 So, after we're done, I do a radio show. Now, you guys, I talk a lot about games. You all play games to win, or at least you think you're playing games to win. We all think we're playing a game that we're trying to win, but I would like to argue that most of you, most of us, most humans, are not actually playing games to win them. We're not actually trying to win. Because if we were really seriously trying to win, we'd win a lot more off of that at about 50% rate than we usually did. Now, I have to warn you, we're going to go to some dark places in this map. I'm going to give you some advice that might induce you friends. I'm going to give you some advice that might take you to a place you really don't want to go. Now, there is no way back. First, the air hockey problem. One of the three bad things that are going to happen to you if you don't leave this room right now. You know that you play air hockey. It's a very popular game in bars in the United States. A little hockey player, it's a two-player game, kind of a sport. He'll like football, those sorts of games. The trouble with air hockey is that it's very fun. I like to play air hockey. But I like to play it, so I kept playing it eventually. I was better than everyone I knew. You might know this situation in Smash Bros. or in Street Fighter. So no one I know will play air hockey with me anymore. Strangers will play with me once and only once. But at the same time, I'm not a pro. I can't go to the World Air Hockey Championships and yes, that is a thing that does exist in our professional air hockey players. If I go there, then he starts showing me how they use the two-finger English group because that's better than the top group they use in the United States and I have no chance. So you will have no one to play games with me anymore. Two, the turn-taking problem. There's a famous German board game designer and once he was asked a question in an interview, the question was basically, how do you get people to take the turn? I play with my friends and they take way too long. They take hours to make their decisions. And the answer he gave on paraphrasing through translation in German was, we slowly start to say to them very calmly, move or I will hit you. And eventually it goes up and we hit him and the problem usually works itself out. Probably from your experience here is that if you follow this advice, you're going to take your turns a lot faster than you used to and you're going to hate every other human being who's ever sitting at a table with you for the rest of the time. I mean, my co-host who's not here is kind of famous for we'll be playing a game. Someone's turn, three seconds have gone by and he's already tapping his foot and then he looks at him like, you, seriously, come on. The matrix problem. Once he starts to really try to win games and you start paying attention to how games work, most games look the same. You're going to look at games, you're going to read the rulebook and you'll already be bored with that game. You'll solve games and be done with them. Seller's Vuitton was one of my favorite games. Until I played it a couple hundred times and I'm literally done with that game. There's no reason for me to ever play it again. In fact, I can tell all of you exactly how to place at least into the semi-models of a Seller's Vuitton tournament just by showing up and following a few simple rules. But something good will happen to you. You will no longer get a gamer. You will get a player of games. There are people who are good at a particular game. I like to say I'm good at counter strikes, but the truth is I'm over 30 and I'm not good at counter strikes. But I'm good at advanced sports. Really good at advanced sports. But many people, if you're a gamer, you're good at one or two games. You're good at your own. You're good at your RTS. You're good at your German game. But very few people are good at games at their core. If you learn how to play German war games very well, you'll also be better at RTSs. You may not be the best, but you'll be better. You'll be better at sports. And you may even be better at life. And a player of games is a book in a science fiction series by Nina Banks and I highly recommend you read it because I'm going to make a lot of references to things in this that many people will not guess. So we keep saying we're a game. And this is a problematic term because the word means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Now, insufferable pence will always go to the dictionary. And I'll pull up this bullshit. So dictionary definitions are completely useless in discussions among technicians, among experts. A normal person talking about games or someone in a classroom might go to the dictionary. But we're gamers. We know about games. We need a specialized lesson. Otherwise, this is a perfectly legitimate point of discussion. So is pedicake a game? Pedicake, the game you play with a child. You clap your hands and you clap. I guess they could fail to execute pedicake. Does that mean that the toddler has lost pedicake? Is pedicake even a game? Can you win it? Can you lose it? Are there even rules? What about Candyland? Candyland, if most people, almost everyone in the world, if you ask them, is Candyland a board game, they will say yes. If you ask them, is this a game, they will say yes. However, players have zero inputs into Candyland. Whether or not you win or lose has no bearing on anything in the world except who shoveled that deck and whether or not they cheated. So does losing in Candyland actually mean anything? Is Candyland even a game? What about the Stanley