 We're the host of Geek Nights. If you enjoy this song, grab one of those flyers and today we're talking about quitting. Yeah, that was the joke we came up with. We could not come up with a way to do that joke in a way that was actually funny. Yeah, I'll do it anyway. The point of this panel, we're talking about quitting from a game theory and a game design perspective is that quitting is an intrinsic property of games. Right. You cannot design a game that cannot be quit. If you can't quit it, it's not a game, it's real life. Any game, any kind of game, no matter what definition of game you want to use, right, is a thing that is outside of actual real life. It is some made up inner universe within the real world, right? And because we live in the real world, we can exit games. Now, there's some, there's some bleed through like harassment. There's all this stuff we'll talk about. But in terms of the game itself, the rules, any game you play in Magfest, you just walk away from the table. You can quit this panel. In fact, if you're not having fun, you probably should. Yeah, but you can quit stuff. Professional sports, a football player could literally just be like, you know what, fuck it and just walk out. Like that could happen. I mean, there are consequences for doing so because real life is also the thing, but you can quit. The game has to deal with it. It is possible. So this panel is we're going to explore quitting from a whole bunch of different angles. This is like quitting 101. We're going to do every single thing there is to do with quitting. We're going to go into it. Let's start with the bail. Quitting before the game. If you're, you know, if you're out, if you're someone's doing something like, hey, we're going to play a game of Eclipse and it's going to take four hours to start to get bin down. You look at your friend, you're like, it doesn't do with that. I'm out. Bailing is a refined skill of an enlightened human. Now you might, you might argue that this sort of bailing before the game starts isn't quitting, right? Quitting is when you're in the game and then you exit the game, right? So like not even entering the game in the first place is sort of like not even quitting. It's sort of just like not playing, you know, but there's still some, there's still a lot of things involved in that. You might bail on a game before it starts for a lot of the same reasons you might quit a game that's already happening. So it's still an important thing to keep in mind because it's very closely related. And the important thing is how close are you to the event horizon of the game? And it's different for every game. If a game takes four hours to set up and then you're like, no, I'm not playing. Yeah, you're not friends with those people anymore. Right. Even though the game didn't start yet, right? It's like you still, there's a certain point you reach where it's like you are now in the game. Congratulations. But if halfway through Tic-Tac-Toe you're like, I can't do this. Right. Or maybe you sit down at a table in Magfist and someone's teaching you a game and then you finish the explanation. And then you go, you know what? I don't want to play this. You didn't reach the point where like it's already turned five, right? You didn't cross that line where it's like, oh, you're already in it now. But the important thing from a games line perspective is that games have to handle these situations because they will occur. And they can occur for a lot of reasons. You might like the busters might should not show up. Like you're ready to play hockey and the other team just isn't there. And you have to have rules around that. What do you do if the opponent doesn't show up? What do you do if someone's kid vomits all over them while they're playing Overwatch and they quit your competitive game? That happened to me like a week ago. But it's also things that are actually common and not ridiculous like what if my computer explodes or what if my computer is like crashes, you know, or a lot of technological technological things, but non technological things can happen to what if you're at Magfest and the fire alarm goes off? Right? What if although you keep playing that game, I just think what if somebody stills their drink on the table? Right? What if you're playing the game and you find that you're missing pieces? You know, it's not a sports you already went into, right? There's many, many reasons you could accidentally have to forfeit or quit or end a game. But this is specifically distinct from the intentional forfeit. So this is an interesting situation. It's a high school football team, American football. And because of a bunch of reasons we'll get into all the kids on this team are monsters. They're like 280 pounds like they're like big NFL burly people, right? These this high school football team can compete with like crappy college football teams, right? Just because of the way their school system is set up, they were able to recruit all of these players into the same high school. And they're playing against other high schools who are just normal high schools who have like one good player and a bunch of high school kids. And basically teams would forfeit the games against them because if they played them, they would get murdered. Yeah, not just now, not just murder, like, Oh, we'll lose the game, which that might be a valid reason to forfeit. But like you'll get hurt. When I was in high school, if someone away 280 pounds of muscle tried to hit me, I would die. Right? And you're like a 90 year old kid who's just playing football because you're not planning to make it a career, right? So you cannot put your it's like, you know, there's a reason that weight classes in boxing weight classes in boxing are very small. It's like x pounds through not very many more pounds, very narrow, right? If you fight against someone who weighs like 10, 15, 20 more pounds than you, you are in deep shit. And you're gonna you're gonna play football against someone who's 100 more pounds. No, it's not gonna happen. Now, if one person quits a game before they forfeit the game for some reason, that's one thing. But then if you if there's a mass forfeit, if you're not just quitting for your own reasons, but you're quitting because of other extrinsic reasons, that turns into a boycott. The 1980 summer Olympics, half the world didn't show up for a lot of reasons related to Afghanistan. So the Olympics had to deal with this, the Olympics happened anyway, the US wasn't there, half the world wasn't there. And you know, the rules of the game or whatever, but that is something that can happen. Imagine if NFL players decided to stop playing because the game is dangerous, right? There are many many instances in history, especially with the Olympics of political boycotts, right? But in professional sports, players haven't sat out too often, you know, usually it's a lockout. But there have been a few quite a few strikes in professional sports, you know, bring in replacement players in the NFL and stuff like that. So, you know, there's labor reasons, political reasons and many other reasons that someone would not play a game for, you know, an intentional preemptive forfeit. But we're gonna really focus on the intentional quitting the stuff you expect you're in the middle of a game, someone flips over the table and walks away. So the only questions that matter when someone quits an ortho game meaning an actual competitive game like a game that has a winner and a loser not like D&D where it's sort of like it's just you're playing but that's not yep. Can the game continue after this player is quit? And can a winner be determined? So for example, this is something that happened on June 4th, 1974. There was an event, the Cleveland Indians game called 10 cent beer nights. Now it was 1974. 10 cents was a lot more money than it is now. But not that much money. It's still 10 cents. That's like, whoa, right? Imagine if it was 10 cent beer magfest. Can any of you imagine a situation that might occur at such a night that might prevent a game of baseball from can tell, oh, look what happened. The audience like attacked the players like the players had to form this like ring with baseball bats like both teams defending each other trying to get the hell out of doubt. You go to a baseball game nowadays and like there'll be a drunk two drunk guys way up in the top level and they'll have a fight and security will take them out right but imagine if like half the stadium was that guy. So what happened here? Basically, this happened. The police were like, we can't get anywhere near that. And they just left. So the umpires were like, uh, yeah, you know what? This game can't continue based on the rules of baseball. The home team forfeits away team wins at the home team's fault for not controlling their stadium, right? And their audience so they lose. So baseball has rules about that. If the game cannot be continued, there is an official specific way to determine who won if the game could not be continued. And in fact, the rules are interesting. So if you win a game like this or lose a game like this, the stats like how many hits, how many pitch strikes, pitches, all that stuff are as they were when the umpires decided the game was