deed and I know that people do the deed and I don't trust people to not do the deed So if we can't tell if you're bad or good, we have to assume your bad And it doesn't matter if you're bad or good because you're harming people just the same as if you're bad So and more importantly, sorry internet disconnect people everything we talked about before with the proportional punishment and the escalating punishment if legitimately like randomly your house burns down Well, you get banned from the game for 10 minutes You're probably not going to log back into the game in the next 10 minutes while your house is burning down But if your house burns down every week either you're actually lying a lot your house burning down Or you need to move Structure if it matters who wins you have a whole meta structure around dealing with it If you're playing a game and the output of that game could result in you receiving lord Stanley's cup Then there are rules to deal with any potential situation If you read the NHL handbook, you would be amazed at all the levels They will go through to make sure there are two goalies if goalies keep getting incapacitated Right So if you come to the hockey game with your goalie and your backup goalie, right? What do they both get hit by a puck like so it's like it's happens pretty often The first goalie has a problem and you need to bring in the second one And it's more much more rare But it's definitely possible it has happened that that goalie has now has a problem Who do you put in there? You can't play without a goalie, right? And the list of who is the goalie goes way down There are people sitting in rooms in the back like waiting just in case like watching the game on tv Or eating some snacks in case they have to be the goalie Sometimes the goalie coach the 50 year old dude who was a goalie 30 years ago might have to get in there It's happened now like one of the year or something You might think but what about you know being a hockey you can pull your goalie like that's an option of the game Why don't they just force them to play without a goalie if they run out of goalie? That's not really fair Well much like an overwatch if you lose a player from overwatch your game's over If you don't have a goalie in a hockey it's going to be back to that Newman 24-0 no matter how good the rest of your team is Matchmaking this is almost a loss at it but not quite But matchmaking is a very powerful tool to prevent these problems But at the same time it is a double-edged sword So matchmaking like microsoft's true skill or elo rankings are all these different ways to Matchmade to make sure that opponents are equally skilled when they're playing a game are very effective They prevent the unfair situation. You don't want to have this situation You talked about earlier where I have to play against LeBron. We don't want that to happen So we use matchmaking we measure people's skill I mean make sure you only play against people with skill that's pretty close to you All right, so you don't get blown out and you don't pick on people and blow them on Yep, the problem with this but also the benefit is that if you have perfect matchmaking Literally every game you ever play will have an exactly 50 chance of winning If every game you ever play is a 50-50 game and is always super close You will never feel like you're getting better. You'll never have immersion experiences You'll never experience the occasional blowout a lot of the exciting things about sports disappear And you end up with a game where every round is zero to zero and you go to the fifth high breaker Imagine I keep playing a game against rim over and over right, but in that I get better It suddenly we were winning about every other game But now suddenly I'm beating him every single time and now it's like oh I can see that I've gotten better because now I used to only beat rim some of the time and now I beat him All the time, but if I keep playing against different people and they're always just as good as me I can't tell that i'm getting better It just feels like all right. I kind of win sometimes and I kind of lose sometimes even though I am getting better I'm getting way better because I just don't realize that people I'm playing against are way Way stronger than the ones I was playing against last week Now the narrative aspect of this is important too because a big part of why we play games is the experience the story we tell uh Usually when you tell a story about a game you play because no one wants to hear about your d&d character Usually you tell the story where either you want in a crazy situation Or you lost in a ridiculous situation The biggest losses and the biggest wins are the most Emergent and interesting narratives if you have perfect matchmaking you'll never see that blowout So you almost like in a professional sport You need to have the professional sport be wide enough to where the worst team like super aguri back where they played in formula one Yeah, they're better than every other race car drivers in the world below them But they're the worst f1 team You need that to feel that sense of scale or the narratives aren't quite as exciting and people lose interest You can't tell how good the superbowl winning team is if you don't have the cleveland browns that right? It's just you can't see if it's also all patriots in every city. You can't see anything So what do you think? You need the matchmaking to be good, but not great You got to have a little wiggle room Uh, if you're clever you would set it up to where the matchmaking is almost always as good as it can be But have a timer where like every now and then it'll just put the scrubs against the pros and just let that happen Or the semi pros against the pros Yeah So I've realized over time that the semi pros against the pros is just as bad as the moves against the pros Ego shield, this is a very important concept It doesn't work on people who study games Or people who have gone bend in this panel, I guess, but it'll work on all your dumb friends So the idea is that games that have some randomness some immersion stuff like a random event that happens in the middle lane And some MOBA I don't play MOBAs. I'm throwing words out there. I'm jungling and a random thing happens So if you have that little bit of randomness then the person who wins Their victory is tempered a little bit like I won because I'm smarter than you But I also got that lucky roll in the fifth round And if you lose you can be like, all right, I lost because I'm dumber than you Right and that makes you feel bad But if I lose