Parable? You can win this. You can lose this. Could you have a tournament at Pads for the Stanley Parable? I'm just going to do a speedrun. So is the Stanley Parable a game? In the game industry, people who design games, depending on if you ask to sit in Meyer or Richard Garfield or all these different people who are for real game designers, they generally will use one of these three definitions. A game is either an interactive amusement, which is pretty broad, right? Candyland is an interactive amusement. It's different from a movie because it's interacting with it. But it's not like Counter-Strike. A series of interesting and or meaningful decisions, for example a game like the Stanley Parable, that is a series of decisions that are interesting. Maybe meaningful, some of those decisions as you might know if you play the game are not actually meaningful. There's a debate as to whether or not decisions have to actually matter or not. But interesting is a good word because it means that we're making a series of decisions in the game that to us are interesting. It doesn't matter if they matter, it just matters that to me as a gamer, I think that they matter. But the games we're talking about here, winning, winning means something. Our competitive test of skill. Richard Garfield actually came up with a word for this. It's based on in the chess community, if any of you play a lot of chess. There are fairy chesses or variant chesses. Chess masters get bored, they want to mix things up, they'll play a variant version of chess. So they use the word ortho-chess, ortho means straight or true, to define normal chess. So if you know without having to explain, I'm playing the regular rules of chess with no modifications, you can say, oh, I was playing ortho-chess the other day. So he coined this term in a book called Characteristics of Games. If you're interested in what I'm going to talk about for the rest of this 40 minutes or so, I highly recommend, if you're a game designer, if you're a game player, this is Richard Garfield's book, Characteristics of Games. You'll go into much more detail than I'm about to go into. But he coined this term. An ortho-game is a competition. Two or more players, an agreed upon set of rules, an inventive ranking. These are games we can win. This also lets us avoid that's not a game nor not a gamer argument in the discussion we're about to have. We're not talking about this handy forever. If you can win, you're going to look at your friends and say, I'm objectively smarter than you. We have to talk about game theory time. So many people have seen my lecture as other kind of games, I suppose. We talk a lot about game theory. Game theory is not fun, and it's fairly about games. However, there's a term in game theory called utility. Utility is what you're after when you play the game. So if I'm playing a game, my utility would arguably to ring the game, to get to the end before someone else, ranked higher than someone else. In other games, our sole utility is that we wish that you rank higher than the other players, thereby winning. So I'm going to take you through a bunch of examples of real strategies in real games, that if you are, if you play games at this patch, where people are out of this room right now, and you've not heard what your girlfriend spoke, and you've never listened to my podcast, then you will probably win a significant percentage of the time more than the other players. You're going to learn about your business, and this is the most important tool in your chest, winning and design games. Humans cannot do differential calculus quickly in their hands. That is something we cannot do. A few of us might be able to, but they're a person. I cannot do that. So if I'm taking an object, and I throw it at one of you, you can catch it, right? Most people can catch a ball if a ball is thrown to them. Yet, you're not calculating where that object will land. In fact, human beings, if an object is thrown, you cannot, without specialized training, predict where that object will land, unless they're the one who threw it or they're the one who can catch it. So we can't calculate where the ball is going, yet we can catch it. It's because humans, you're something called the gaze heuristic. This is something that is innate to humans. If an object is thrown to you and you wish to catch it, you shouldn't make that gesture. That would be a very unfortunate out of context photo. So you will turn your head up, look at the object, and lock your neck at that angle. You will then move forward or backward so that the object is always in your field of view. So you're always at the same angle to the object. And so happens that the mass of that mean, if you keep doing that, eventually the object will hit you right between the eyes. So what you do is you instinctually do this, you'll move forward and backward without even thinking about it, and then at the last second, you'll stop throwing the object. It's a heuristic. A heuristic is a simple set of rules that allow you to very quickly analyze and make a decision for a complex situation without necessarily understanding the whole situation. You don't want to be that asshole who's sitting at the table literally calculating every possible outcome of that. Richard Garfield took gains and heuristics and went on to step further. He broke them up into two types of heuristics. The first is a directional heuristic. This is a rule I use to determine what to do next, where to go, which bridge do I use. I have very simple directional heuristic here. I will not use the bridge that looks like it's going to kill me. When