beyond the event horizon where it couldn't return to a playable state. The scores recorded for historical purposes as nine to zero. So because it's almost like when you're writing code, like you write a function, it has an output. If your function fails, it still has to have the expected output. So the rest of the season of baseball will work as intended. So you can't just have this game that returns a null pointer exception. If I want to find out what the score was because some future term we use like gold, like gold differential, I'm gonna hack. They use some sort of metric using those numbers. This game has to have all the stats that a full game would have had. It's nine to zero because there are nine innings. If you play high school baseball that has seven innings, it's seven to zero. They think about these things. Use like six innings in high school. I think it's seven. Pretty sure. I don't like baseball. I don't. So what about a single player game, like you're playing doom at home? You can just quit whenever the hell you want. No one cares. No other people involved, whatever. I'll win later. The only consequences I quit so cool. I gotta go eat lunch. I'll play again some other time. Yeah. Overwatch Quick Play. This happens a lot. We'll talk a lot about Overwatch in this panel. That's the game rooms playing. So he's gonna make every example with that. So in Quick Play, the game can I mean, Diva, I play this game a lot. You can just continue because what the game does is it finds some poor sucker who's solo queuing and says, Hey, this game where someone quit, we're gonna throw you into the middle of it and everyone's gonna hate you and it's going to be miserable. Good luck. Have fun. But the other team usually doesn't notice at most. They think, wow, that Diva that was really giving me trouble isn't here anymore. All right, I guess they just switched to that garbage Hanzo. Cool. All right, so in a lot of games, right, you know, this would be a problem, right? So in Counter Strike, if someone leaves, like they don't really replace them. And it's like you're in big trouble, right? In Left 4 Dead, you get the situation where, you know, people quit the losing team. And now the losing team is disadvantaged. And then random people join the losing team because they're on the losing team, they quit and basically have one team that people keep joining and leaving and it keeps losing forever. And the other team sticks together because they keep winning against this nothing team. And then they win more and more and more. Well, anyone who decides I'll play some Left 4 Dead joins this like miserable team of horrible cocktails. And so it's some maybe miraculous thing happens and four good people join the other team simultaneously and manage to get a win. And then the other team starts losing people in that right. But casual games, if it's not like a super competitive thing, they'll do stuff like that like backfill those put another player and they'll lose something so that even if the game is suspect, like the team that won or lost might not be the most skilled team that should have won or lost. But the game does continue with the minimal impact of the other players. But in competitive, where like stats matter and like it's a serious game, that doesn't fly. So they need to have like all these really specific rules about like if a player quits, you it's going to count as a loss for you. But you are welcome to quit because that other player quit like you don't have to play this losing game. You are allowed to continue it because maybe you're so good like you might still win like it gives you that option. But it is explicit what is going to happen. It doesn't hide it is you don't wonder where that Hanzo went. You know that Hanzo quit right Rocket League does something pretty similar right? It's like someone leaves your team and it's like, okay, someone left your team. It wasn't you are going to punish them for just leaving the serious game or semi-serious game, you know, but you can quit if you want to without penalty. But if the other people if you still win, okay, you still win, you know. Carcassonne little board game, a lot of your friends playing this this convention. Carcassonne turns out okay, like if someone quits, you can get no official rules on the rule book about quitting. Technically, it's like, got to put an S for us next to it. But because the game is structured in such a way, you can actually deal with someone quitting pretty elegantly if you want to know it depends on how skilled players are if you're like not super competitive about this game, just keep going. Just that other player just they don't take any more actions and it'll work out fine. Like the game will be fine. It means that any player who stays in the game is going to get a few more tiles because that, you know, they say there are five players you each get 20% of the tiles. If someone leaves, you're not going to get 25% of the remaining tiles. So if you were an advanced player who say was building a smaller set of structures because you knew how many tiles you get because you like, you know the odds, suddenly like that ruins the game for you. So if you're like super competitive, game over quit. But if you're just playing this for fun, you can just keep playing. It totally works out. Yeah. So that does raise another interesting question of the third question you have to ask isn't just going to winner be determined because yeah, we can determine a winner in all these situations. But does that win counts? I would not count any win in any game I played where 100% of the roles weren't followed. But that is me. You might not care that much. But I want to put that little asterisk next to my name in the Hall of Fame. If I lose a game because it's a bunch of Hanzos keeps cycling. It also depends count for what, right? It's like, does it count enough that I can brag to my friends that I beat them that one time and they'll say, no, no, no, someone quit that game that game. It's like, whatever, you didn't really right? And can I become the world champion of carcassone? It's like, no, no, you can't. It needs to be much more strict. And according to the rules in order for you to be the world champion of carcassone, we got to replay that game or do something. Right. So a better question to ask, especially if you're a game designer, isn't does the win count? But was the game satisfying? The players at the end when a score is determined, are they okay with that? Do they feel like the game was still worth playing? Or are they just angry that you ruined the game by quitting on them? Right. There are a lot of times like the carcassone, right, where you could play the game and someone quit, but you all kept playing with the remaining tiles. And that person's final score was just the score they had when they left, right? And it's like, you finished the game, you played it. And it's like, that could be a satisfying game finish. It's like, you're not upset by that unless you really, really care about that, like astras. Right. And it's like, you still had a fully enjoyable game that you began middle and ended. So what's the problem? Yeah. So some more examples now thinking about those questions. Some complicated four hour long board game. Because of all these fiddly little bits here and because the game is so complex, if Jo Jo Jo quits the game two hours in, there is basically no way to recover from that at all. You can't just ignore that player because suddenly like, say like Jo Jo is between the two of us and it's a giant map. The two of us are going to move in on that dead player's territory. Meanwhile, someone else who's not near that empty territory doesn't have that opportunity. They weren't just handed like all this territory for me. Right. So that's like, that's not fair at all. It just totally messes. There's no way the game can continue. Like all these numbers, all the numbers of things that go around are determined by the number of players. So like that's all messed up now. The game's getting at a weird point. And even worse, say you find a friend who also knows the rules of this game and says, Oh, I'll take over for that player with carcassone. That's totally fine. You can sit down at a carcassone game at any point, look at the board and after a minute have a good sense of what the strategy was. Good luck figuring out what Joey Jojo was trying to do in this game. It'll take you hours to figure out the state of the game, because you weren't learning it turn by turn for the last two hours. Maybe you were really friendly with the player who left, like an alliance. And now this new player is like someone you're not so friendly with. And they're like, they want to attack you. And it's like, Oh, great. That thing that I had, I had moved my strategy to not attack him. And all my ships are over here. And now suddenly that is changed randomly into an aggressor. And my ships are out of position. Yeah. Or like, you know, you know Joey Jojo sucks at the game. And you're like, you're banking on that. And suddenly Scott takes over for sure, Jojo. And now you're in trouble. How to long form RPG? That's our D&D group from like 15 years ago. I've been using this picture for over a decade. I don't know if they know. I've