and I could say oh I lost because of that lucky event, you know, it's like, all right He got lucky beat me. It's good. It's good, but I don't feel bad about myself I'm like, I played well. I didn't make any mistakes, right? Because the game has randomness It doesn't make me feel bad about losing and therefore I'm not gonna quit because you know, I'm cool with it I'm not getting mad So there's this fine line between having enough random and immersion behavior in the game to give the person who lost Some justification, even if it's BS doesn't have to be real justification There just has to be enough room so they can tell themselves and go to sleep that night I didn't lose because I'm dumber than Scott. I lost because of that BS in the third round If they're not mad when they lose then I can arrange for it Anti-cheating tools, you gotta make the game fair You've gotta make sure that no one can cheat in your game If people are cheating in your game, it's going to ruin your game Tabletop, this is actually really important. If you design tabletop games certain ways It's hard to see if someone's cheating and I've learned from experience There are people out there who cheat at tabletop games and that's crazy and weird But they do it and they're not even doing it for money. It's not even poker. They're just doing it And not only if you have cheaters in your game Not only does that mean people rage quit because they have to play against cheaters Remember the cheaters are the rage quitters. They're just instead of quitting. They're cheating So you're allowing those people to continue to be in your game You need to make sure that those people are not playing your game and then when the good people can play Equally important to that you need to have systems to deal with toxic people People who are being racist who are being sexist who are grieving who are trolling All those people you need to have systems that are not easy to game to deal with and eliminate those players Like dev captain said to the leavers. I'd rather those people not play our game I'd rather none of these people play our game either Much more clever than this the tools is the design Make a game where it isn't possible to be racist at someone Yeah, you can't even you can't even talk to me boonies that hello There's like six choices of things to say like it's a nintendo game It's like each someone starts saying hello as much as possible You can just put you can just mute them. It's like, all right, let's play they can't say anything They can't harass you like turn off the voice chat and overwatch and she's loose here. I can do this all day I can do this. I can do this all day Make losing fun. I'll give you a link to this later But we gave I gave a long lecture at packs australia on how to make losing fun So just watch that video and this is all that so I just snuck an hour or more of content into this panel This culture is a double-edged sword as well Sports culture says never quit quitters never win. Don't quit and on one hand that's good Quitting itself is somehow bad or shameful is like a thing you shouldn't do it makes you a bad person when you quit Right, you should stick through it and top it out. It's like no no you really shouldn't so on one hand Sportsman like conduct the idea that you should suck it up and play the game to the end Because that's the sportsman like thing to do But on the other hand if someone's being racist to you or you've hurt yourself No, don't suck it up. Just call the police or go to the hospital. So culture like everything can be a double-edged sword We're almost out of time. So where do we go you me and hanjo on this incredible journey Quitting is an intrinsic part of games because games are not real life Don't quit games Except when you're gonna quit games So if a game is boring if you're not having fun, stop playing the game Like don't play games that you don't enjoy There's so many people they just get mad at a game because it's like oh my god This game is so bad, but if we'll stop playing it play a different game then. Yeah, it's not bad They just keep playing the game and keep being mad at it. There's other games out there Like a million of them don't say the game is bad The game may be bad for you if you're not enjoying the game Just don't play it if you find yourself rage quitting a game all the time Just play a different game play a game that you win at if the game is hurting you If you're playing the game to the exclusion of feeding your child you should probably quit that game If you're running to this guy You should forfeit the game No one is obligated to play in a game where they're being harassed So even an overwatch competitive if someone's being racist like and you quit the overwatch competitive game because of it That's totally cool. Take your punishment. It's a protest. It's a forfeit. Do it If you're gonna quit if you're playing a game and you just gotta range quit At least quit with grace. Don't murder people. Don't harm the other players Don't flip the table over Don't type your hundred page essay into the text chat about why you're quitting and how this is an outrage And you people are all out. Just just quit the game and walk away Let it wash over you quit and experience tranquility Because your goal in quitting if you're not a horrible person is to not experience this game anymore So quit and be happy if you quit and you're still mad you accomplish Nothing and you hurt other people on the way out And most importantly if you're gonna make a game make the game so that winning and losing are equally fun I hope that was enjoyable Podcast is an mp3. Don't listen to it. We've been doing this podcast. I do not recommend listening to it But we've been doing it for 12 years If you insist is on is on the internet for free There are mp3s for free on the internet that you can download free mp3s free thousands of this card We'll take you to our youtube channel that has the lectures. We talked about on making losing fun and like 50 other lectures And you can take this straight to the enforcers to make sure we never come back if you didn't have a good time And Hopefully I have no more obligations this packs. Goodbye. Enjoy the rest of packs. We're going to make that finale Yeah, let's say never seen any of your guys's content. This is really cool I was not expecting to see the ball sack I've been a parker forever That is what early 2000s. I don't know how to undo this thing I need to wait for the guy. Yeah, it gets that A B 10 I had a friend that actually came across. I joined a honjo guy Oh, really? In game? Yeah