it's out, use the bridge that's safer. A level zero directional heuristic in chess is I will move randomly until the game is over. That'll win about 50% of the time against someone else using that same heuristic. A level one heuristic might be I will generally move my pieces to where it became. A very high level heuristic might involve a complex strategy of beginning with a Polish opening and then agree to a fake five turns later unless my opponent does x, y, or z. Positional heuristic is how I know who's winning. What is my rank? Sometimes positional heuristics are simple. A game of ice hockey, a game of football, there's a score. The score is the heuristic. But, for example, in Mario Kart is the person in first place really winning Mario Kart? A young player, a novice player, might assume that because they're in first place they're winning. Skill players know that they're actually trying to be in second place until a blue shell comes out. So when you play games think about what is a simple rule you can use to figure out who's winning and what's a simple rule you can use to figure out what you should do next. Use simple rules, not complex rules. And as you play games, as you get better at them you'll naturally develop increasingly complex heuristics. Some games. Does anyone here play the game of Dotsy? Wow, this is very fascinating because in the United States this game is basically dead now. Almost no one has played Dotsy anymore. At least anyone under 30. So, Dotsy is a pretty simple game. A pretty dumb game. I can play this game perfectly. In fact, there's a simulator online that we leaked about our show a while ago that will analyze your play. It makes you play Dotsy for a little while and then it shows you statistically how perfect you are. So if you can play Dotsy perfectly you're going to gain a whole ton of skills that a lot of gamers don't have. A lot of gamers can't quickly calculate the odds of dice. A lot of gamers can't make those snap decisions. A lot of gamers can't figure out whether or not they should go for the Dotsy because they ran at how. A lot of people play Dotsy and think it's just solitary. They don't realize that you actually have to pay attention to what everyone else is doing. If someone else is doing much better than me I need to become increasingly desperate, for example. I have a risk of evolving how well the other players around here are doing. I'm not going to tell you how to win Dotsy. I'm going to tell you to play Dotsy until you win the majority of the time against the Fultons and you win a cool amount of the time against people who are as smart as you. Table top games. I'm using a lot of examples from table top. Not because I think table top is superior though I do generally really enjoy table top games but because table top games are very effective tools in learning how to play games it's like exercising specific muscle groups. A game like League of Legends or Dota 2 is incredibly complex. Your brain cannot hold the entire state of the game. You're using a very simplified model in your brain. A table top game by the laws of physics really has to be simple enough to be managed by moving pieces around on a board. As a result, you can twiddle something in a table top game and see the effects of that much more readily. If you play a lot of table top games and you get very good at table top games you'll find that you're very good at all other kinds of games. Table top games, kind of like if you're a boulder or a rock climber, each table top game presents a sort of puzzle. Once you solve that puzzle, you're done with that game and you've gained a very tolerable heuristic to use it all the games. The shortest path a very simple strategy. This is a game called Kalis. You should be able to figure out just by looking at the board and knowing nothing about the rules a reasonable, positional and directional heuristic. The directional heuristic is whatever that castle is, do that thing. There's a bunch of stuff in this game. You're laying out buildings, you've been out of resources, you trade resources, you go for prestige and all this stuff. But the biggest thing on this board other than the actual track is this huge castle. It is a huge chunk of non-game real estate. That's not game ain't that. That's just a picture. That is a clue to you that that castle is important. In any game where there is an obvious way to win and a bunch of cool, complex looking ways to win, if you're playing this game for the first time or you're playing this with people who are not experts at it, do the obvious easy thing. You'll probably win. If you're playing a game in Puerto Rico, captain, just do the captain. Just keep doing the captain. You'll probably win because that's a whole ton of victory points. But much more complex strategies are much more difficult to execute. If a game has a degenerate strategy, do it. Be that jerk. Are you familiar with this making problem? It's a good part of our game. However, you've got a little boost if you did a drift enter and got a little spark. You get a little boost. Because you've got the sparks if you jiggle left and right enough on a turn. If you were super fast and were willing to risk serious injury to your car bowls, you could boost constantly on straightaways. You would get half the times of other people. So there was a degenerate strategy. Nothing mattered in the game but your ability to execute snaking. Snaking was not fun. Snaking sucked. Snaking literally ruined this game. However, if you want to win a game and a game has a degenerate strategy, if you're obligated to use that degenerate strategy