told most of those people are here. Yeah, most of these people are at this Megfest. But the two people at the bottom, that's Scott out there, don't have hair anymore. Anyway, so you know, this really depends on like the kind of game you got going on, right? Maybe you got like a tight group, and you've got like the minimum number of players and you lose someone. Now you don't have enough players to form the party and you it's hard to continue because it's really boring to play an RPG with like a GM and like one or two people, right? You need three hopefully four is really good, right? Now even down to three is sketchy. And that could be a problem. You know, maybe this player, maybe you can write them out of the story, like, oh, they died, that you can get their character out of there. That's not really much of a problem. But what if their character was like, the focus of the quest that you were on, like, you know, you're it's final fantasy and like, you know, the magical girl who was the whole important thing in the story. Oh, she's gone. It's like, what? That there's no reason for us to continue on this quest without that person. And because you make them an NPC and the GM takes care of them. But then because you've played this game over so long, like there's a lot of investment. If anyone takes over a character in something like that, or even in a city game, even a competitive game, like I'm playing a like year long civilization game with giant multiplayer robot, like, I just got communism, like stuff started really heat up in this game. If someone else joins that game, the narrative shift suddenly like suddenly someone like the DM is not going to play that magical girl the same way the first person was so the person who quit will now possibly be mad at you for ruining the row C, like social consequences occur. What about raid games? What about wow? You got a wild group. You've got in people to play the raids. And then one of those people quits. Well, it's fine if it's just some sort of like hanger on who's like barely contributing, right? But it's like, the healer is gone. We cannot continue. What do we do? Right? We have a whole team of people and everyone's got a role and one of the people is gone and we can't find a replacement. But it also if I think about this long term, once you've lost that person, you can't keep doing the gaming you were doing up to this point. So you do a raid every weekend, you got your team, your friends, your fun. And suddenly someone just quits on that because I have a baby or get married or something done like that. Then now you've got to what are you going to like audition healers, which yeah, that's kind of what people do like the audition people join the red group sometimes. But like it could disrupt your routine of playing games as opposed to disrupting an individual instance of a game like this is wrecked people's summers. I mean, you know, this can happen outside of games too, right? All right, we're going to go on a road trip and the person with the driver's license quit. And this is probably the most interesting part of this panel. Why do people quit games? Because you can boil these down to a pretty small set of categories. Primarily, the games not that interesting to them. They're bored for some reason. Right, you know, maybe people had an idea of what the game was going to be when they started, you know, they people, you know, people's feelings change based on the world, right? You know, things can happen over the course of play to where make they decided to play at the beginning. They said, I'm playing this, they start playing. And then during the game at some point, it's like they do not want to continue because they don't feel like it. They're not enjoying themselves. They're upset, maybe about something else who knows. Maybe they're not they're not winning, or they don't feel like they could win. And there isn't anything interesting for them to do, like the mechanical actions in the game are boring to them unless they have a chance of winning. Maybe it's your friend who's really into like Shake Eek. And Marge here is like, Oh man, we're going to play Shake Eek and she's really into it. She never played Shake Eek before. She doesn't know. And culturally, like, like you've been in this boat, you've been in a game that's boring and you keep playing out of social obligations. How freeing would that be to just walk away from the table and let them deal with it? You can be in the arcade in five minutes at MagFest, or you're in the four hour game of Eclipse that you realize is actually going to take six hours because Joe Joe Joe won't take his turret. Now maybe you're a jerk for just leaving, but maybe they're a jerk for making you stay when you don't want to play, right? Who knows? You've got to calibrate like your bail threshold in life, not just in games, but in life. I bail and like like there's a gust of wind. I'm out. I'm done this game. I'm not playing this game. Like a feather will move a little bit, rims like I click. The game just goes down too long and now your candy's gone. Right. So sometimes when this happens, it's because the game is just longer than you thought it would be from the beginning, especially when friends lie and say, oh, cavern again, it takes like a half hour to play, or maybe the game does take a half hour to play and the people playing it are slow, right? But another thing that can happen is a lot of games, the one that most people would understand was B monopoly where the game is over, but it's not officially over, right? It's like someone's got all the properties and all the hotels, but not if the game officially ends when everyone else is bankrupt. So you're going to have to sit there for another hour rolling dice just to find out what you already knew, which is the person who had hotels all over the board is going to win. You didn't but you couldn't declare them the winner, right? Yeah, some games get this right. The best example being tennis where if you're playing tennis, you have a chance to win. And as soon as you have no chance to win, it's match point and someone scores the match point. The game ends immediately. So if you're playing, you can win. And if you're not playing, you can't win. There's a lot of games where you could be playing them and it's not officially over, but effectively you have already lost, but you're still sitting there playing and it's going too long, right? The game should end as soon as only one person can win. And sometimes it ends up being extrinsic. Like you wouldn't necessarily quit the game, but your friends that's going to take an hour, they're taking turns real slow. It takes an hour and a half. And you've got to be at like the Nidhog tournament in 10 minutes and you just have to leave. The game is not what you expected. Your friends are like, this is going to be a mech battling German style game. And it ends up being this BSE diplomacy game. It's kind of incisive. Yeah, that game is not good. But yeah, there's tons of games out there where on the surface look like one thing, but are actually another thing. A lot of people get fooled by themes of games, which I have managed to not be fooled by that. We're like, they'll look at a game and be like, Oh, it's the Mega Man game. I love Mega Man. I'll play that game. But it's like a garbage game. It just happens that pictures of Megamans plastered onto it. Right? You know, it's like they get fooled into thinking it's something they're going to like. And then once they play it, they learn the reality, which is it's something that they don't like. So, you know, when games falsely advertise or cover themselves up with like fancy art that doesn't represent what the game actually is, this happens a lot. So rather than finish the game, you might want to quit it early once you have learned and seen the truth with your own eyes. The game is unfair or the game is perceived to be unfair. No one wants to play against cheaters. If you're playing hockey and you suspect that like the other teams stuck an extra puck out and like did some nonsense, you're not going to come back on the ice. You're just going to go home. Yeah, there's no point in someone to get someone else's aim body like the suspect who I suspect is embodying. I think the three wall headshots, the four wall headshots. Right. So, you know, you but why what's the point of playing with this person? But it isn't one. You might as well just quit if you can't kick them out. Right. But there are other times where someone's not cheating, but it's still just pointless. Right. If I was going to play basketball against Michael Jordan or LeBron, you don't need to cheat. They don't need to cheat perfectly following the rules of basketball. I would never touch the basketball. It would just put right. It would be up there somewhere and I would be like right. And that would be they'd put it in the basket and I would do nothing. Right. And there's no point in me playing against them. It's not like I'm going to suddenly grow a foot taller and be able to compete. It's not like I'm suddenly going to get twice as strong and be able to compete. It's just not going to happen no matter how hard I try. So better off to do something else with my time. Now in serious