as much as possible, I would say... I think 90% of the people I've played this game with on live quit within three seconds for now is in the start and they'd message me if they could. No snaking. I would start snaking and then quit. So I won't. I told you guys, I'm not a snaker. So there's an idea in game theory called Pareto Front here as it were. The idea is that say these are all Street Fighter characters and Bison, Dan Hibiki, whatever. Some characters might be just works but generally, if you want to get something, I want to be a little bit faster then I have to be a little bit weaker. You give something up to get something in any decision. Otherwise, you're not actually making a decision. So in a game, you might have a lot of character options, a lot of choices but some of those choices are mathematically directly inferior to other choices. They're just works. Dan Hibiki is just slow. It's just works. There's literally no reason to use Dan Hibiki except for Bragging rights. So you want to use characters, you want to use items, you want to use strategies that are on the frontier of efficiency meaning there's no way to get something without giving something up. That's the age of efficiency. So if you're playing a game that's paid to win, just playing. If you want to be the best in Hearthstone, you have to know how Hearthstone works. You also have to have all the best pieces buy the best magic cards, buy the best self. If a game is paid to play, literally over your wallet or don't play that game. It was a stretch to what you were saying. I just really liked your series. So equipment. It's not some straightforward in games that aren't just paid to win. In a game that's paid to win, buy the best piece you just win. And the old days of magic, if you just bought a black lotus and they let you use it, you're gonna win. So equipment in games, tools in games, sometimes have a trade-off. Better equipment might make you worse at a game. An example to use a very different sport, a different game, is skiing. Ice skiing. There's no skiing in normal places. Ice skiing in New York or Ireland. In skiing, you can buy a normal ski. You can buy a really advanced ski. The advanced ski will probably kill you. But it will give you this tiny performance edge if you're an advanced skier. Now, rather than going into all these details of how to choose equipment or whatever, there's a very simple heuristic you can use in any game. If there is equipment, either a video game or a horde game sport, if you don't understand why a piece of equipment is better, do not expend resources to get that equipment. Until you can articulate, this bouldering shoe is superior for me because my foot keeps falling off of these tiny crimps and that has a very aggressive toe structure. Unless you know what that means, don't buy the expensive thing. Because if she thinks, you're a terrible golfer, Tiger Woods golf clubs are not going to help you. Carcassonne is an excellent game to learn many of these core mechanics. Are you all familiar with Carcassonne? It's a movie I've never played Carcassonne. I have homework for you. Play this game. It takes two minutes to learn. It's super simple, it's super fun and you can socialize during the game. It's not one of those games where everyone has to be dead, sound like horrifying all the time. Basically, you land tiles and try to get points. And even without knowing the rules, we can examine some really interesting juristics in this game. So, to explain a little bit, let's claim that city. It's Greene's term. Greene has a normal sized meeple and a big meeple. Meeple is the technical term for that little piece there. If the city is completed, whoever controls the city by having the most meeples in it gets all the points for the city. That city is worth a shit ton of points right now. So, Greene cannot directly put their dude in the city. If you want to join someone else's city, you can put your dude somewhere else and then connect the cities together later. So, Greene can either put his little meeple there or his big meeple there. Of course, the big meeple there will steal all the points from Greene. If he puts a little meeple there, Greene and Greene will equally share the points. What will Greene do? Now, what should he do? What will he do? Well, what if Greene's in the last place? What if Greene is already losing the game? What if Greene is your dumbest friend? You all have a friend who's a little dude. Greene is my dumbest friend. He's not going to beat me. However, if I try to steal those points from him, if I go here with my big meeple, Greene's not going to help me finish that city. Greene doesn't care, or Greene might try to stop me from finishing the city now. Or Greene's dumb and whatever, it doesn't help me. So, I will now have to spend more resources and more time to finish the city on my own. But if I collaborate with Greene, I have my little meeple there. Greene is perfectly happy, especially if you're my dumbest friend, to help me finish that city. He's at least not going to stop me, because he wants his meeple back. And I'll get a ton of points. Give those points to Red, I might as well be burning them. So, I will collaborate with my dumbest friend. I will collaborate with whoever's in the last place. Collaborate with anyone who you know cannot beat you. So, how do I get into that situation? Recall this, they're king breakers. There's a strategy in more games called king making. This is king breaking. Say it's a poor player game. Three of you need to agree very quickly to choose one of your friends and just eliminate them from the game. Because