competition, this is an extra problem because you're competing. So you actually care about the outcome of the game, win or lose. So if you feel like someone has an unfair advantage and this will especially happen in eSports when there's a glitch and there isn't a rule to handle the glitch. So like right now, there's a problem in Overwatch where there's two maps where you can get outside of the map and just have a grand old time and kill the other team whenever you want. It's not clear officially whether or not that is allowed because I'm pretty sure if there's a serious tournament, they'd be like anyone who leaves the map, your team loses that match, right? It's like just don't do it. Yeah, or they would patch it if it's an official. It'll get patched, I assume pretty quick. But you're not going to play against someone who is cheating because you don't want to legitimize the outcome of that game. Right. Often you'll see in not an amateur or, you know, less than the top tier of competition, people put in mercy rules, right to sort of enforce the quitting like, okay, make it stop, right? The suspect wasn't cheating and the other people can't even compete. It's like, all right, we're not going to make you keep playing. It's just over. But there's also a more weird problem that you'll see, especially in on on play, where you are playing the game and the other players are beating you and you think they're cheating because you just actually really suck at the game. And it's not that you recognize like, oh, Michael George is way better than me. Like you think he is cheating. You believe that you would be him, but he is breaking some rule of physics, I guess, and clipping through the walls. And like whatever it is that he's doing. And I've been kicked when I used to play Counter-Strike back when I was young enough to move my mouse that fast to get my corners. Like I would play Counter-Strike semi-competitively and I would get kicked from servers for cheating because I got too many headshots. I wasn't doing that. I was just playing. And that happens. That's actually kind of a problem. That's this is the technical term in the industry. You know, we talked just now about people sort of, you know, being upset and wanted to quit because they were being like destroyed, right? The other people are much better than them and they were losing, right? But there are many other reasons that you might have the butthurt rage, even if you're a competition is weaker than you or equal to you, you know, it has nothing to do with them, right? For example, maybe there's a lot of random things in the game and just one of the random things just bites you and it's nothing broke. It's just like you drew a really bad card in a card game where the dice came up snake guys and it's just like, what's the point in life? Why don't even try? Why don't I put all this effort in? If it all came down to this stupid dice roll that ruined me, right? You're just mad. And these are the situations where quitting is actually probably the best case scenario for that player because now they're gone and you don't have to deal with them. You can play a new game. But this is also the level where players will lash out. They may not quit, but just grief the game. They will say, you know what? I'm gonna make Scott win because if you all and just take actions to make Scott win, to make the game unsatisfying, hoping that you will quit because you suck or they'll mess up the state of the game so that you can't continue. You can't even calculate the score. It can happen a lot in games of diplomacy, right? If people just decide to gang up on you, right? And it's just like now you're mad because it's like everyone just ganging up on you. So like you're upset about that. If you take it personally, not just as a game thing, right? You know, there's many, many reasons that people with, you know, even people who don't have anger issues might get mad and not want to play a game anymore because of things that happened in it. So there's a story. We've talked about this on other panels. We'll talk about it a little bit in the panel during tomorrow too. But there's a gentleman and his friends. Their goal was to get his name again. I don't even remember. He plays Hamzoh. Hamzoh spelled wrong. His overwatch goal was to be the lowest ranked player in the world. He's losing on purpose. But he's losing on purpose while trying to give the appearance of trying really hard to win. And he wrote this is great like interview and essay of like all the like situations that occurred. But he talked a lot about there's this area in like the bottom third, like not the bottom bottom of people who like don't know diva can fly, but like in this middle zone of people who he said they are quote the angriest people in the world. Right. They know how to play the game. Right. It's like they're not like someone who's like playing Mario and doesn't know that Mario can fly with the tail. Right. It's like they understand the game. They don't have to control the game. They're competent. They just suck. Like their aim is bad. They don't move and shoot at the same time. You know, they don't have the techniques. They just have the competency. Right. And they feel like they should be good at the game because they know what the hell they're doing. They understand the rules and they're they're trying hard, but they're not improving at all because I guess I think they might improve. They had coaching that would teach them technique, but some people are just unsalvageable. Maybe or maybe they're just bad at learning. Who knows there's something with those people, right? And they they're so angry because they feel like they better than they are. And their score and rank does not reflect what they feel their ranks should be based on what they know because they don't know what they don't know. And it's extra hurtful to them because these ranks are mathematically determined and pretty reasonably objective. So the game says you're this rank, you're that rank like you might be a little better or a little worse, but you're down there. And it just so happens that like the middle third of the left side of the bell curve is where all of those people are. That's like the sweets like is the opposite of the sweet spot. And it's a very specific situation. They feel entitled to winning. And they don't understand why they're not winning. They feel like they're better at the game than they are. They don't understand the actual heuristics of the game. And they're not getting better. There's not much you can do about these people like I don't know what to do about matchmaking actually makes them matter. But people are likely to quit is the point, right? Yeah, it's when you're in that situation, quitting becomes a thing that's going to happen. You know, you're going to want to quit more because you're not getting the results you expect based on your perceived performance. And that is going to make you more mad than say someone who's really good and loses because that person knows why they lost because they can see what's going on, right? And you know, or some of us just so bad they know they're bad or barely understands the game, right? Doesn't have this sort of idea like, oh, yeah, I suck out of it. Like once you get beyond that part of the bell curve, like there's this good humor and fun of like, yeah, we're all bad at this game, but we're trying. We'll make it some day. So talking about real life, yes, games are 100% extrinsic to reality, except that there's racist shitbags all over the Internet and they show up in your games. Yeah. So you don't need to play with them. But at the same time, this is a huge reason why people quit games. I quit Overwatch games. If someone's being weirdly sexist, weirdly racist or important first, but then I quit the game, like I won't play with those people. We'll talk a little about mitigating this later, but this is a real and serious reason why people quit games. And it's one of the few reasons quit games is actually pretty justified. Like you should never have to tolerate that kind of crap playing a game. Right. It's like people sort of have this obligation, whether it's like a board game in person or a video game that like, you know, without one of those other reasons we've talked about or we'll talk about soon, you know, it's like they feel like they should keep playing a game to the end. You started the game, you're somewhat obligated to finish it. But it's like, wouldn't it be much better if any time there was someone who was bad, if we just quit the game and now those people couldn't find anyone to play with? It's like to punish them, right? Why should we reward them by providing them the fun of having friends to play with? That's not a person that should have friends. Right. So they're playing a game. Just quit it. Just right force them to be alone. If you're sitting at a table in magfest and you're playing friends, you know, games with some magfest people who I hope I don't think any magfest people should be like this. But in case there is just everyone get up and walk away. Right. Don't let them have fun. They don't deserve it. Stopping points. Sometimes you'll quit a game because you're just invested in the game, you're playing it, you're doing your thing and you lose track of time that serotonous is rushing through your brain and you're just like, you know, you'll play literally forever. But then the game gives you a cue that says, okay, like it pauses, you back away for a second and you remember you're in the real world and you look and see the clock or like you look and see your friends and you're like, all right, I live in a real world and maybe I could do something different because no one quits a game suddenly. No one quits a game. You're literally not playing doom. And in the middle of fighting a cyberdeam, you're just like, fuck it and just turn the game off and go to battle. Right. You kill the cyberdeam and you pull the exit switch and it goes, and then you're like, all right, good. I can save the game here. There's two kinds of stopping points. Extrinsic stopping points are outside of the game. It's time for dinner. This panel is over. It's time for magfest. Yep. The bus is coming. There's a reason why I need to pee in civilization games. That's why I quit that panel early a little while ago. In civilization games, there's an option to put our real world clock just in the game. So you don't forget. I guess a lot a lot of games lately are including the real world clock because they're PC games, especially because the PC games will cover up your windows clock. You're not using the Mac to play games. You know, like hardstone puts the clock in the corner, even on the iPad, it puts the clock in the corner, right? Civilization puts it in the top, right? And I love this. This is great because you can easily forget, especially the longer the game is, what the hell time it is because you're not looking at anything else. When I used to play Sims 2, like more than once, I would look out the window like, what's that light? I would literally see Dawn approaching. Not good. And I mean, it's more serious than you think, right? There are people, especially like in countries with a more net cafe kind of culture who like have died or have serious health issues from sitting there for too long and a clock may have saved them, maybe. Or like, you know, life comes at you fast. Like Father Town was undefeated. Eventually, you're going to stop playing a game that you might quit the long form. Like people who play any sport will eventually be too old to play that sport. I'm already too old to play Overwatch and Counter-Strike. I pretty much can't play a real time game seriously and competitively anymore, even though I was doing the best at Quick 1 yesterday. But you were crushing me a lot. Not against anyone who's any good. But like I'm old. I'm like going to be 34, 35, right? So my arm cannot aim good. Now this is more like high level meta. This isn't like quitting an instance of a game. This is like quitting the game itself. Like I will never play Civilization again. I'm tired of spending money on these magic cards. I'm not playing this anymore. Yep. I'm 40 and I'm a human and I'm playing hockey. There have been humans who played hockey after 40. I'm 50 years old. I can't keep playing these Pokemon games. It's just too creepy. It was okay when I was 40. But 50? But it's nothing in the game prompts you. Real life rings the bell and says it's time. Injured and stopping points. You play Doom until you die or you see that screen. And that is a hundred percent. All the way. I found this screenshot. This is not me. It could be. So games, especially single player games, especially in earlier eras where people didn't put as much rigor into studying games, games were sort of designed to be addictive by accident. Right. I mean, you can view quitting as like a problem to solve, right? If you were the maker of a game, you know, or someone who's trying to get people to play a game, like for the GM and people are quitting on you. That's a problem you're trying to solve. You want to prevent quitting, right? So you're still like slipping cocaine into their drinks, right? So here's one of the first and earliest ways that game video game designers at least tried to prevent quitting, which is, you know, to warn people like, Hey, are you sure you want to quit babies? Oh, you suck so much. Are you sure you don't suck? Oh, OK, you suck. Go up, go back to that DOS prompt, sucky man. Anyone know what game this is from? Yes. OK, good. So modern games do this on purpose. They will strain along rewards to get you to keep playing. It's like, right, you just leveled up. That could be a stopping point. You just got to level. But hey, you know, let me tell you about this quest. You might want to go on. I'll give you like mad exp if you go on this quest right now. Yeah, it's a limited time quest. I don't know if you come back later. I'm going to be here. You know, this is how I do. You did just level up and you got a loot box. But you've got a bunch of experience now toward the next level. And we're during the winter event. So if you get another loot box, it's a special loot box. And by the way, you're getting 20 percent more exp because you are playing consecutive games. My solution to this is I don't open loot boxes and my friends hate me for it. How many unopened loot boxes do you have? I have 24 unopened loot boxes right now. Is that a lot? That's a seem like a lot. When it gets like the thousands, that's when you should be in Hearthstone. I opened a few winter ones because I wanted in Hearthstone. I do the quests every day and I don't spend the gold. I said like mountains of gold. I can have so much gold. But you've got to recognize that there are like this like the clock and survive. If you were a naive game designer or an evil game designer, you would not include that clock. You want player. You would think the heuristic of my game is good is my players play it longer. He played it until death. It's a real good game. Or you might be evil and literally be thinking if I get them addicted to this free to play game, I can extract money from them later. So what do you do about quitters? Like we just talked about two ways to do so. Don't prevent them from quitting. But no, it is the solutions to quitters like if someone has already quit, then what do you do? Yeah. So one, you mitigate it. So there's a lot of ways to do this. And the idea, the reason I use the word mitigation is very specific because like in DevOps or like IT or like production operations out there in engineering, mitigation is the idea that there are problems or errors or mistakes that are guaranteed to occur eventually. At some point, so things will happen and we can't prevent them from happening. That'd be prevention and we can't completely erase the consequences. But we can diminish the consequences as much as possible. So what will we do and how we do it? You mitigate the damage. Carcassonne, we talked about before, does this in a bunch of ways like the game can kind of just continue. If you're playing it online, it can just throw an AI in to take over the players. You just keep playing the game exactly as it was. That's not a perfect solution, but it's kind of it's a mitigation, right? It's like, all right, you know, the AI, the game's sort of going still good. But you do something. You have escalating punishment to prevent people from doing it. So in Overwatch, if you quit a game, it's like, fine, you can leave. But if you keep quitting games, if they even casual games, it'll eventually be like yo, you've quit a lot of games. So if you quit this one that you're trying to quit right now, we're taking away all those loot boxes. You're getting a 75 percent XP penalty until we see fit to let you have that back. That is a terrifying screen. And you will occasionally find people on Reddit who see it for the first time and panic. And it will eventually it's almost like hitting someone to prevent them from doing something. So they'll be afraid of being hit in the future. Proportional punishment is different. Quitting a quick play game. Yeah, they only punish you if you do it all the time, quitting a competitive game ruins an hour for everybody. So if you quit competitive games, they ruin your life. They will eventually spend it in competitive play up to receiving a ban for the entire season. All right. Yeah, I guess. If you really want to play this game, they'll suspend you and then they'll ban you. Right. If you I guess if you quit, you better be quitting the game for good. Like I'm just not playing Overwatch anymore. And then you will care about this penalty. Yep. De facto graceful exits. Like we said with Carcassonne, Factory Fun is another great example of this. This game just mechanically the way it's designed. If one or two or three as long as at least one player has not quit, the game is literally unaffected by this. You can just keep playing. There is no mechanical effect to that. Right. And this is any the best games that do this games do this the best are the games that are effectively races, right? Where players are independently doing something that doesn't really interact with each other very much, right? Like a thing about an actual foot race. If someone said just stops running, I was like, fuck it. Doesn't affect everyone else. Right. It's who's the fastest runner. If everyone quits. OK, that one person who didn't quit wins. Great. You know, this is a lot