now our chance of winning is going from 25% to 33%. There's no reason not to do this. You will see this happen constantly in a high level player, the biggest stitch. This is not trying to maximize our score. This isn't a game theory utility where we're trying to get the most possible points. This is winning utility. We're trying to be ranked better than other players. If I win by a million, it's the same as winning by one. So in this situation, Red could place that road somewhere, put a dude on it, hit one point, maybe two points, or I can put it right there. Now let's say it's statistically much less likely to finish. Tie up two peoples and basically denying blue and green the only people who are addressed to me let's say a whole ton of points. Denying someone who could pee pee points is the same as getting points for myself. If you can dig your friend over for 10 or you can get two, you should dig. Both who wins games? Games that are more than two players or more than two teams are called political games. Unless those games are races or solitary or something like that. What that means is that if players can interact with each other at all then it doesn't necessarily matter to the quote unquote skill of the game. What matters among high level play is who is attacked, when. Who wins is determined basically by all the players repeatedly voting on who's going to win the game. It doesn't matter that I've won this battle and lost this battle at risk what matters is that I attacked pink twice and I only attacked blue once. This game, well of horror and as many other games like it is a pure voting race game. Every round you basically move guys around and then you vote somebody off the island wherever you vote off the island is fucking killed by zombies. To win games that are political once you recognize the games are political the real strategy is to be pretty quiet. You kind of head back to let everyone else argue and fight with each other and try to be not noticed try to not look like a friend or just be me and get someone else to accuse you of trying that strategy. Get some friend, you know your friend you got the dumb friend you both got the jerk friend. If you got the jerk friend if I tell a lie and my co-host Scott tells a lie and we're both lying in each house one day with a bunch of friends and Scott doesn't play, we're sitting off to the side and every round he yelled across the room don't vote for rim in a vote who wins game you know where this is going don't vote I won the game and because someone else was attacking me in the mouth someone else was saying rims winning, rims winning, attack rims don't let rim win, don't let rim win people don't like being told what to do that's just something huge I'm going to say subconsciously just a spy game ignore that advice and I won so if a game is political don't try to win the game with complex heuristics try to win the game by being a person who is attack the least and attack the person who's likely to beat you the most and you'll find that the majority of multiplayer games boil down to politics and nothing more so speaking of politics there are two general types of politics in games direct attacking and indirect attacking I have a much more off-color way to describe that but I didn't rate this panel as 15 plus so you can go find that out on some way so direct attack games are like risk you are attacking the other player a war game, mage knife magic and gathering if you're playing that weird sphere version where there's multiple people and you pick them to attack so in games where you can directly attack the other player politics are obvious what about a game like egregora indirect attacks you can't go raiding someone's farm in egregora but you can put your guy on the space that he needed to get a baby the term he needed a baby I didn't need a baby that much my friend needed it a lot I'm taking that baby from him I basically attacked him in a game that does not look like it's a political game German board games really, really have this mechanic a lot especially in worker placement games almost all worker placement games in the end, once you're all super skilled come down to who denied another player a critical move in critical time figure that out and that's the only thing you could focus on in carcassel, in egregora the thing to focus on if you can't operate in your stupid house then that'll rinse, that's garbage get that baby as soon as possible you want babies faster than everyone else that'll win you that game more often than not racemanship so this applies to all games in a game, a multiplayer game if someone else can do something to win and it's my turn and someone else goes after me turn the person who was after you and say, you have to stop him from winning because I won't, take your turn like normal never be the one who stops the winner from winning if you're going to lose, lose anyway they can threaten and say so the person who goes right before the person who's currently winning they now have to stop that person or the game's over they're probably going to stop the person they're not going to think about the game in terms of racemanship so convince all their players to do your dirty work I'm planning to get along or sit by online right now there's one jerk who is off my county by himself with our dumbest friends and two AIs and he has this empire of esteem ships and yeah, I got horsemen still so I'm trying to convince all their empires on my continent to rage some sort of war against him to take him down and I will of course support the war by sending a few units to kind of hang out on the outskirts