of board games and other video games that are effectively just races. Like who can get the most points and you're not really doing anything to each other. And if someone just decides to stop playing, it's like, I guess they didn't get the most points. Unless maybe they're bad ass and they got the most points and they quit and everyone else keeps running, but they still win. So much more difficult and it is hard to find real examples of this. Did you're a or did you're quitting? I fold. Meaning you are allowed for the rules of the game to quit the game either within like a round or an action in the game or quit the entire game. And the rules cover that. Yeah, I'm just going to take my money and cash out because the rules here don't say you can quit, but you effectively can quit the rules of poker are I can just leave the table in the casino with my money if I want to. And that is fine. Now the tournaments are different. You can't you can't just walk away from the poker tournament and keep your money. Yeah, they take your money. Yeah, but but you can quit playing and you can fold a hand. In general, if you're reading the rules, especially to a tabletop game and you see specific rules for if a player quits, that is probably a very well designed game because it is so extremely rare that even pro game designers consider this possibility. I was hard pressed to find examples and most of the examples I asked like some listeners and friends like, can you come up with examples? Almost every example they gave me did not actually have rules. They just mistakenly thought it had rules because they've done it before and it worked. But the rules didn't say anything about it. Some games will do this on like a whole game level like a glory to room the Chateau game. There's a rule in the book that says at any time, if all of the players unanimously agree that one of the players has won the game, you can stop right then and then so you could just vote to say, yeah, this is over. And it's like you could just do that in any game. You could be playing the game of life and just like, do we decide that Scott wins? Yeah. OK, we're done, right? Scott wins and then I will win. But it doesn't say that in the rules. Just putting something in the rules makes a huge difference, right? Look at something like, you know, Harstow has the concede button, which basically just says, I lose you win, right? It's but just making that official whereas rather than like making people disconnect or kill themselves like makes such a huge difference. People quit and concede all the time. It's like, you're supposed to concede. It's just like, yeah, I concede all over the place because they made it official. It's totally cool. Like no one's like too much conceding going on here, right? But if they didn't have that button and people were just like closing down their games and doing other things to quit, people like, oh, we got a rage quitting problem going on. Yeah, just like making it official and not, you know, giving someone the win, everything's all good. This is also important back to that harassment thing. If you give someone an official like approve, like this is a socially OK thing to do option. It's an escape hatch for someone who wants to quit a game because horrible people are playing with them. But if it were, say, overwatch, there's no like official way to do it. Like you're the jerk who quit the game. Even though it's not true, it allows a false equivalency of you did something bad and they did something bad. If there's an official way to quit, you did nothing wrong and no one can fault you. Some games kick you out if you're doing too bad. It's not necessarily quitting, right? That's being eliminated. But it's a player who probably would quit or if they didn't quit, they wanted to quit. They're bored. Right. The other thing is that a game that has rules for player elimination, you can almost always use those rules for quitting as well. You just say, oh, you quit. We're going to do the same thing to you that would happen if you got eliminated. Right. If someone destroys all your pieces on the board and access now lies, then this happens to you. So if you want to quit a game of access now, I just remove all your pieces from the board and we'll follow the, you know, these other rules. You're basically preemptively rage quitting someone before they realize they're mad because like monopoly, you're mad because you know you can't win, but the game's going on forever and your friends won't just end it. But if monopoly is like, yeah, dog, you can't win. You are free to leave this table and enjoy the rest of your life. How good does that feel? In Age of Steam, I played it once. I made it to like the third turn and then I didn't have any money. So it just made me stop playing. I was eliminated the next turn. Right. It's just like, oh, you're done. And it didn't make me continue to play the remaining 10 turns of the game and a game I couldn't win. Incentives. So again, back to Overwatch. Overwatch gives you all these incentives to keep playing the game, even if you're losing and it sucks. If you play to the end, you're going to get all that experience from the game to get the loot boxes. You get the loot box by losing? Yeah, you get you get experience points every game, whether or not you win or lose. You just get more if you win. So there is a reason to keep playing. There's a reason to keep trying because you also want to show up here. It feels great when it shows up here and says, yeah, you did the best healing. Yeah, you were the coolest dude. Yeah, you were Reaper or whatever. So it's just that. And some games do it even just with fun stuff like Super Meat Boy, it might be 4 AM. You really want to go to bed, but you know that if you beat the level, you get to see the 10,000 Meat Boys that failed coalescing into the one Meat Boy who lived. You really want to see that it gives you an incentive to not quit. This is relatively recent. This type of thing. They've been getting better at it. Yeah. But basically, yeah, instead of, you know, look at the penalties, the other games we're using, like, oh, we're going to give you less XP, we're going to ban you from playing the game because you rage quit too much. It's like, we're going to change your profile icons. Everyone knows that you suck and you keep quitting when you're losing. It's like, the thing is, it's really understandable for a street fighter because, like, street fighter fight doesn't take too long. It's real fast. So if you're quitting one of those, it's like, really, you couldn't sit there for the extra 30 seconds for the guy to finish up the last half of your health bar. You're going to just stand still and let him do a combo on you. It's because some games are poorly designed, like old Mario Kart on the DS. If you quit, it didn't really count as a loss. So if you had a good record, you just quit any match you're losing immediately. That is true. In the Blizzard games and Rocket League stuff, when you quit, it counts as you lose, right? You know, when you push concede in Hearthstone, you don't win. Yeah. It's the same as if you lost. But with street fighter, we know, like Scott said, it's 30 seconds. You're not quitting because you're bored. If you get bored in the last 10 seconds of the game, like there's something else going on in your brain or life that is a problem. You're quitting because they the thing they should do is that when you quit, it counts as you lose or do that. Or they're quitting because they don't want to give you the winner the satisfaction. They're basically flipping the table as much as they can. They're ragequitting and it's like the most they can do to flip you off because they can't actually chat to you usually. Like they're doing it to hurt you. Now, a lot of people, whenever this comes up, the same thread appears everywhere. And the thread basically is people saying, but but but my internet connection sucks. So like I'll get knocked out of games and I didn't want to quit. And it's not my fault. And I say tough luck. That's right. Because internet connection is so bad, you can't play these games nicely anyway. You can't have a good experience for yourself, right? A game that needs a constant internet connection. So don't bother playing it because it's not good for you. Go play something else. There's not going to be a constant pain in the butt. And also by you, even even if you're not doing it intentionally, if you're constantly disconnecting or your ping is bad, you're ruining the game for your teammates, right? You're even ruining the game for your opponents because they have a substandard, you know, opponent they're up against, right? You are hurting the game. It doesn't matter if it's intentional or your internet is bad because you live in a really bad place or just bad that day. So yeah, we're going to punish you. You shouldn't you should be want you to not be in this game, right? And just have people with good internet connections playing. This is from a game design perspective. You're trying to keep the health of the game itself to a high level. You're trying to make the experience good for people. So regardless of why another player is making that experience bad or poor for the other players, you need to