and then come back home but I'm not going to give it resources to stop him I want other people to throw themselves at the wall so I can walk over and once it breaks there's a game called Simdels is anyone familiar with Simdels? common good popular game I recommend playing it it's a stupid game if you're spending a game there however, it really exemplifies this mechanic the warlord is the only way to attack a player as opposed to a role the warlord's only function is to lay the end of the game to attack the winner never use the warlord to attack the winner make some other shmuck doing what about a game for everyone can lose like Crononauts Crononauts, if too many of these paradoxes appear the game is over you all lose what's my utility? my utility is to be ranked higher than the other players if I can't be ranked higher than everyone else I will happily accept a five way draw if this game is close to ending let the world burn let it end never ever fix one of these things ever so I keep talking about press so I have a question for you all can you threaten someone in paper rock scissors yes I usually play this on stage with Scott so I'm going to throw rock what are you going to throw? I say I'm going to throw rock you know I'm lying I'm lying about 33% of the time so in a game where you can't prove, where you can't free move where you can't make a threat credible press are meaningless some friends you in a game like mechanic around making threats or making deals ignore it, it's noise everything that person is saying is just noise you cannot actually make threats in this game they are meaningless now I can make a credible threat by laying down my card ahead of time so if I throw scissors first I'm going to throw scissors threatening it's out here so how do you make an effective credible threat? you either have to build a reputation of making threats but again that only works on people that weren't in this room because you know what do we ignore threats no matter how credible they seem because it's all just noise so make threats and make them seem credible if you want to make an actually credible threat you have to take an action that removes your further course this doesn't work in all games in paper rock scissors I can't do this removing an option literally just makes me lose chicken in America in the cinema where two guys in cars rev up their engines and there's a girl they both want to take care of them the girls are going to date and whatever so they're going to drive their cars at each other and one of them is going to swerve if I swerve and my opponent doesn't he gets the girl if I don't swerve my opponent does I get the girl if we both swerve she wants nothing to do with us and if neither one of us swerves a threat in a shirt both players are going to say I'm not going to swerve of course who's going to say I'm going to swerve so the way to win that is to look your opponent in the eye and before they can do anything get your steering wheel and rip it out of the car I hate rock scissors by denying myself an option I just hurt myself in chicken by denying myself an option I guarantee victory unless my opponent is crazy the word space stereo is a mutual debt I don't want to say not dying was part of our utility just being a grandtide so there's a concept of arbitration this is a game called version of hex this is the best game in the world to play on a phone while you're pooping one game of this takes exactly one poop it's also a good game to learn a lot of this concept so if you see an opponent in a game agonizing over a decision that is in effect arbitrary you know that they're your dumbest friends you can be able to recognize and eliminate arbitrary decisions quickly so you can focus all your time and effort on the decisions that aren't arbitrary so on this board it's directionless to scratch your face facing doesn't matter how many options do I have to place that hex on this board the answer is four four choices everything else on that board is identical to one of the other choices so by recognizing that a dumb player is a little more an experienced player is agonizing over all these choices they've got but a smart player literally only sees those four now how many places can I place a similar tile how many spaces can I place a non-facing directionless tile on this board three so now it gets more complex but you can see the same rules apply I've got a piece that hasn't facing and now the board has some pieces already out and while I have all these choices again I can still eliminate a whole bunch of options you can always eliminate options in games one of the best ways to begin a game is to quickly eliminate arbitrary options and to see when your friend is too dumb to realize that decision is arbitrary this is where the turn-taking problem comes in you will know that most decisions in games don't actually matter your friends will not know that your friends will be forever agonizing over whether to play block or paper and further let's go work in place so there's facing right this guy can face I can rotate him around after I place him you can still eliminate a lot of obvious decisions even not knowing the rules you probably don't want to point those guns off the board you probably want to point them at the enemy in some fashion so back to Citadel's the most powerful thing you can do in a game is have the capacity to act randomly humans cannot act randomly if I ask all of you to write a series of random numbers I am confident unless a few of you have studied game theory or some maths I can tell if you wrote the numbers or if you wrote them based on a random number generator humans cannot make random numbers you will make very obvious four decisions and make non-random number streams so in games if you are able to act randomly you have a huge advantage over your moments you do this when the decision is arbitrary in Citadel's whether or not to take the King of the Thief or the Assassin or whatever is usually effectively arbitrary for a lot of reasons so the strategy we discovered when we play this game is that I will take by that look at everybody shuffling and not even looking at it now our opponents can make no decision based on my psychology based on where I am looking based on whether or not I am smiling based on what the poison is in they have no idea what I did and there is no way they can know because I don't even know but what I have said humans can't act randomly easily that's why I said shuffle you need to use an external source for randomness many games disallow this many games do not they say you cannot use a piece of paper you cannot roll a dice while you are playing it is very bad etiquette than a tabletop game to whip out a d20 and roll it a whole bunch of times on your turn however it is not against the rules to look at your watch and my rule what I will do is I need to make a random decision I split a watch face into a number of pie slices and usually out of 12 or 10 or 8 I can make a reasonably rough estimate and then whatever I need to make a decision I just look at the watch and wherever the second hand is that makes my decision in fact I cheated on a game theory a music theory test once because there were lights in the US power cycles because of the hurts they were at I could hear the dissonance I used the lights in the room to pass a sight sounding test I had to listen to music and transcribe it hahahaha some games and you notice it is important because in a never-under a very popular game the rules specifically say that you are allowed to use dice coins or any means you wish to add a randomness or to make random decisions but rules stipulate that so you can see that this is a powerful strategy that real games have incorporated rules of power now completely random action well usually now we do a game in game theory there is an idea called a mix strategy a pure strategy would be I will use the bishop for the first 5 turns and the assassin for the second 5 turns not the best strategy a mix strategy let's say I want to play the bishop the bishop I have a bunch of blue out if I play the bishop and do not get assassinated or themed it is a huge, huge boom for me everyone at the table knows this so they are likely to want to assassinate me so I can't play the bishop because I know someone is going to assassinate the bishop however if I choose not to play the bishop and some jerk decides to assassinate the bishop they will give ways to their turn it is good for me I should never use a pure strategy I should never, never play the bishop because if I never play the bishop then my opponent never needs to play the assassin because they know I would never have the balls to play the bishop so I use a mix strategy I decide on a number and over time I refine that number I decide 10% of the time in the situation I will play the bishop the other 9% of the time I will play another one of random or another way to do this to enforce this randomness is say I have all the whole stack of cards I will pull out the 3 cards that are interesting to me like to play or the bishop and 2 random ones a problem with all these strategies is that when we play my group of gamers plays this game no one talks everyone shuffles and the game is completely random we ruined this game so this illustration again from Richard Gargill's character I apologize for pausing for a moment usually I have a promo because it goes up 50% of the talking in these things there is no such thing as catching up in games this is an illustration from characters games where he talks about this in depth there is no way to ever catch up if you are behind in a game if you could have caught up you were never behind your positional heuristic was just not complex enough so who is playing here A or B a smart player might say B as opposed to A what if you don't realize this ladder is there what if you don't know the blue shells coming so knowing that you can never catch up and there is no such thing as catch up mechanisms you need to use the catch up mechanisms that do exist in games at least the flow through the lawns to your advantage this game called initial D car is a game great arcade game however if you play the game by default if you fall too far behind your opponent there is a crazy problem making sure that you are always behind your opponent the game is always neck and neck so a very good strategy if you are playing initial D is to literally always be behind be behind on purpose and then pass the person at the critical moment and hand use the normal back use the catch up mechanism power grid and excellent germ board game a very common strategy is to fall into last place the turn before you bust out and win because if you are in last place you get a ton of benefits in power grid you get first choice on all the resources you get last choice on power plans basically you get the optimal choice in every situation it is a mechanism to prevent someone from running away with me but if you are a clever player you will try to fall a little bit behind to get those booms you incorporate the catch up and the normal back into your heuristics you are always in second place in Mario power grid so desperation ice hockey I talk about ice hockey a lot because