eliminate that player or eliminate those behaviors or your game is going to be bad. And also that's really just an excuse, right? Most people who say this are about usually rage-quitting 90% of the time. And like, how often does your internet really take you out of a game? Not often, right? If your internet is normal. And it was the last sudden sentence. Matt. Oh, you want to read this? I hope there's sufficiently robust code in this up. I'll read it in the proper voice. I hope that there is sufficiently robust code in this update to make reasonably reliable decisions. This guy totally risked Fedora on whether a disconnect is intentional or whether just due to an actual network issue. Obviously, someone who quits the game is easy to detect. But I'd hate to see them also treat someone who loses internet connection goes down to the what? Goes down the same. Yeah, we're saying we should treat someone who's internet connection goes down the same as someone who quits on purpose. He even knows. Yes, I know this means some people could still rage quit by purposely dropping their internet connection. It's you. It's you. You will literally see a paragraph almost identical to this as the first comment on every article on the entire internet about shaming people or punishing people for rage quit. Matchmaking, I realized after the fact, I could have made this a loss at it and I feel like I'm going to right. So so matchmaking goes back to what I was talking about before with like LeBron and Michael Jordan, right? Is like a matchmaking in a game is not good. You can often be up against opponents who you shouldn't be up against and make the game on fun, even though the game is otherwise not a problem, right? So Hearthstone has this problem where they derank everyone at the beginning of the season and you go in there and the sum you're like ranked 20 and some legend guy comes through and he's got all these crazy fucking cards and you're like, well, I pay this for free and I have like one legendary card and whoa, look at that. I don't know what the hell that is and I lose. Why did I play this? Now there are objective or at least reasonably objective and mathematical ways to calculate skill in different games. Like these are graphs from a paper talking about Microsoft true skill. You can just implement true skill in your game. Like you can use the math that other people have done to balance and matchmaking your game. Almost every game that has matchmaking out there where your rank goes up and down Rocket League and everything. They're all using Microsoft true skill or some variation of Microsoft true skill. They basically all read the same mathematical paper and tweaked it a bit for their game specifically. Now there's an interesting problem here because good matchmaking will prevent a lot of rage quitting and boredom and fears of cheaters and all this nonsense. But perfect matchmaking actually makes players very unsatisfied with games because if matchmaking was 100% magically perfect you will never experience getting better at the game ever. Right. So my skill is going up but now I'm playing against different people but they're all whoever I'm playing against is always just about as good as I am which means I'm going to win about half the time. Always. I'm never going to suddenly get like a ton of wins. Right. That doesn't happen because I'm always playing against people who are about as good as me. I'm never playing as people weaker than me which means I'm not going to just roll them over and they're playing as people way better than me and I'm not going to get bowled over myself. It's always like this 50% win rate. So even though your skill is going up you're getting the same amount of wins all the time but you don't feel like you're getting better. If you compare this to something like a real professional sports league right one year your team is really good you know suddenly you're on the new way you get traded to the Patriots and you're just like win win win win win win win ah this is so great right you know that the Cleveland Browns are out there going lose lose lose lose lose. Right. It's much and you have to play they have to play each other because it's a league where everyone has to play each other. Now in the old days of baseball people would just like go home all the time there's no matchmaking in baseball. Yeah but like in like olden times baseball in this like professional baseball in the U.S. teams would just be like you know what we're just not going to play against them because they're too good. Screw you. What's the point? Yeah that does not happen anymore. Basically stopped happening after the like 1950s but the solution to that like because if you have that perfect matchmaking you know smurfs people who make a new account so they can play against scrubs it's because they want to feel that experience being new in the matrix. Occasionally when playing Overwatch or Counter-Strike like it won't find a good game and it'll put me with the angriest people in the world from before. I'm just walking around like a god like I choose that you shall die and you shall live and you shall die and oh is that an AWP? I'm just going to walk towards you like Ernest P. Warrell and Ernest goes to camp because I know that you can't actually hit me. Only a few people left at that. So actually good matchmaking causes smurfing which sucks so I can't tell you who does this but there are real game companies where their internal documentation they study this and their actual responses that the matchmaking is made a little bit bad on purpose. They add a fuzziness they will make sure that you will occasionally run into an opponent who is vastly better than you because what that means is you'll get those highs and lows they'll get to see what that looks like. Yup. Right? It's like what does it look like when someone just bulls you over? Oh I see that's what I have to achieve next right? That's the level I have to get to. You can see the future of where you need to go but if you're good it'll also remind you like yeah you feel like you're not good at this game here's you five years ago this is what you're playing against now see they don't know how to make diva fly yet so this literally happens a lot of the games you play the matchmaking will occasionally purposefully grossly mismatch you that isn't just like a flu that is happening on purpose because people study this shit. Anti cheating tools are a big deal I don't think any how many of you played like quake one quake two deathmatch back in the day? When there were no anti cheating tools You could like people cheated all the time constantly and the cheats were ridiculous cheats like oh I just click a few times and everyone dies and I'm invincible and I'm moving too fast I wrote a script in quake two that gave me offhanded grenades what? So I could hit he could be shooting his gun and throwing grenades at the same time it was a script it was like I had the right number of pause statements in there's a whole scripting language in quake two you could bind them to keys I wrote scripts scripts that would do all this nonsense is that cheating? I did it it's in the game yeah it was in the game anti cheating punkbuster appeared and started changing everything basically people started running software on their servers and they would tell you if you want to play on my server that I'm hosting you've got to run the software on your computer and it's going to watch you to see if you're cheating and you started you had to form these clicks like I knew the IP addresses of servers I could join where they had a zero cheater tolerance policy and I could play there safely couldn't play out in the wild all in box nowadays you really can't cheat and cheaters just get banned like blizzard if you cheat at a blizzard game they just take the game away they bang you and that's it and if you appeal it they just kind of laugh so probably even more important are the anti-harassment tools you need to build tools into your game to report and deal with people who are harassing and this is a super complex problem because if people get harassed they'll quit harassers if they get stopped will quit you want one of those populations to quit their game quit your game and you want the other one to not quit your game and you can figure out which one's which and if your whole community all the harassers are there like every single game the person will just quit your game entirely and not just that one match where there was a bad person and then you're losing money and the next time you put out a game or you put out a sequel that person won't buy that game even though they might have liked the game itself because they have this idea of what it's going to be like to play it remember Heroes of New Earth we talked about Heroes of New Earth at a PAX panel a long time ago we talked about the community of that game and there is this one comment in our YouTube channel to this day where someone's like you guys are being really unfair to the community of this game like it's not as bad as you say it is and there's just this thread of people being like ah dude it is literally at the bottom of the internet the problem with these tools is that harassers are also going to use them and they're going to accuse the people they're harassing of the same thing that they're accusing them of right I mean that's at least if you put the tool of simply just user reporting right only right there are other tools that can be used right like just monitoring by the people who run the game you know you could I guess even enough people you could read all the chats and listen to all the voice chats and find the people who are the harassers and ban them joke right and that wouldn't be subject to problems of harassers reporting innocent people much more clever is anti-harassment design designing a game such that no matter how much of a cockbag the person you're playing with is they can't get it on you right the worst that someone can do to you in a game of Hearthstone is say you know threaten push the threaten button you can't talk you can't chat with them right you know they can just use the emotes at you but you can squelch the emotes so now they're shut up and they have to just play and they could let the rope go every turn in which case I'm like oh you're gonna rope me in I'll wait for your rope bring it on yeah right yeah go ahead with that rope you're gonna lose this game you're wasting your time you could just let me win and you can see it anytime you want and then I win so a really subtle example of this in Overwatch if you type certain phrases like ggez like right after you beat a game beat someone you're like ggez it just changes your text to like I'm sorry that I am session antisocial disappointment and the way the community has evolved around that because I like to trash talk like when I'm playing with my friends like that's the thing we do but in Overwatch trash talking sort of evolves where people will say gg like good game as trash talk like they'll say good game a minute before the match ends what happens like yeah it's trash talk like I'm doing it to be kind of a jerk but the action I took is I said good game it's like it's gone through this filter and even if you recognize oh that guy's a jerk and he said it early the thing he said was good game like it's kind of an objective as long as the person doesn't say like you all guys suck and racist slur and sexist slur right as long as they don't say that if they say gg the person on the other end might say oh gg they might not see that sarcasm because it's text on the internet so it really depends on you when you see a text like that if you recognize whether you know do you perceive that and it's like you might even see someone say gg a minute early and think that jerk but really they were just saying gg they put him in they put him in and you just had such a pessimistic view of humanity that you thought that person was a harasser but they weren't so I am the beholder culture so this is a game account does anyone know who Vince Lombardi is I mean we're talking about football enough today okay okay but anyway in the United States especially but I think in the world in general and you know generally in uh you know sexist world right you know quitting is like a bad thing especially for men right men don't quit winners win yeah it's like quitting is like this bad thing like if you're the quitter then you're bad right and I think we've talked today about how you know a lot of reasons like quitting is not bad right but like this culture of like quitting as a bad thing not just a games but like at life it's like oh you should you have your dream you should never give up on it it's like no sometimes you should give up and it's totally cool to give up and it's not a problem and you shouldn't be shamed for giving up and you shouldn't be looked down upon for giving up right quitting is often an intelligent decision and often we should that's something we never do is say good job quitting who says that even though there's a lot of times you should like you see someone like struggling with something that you know they can never do like playing basketball against LeBron when they're only four feet tall and you know it's like they're just suffering and they're not happy and but they just can't quit because they can't quit for cultural reasons right there's a huge pressure to not quit at things in general we should when someone quits intelligently we should be like that was good you should have quit good you should yes good correct good move a counterpoint no one says that is that in within individual games or individual sports the culture of professionalism and sportsmanship could also prevent rage quitters without having these this like over masculine nonsense like for example if you're if you have like a pickup league of hockey maybe you all like you all take it seriously left we're like no one's going to quit the games like everyone's like we're playing this together this is a thing don't quit and that's sort of like that honor code of a sport could prevent quitting you want to encourage that good kind of culture of like this mutually consensual culture around not quitting without making it the sort of obligatory construct that makes people play against racism I think one thing we do see is the sort of sense of like honorable quitting like oh I recognize your mastery right now that's not the master saying good job quitting but you're still like honorably like conceiving like yes you are better than me right like a chess you'll just like knock your king over and be like all right congratulations right or like martial arts you're like all right you have bested me you are the master so where do we go with all this we we literally have two minutes left and the summary of this panel is very simple one quitting games are not real life you can quit games if you can't quit them they're not games if you design games you have to at least consider the idea that someone might quit your game in the middle of it and you have to decide how you want that experience to play out for all involved generally don't quit games like if you commit to a game and you're playing it with people and they don't do something like really racist or sexist or dumb or like like just play the game to the end if it's not going to hurt you because you agreed to it right I mean you think about it like if you're just playing a normal game you think about what quitting is going to do it's going to be like okay you're going to sit there for how much more longer and whether how much fun is it for you but how much of these people who seem to want to play but you can verify you're like hey does everyone still want to play this do you mind if I quit and if they say yeah we really want to continue you know you got a way what's going on but in general don't just quit because rage you know like the rage quitters are punishing them for a reason sometimes quit games if you're if you're sitting down and for a game at magfest and they say it's going to take two hours and you've hit the three hour mark and it's not even halfway done I urge you to quit that game for your own health and sense if you got legit reasons you know even though we shouldn't generally quit you when you got a legit reason you absolutely got to quit nope if you're addicted to a game if a game is having an undo a negative impact on your life you really need to try to recognize that like if someone points out like yo dog you stopped feeding your kids like a month ago and you're just playing overwatch you've been here you've been at that Sibs since like 2 a.m. yesterday you should stop you haven't eaten anything do you even have a hotel room here yeah it's like you know if you need to be able to recognize like even if you're having fun and even if the game is good and you're playing it too much quitting is often a good idea all right and if someone does you know especially in this case if you see someone quit for this reason you need to acknowledge that I'm like good job quitting right yes you should have quit that you know like someone's quit smoking it's a good yes that's a good thing congrats oh no another vaping oh no stop poisoning yourselves gaming culture we are very invested in the idea of never quit a game so we've talked about all this time I urge you if someone is engaging in bad behavior particularly the kinds of bad behaviors that are so endemic in gaming right now quit and tell them why and tell everyone at the table why walk away from that shit because it's hard to find game we have a whole lecture on YouTube you might have to do other things but also do this we have this whole lecture on YouTube about how hard it is to find games because it's so hard to find people to play the games you like with in society like you know like if you're into like Bushido Blade if you find another human being who also likes Bushido Blade you want to play Bushido Blade with them and if it turns out they're really racist don't play Bushido Blade with them even though there's no one else on earth to play with it's better off to just not play Bushido Blade and we're out of time all right we quit would like to see videos of many of these lectures you gotta see rim and a hot dog cause it'll wait like five minutes yeah that's gonna happen too but grab one of these flyers there are links to YouTube videos of many of the panels we have done over time and I'm going to be on the horror sourced panel tonight