it is a sport in the United States that is not super popular outside of US, Finland, Russia, Canada and even that only occurs in the United States but in ice hockey there is 5 players on each team and we are going you are trying to score on the net but this isn't fast enough you can pull your goaler that is something you can't do in football but you can do that in hockey you can pull your goaler out of the net and get an extra person in the field that is a ludicrous crazy desperate strategy and everyone does it if they are behind in the last minute or two of the game I don't care if I am ranked poorly I care if I am ranked number one I am trying to be ranked higher than everybody else if I am going to lose anyway if someone scores an empty net goal on me oh no, I lost anyway but having that chance of coming back of court and court catching up is really risky because the risk is literally meaningless so as a result people will pull the goaler if they are behind if you are actually behind based on your heuristics you have to turn like a galsy that you are losing the game take increasingly desperate risks take more risky decisions because sure, they might blow up in your face but if they don't you will catch up it's a very simply risk if this applies to all games the more risky and desperate you should add candy boxes someone played this game, it's called candy box it's online you should all go play it tonight in your hotel room the game works like this every second you get a candy in real time 24-7 candy, candy, candy one by a silver sword wait a thousand seconds the game has more to it eventually you can buy a lollipop and there's quests it's kind of like Farmer's quest plus plus but in this game if you want to win a game that is a candy box just let the candy box fill up just let it wait many of you are playing a candy box game right now pull out a 3DS and you all try to get find me your monster man or whatever but the way to win those games is to get as many street passes as possible you don't lose anything there's no scaling getting street passes go sit in the handle lounge somewhere and just clear that 10 out of 10 out of 10 constantly for all the packs that sucks and that's boring but that's how you win candy box games the supply is a much more complex game the thing called ingress it's a Google up and down game I play it a lot because I'm kind of worried about those things and right now this whole area is locked down for the correct team the green team is the correct team I don't even know where the screen shots go so and in fact I own many other portals around here because I was here a few weeks ago so to win this game because you walk around the real world and find a portal you attack it, change its color to win this game, just go around hacking portals spend months or years of your life walking around just constantly playing it there's a game it was the precursor to team fortress 2 called team fortress but team fortress, most people in the team fortress think of team fortress classic that was baby's first bullshit first as far as we were concerned because there was team fortress, many team fortress in the weapons factory for quake 1 and quake 2 those were way different from modern team fortress so in weapons factory which was the quake 2 equivalent of team fortress I got to play in the clans it was the big batch of classic hour the game was incredibly good price I'm not gonna get into all that stuff now but in that game in my clan my role was do candy box I would play the cyborg cyborg can drop a suicide bomb that thing will take out centuries, crazy powerful and what I would do is I would spawn run as fast as possible do new field defenses in the enemy base then make my comic house it exactly 95 seconds later I'd be right back with that comic house for an hour that was boring in regards to sales you get through the midfield defenses however, it's psychologically war down the opponents they didn't really believe someone was going to do that every 95 seconds if there's a game you can push a body to get a point push that body to see where a finger falls out stand in formation if you play a card game like hearts or yuker, hearts is a great example or any game like small world or vinci where it doesn't tell you how many points other players have but you could know if you were paying attention don't count everything in Tigger's New Freedies don't count every single victory point anyone got, your brain is not going to keep you're going to mess that up in hearts, don't count every card that was played by who no one except crazy people could do that but count how many hearts came out in Blackjack, count how many tens came out use a simple characteristic to keep track in Tigger's New Freedies, a good German board game if I correctly were one of the best German board games I would decide I don't keep a full count of points but I keep a count of for every other player there's only three who's winning in my estimation who has, for each player what color do they have the most points in and what color do they have the least points in and I keep a soft count of just that I know that guy's winning I know he has a lot of blue, I know he played a lot of hearts I keep track of the information the games give you know the actual rules of the game in Dota 2 and League of Legends if you play these games just based on the tooltips and just based on the tutorials as many of you might know, you'll lose you'll lose terribly these games have all these secret bullshit rules all these denials and last hits all this crazy crap if you want to be good at these kinds of games read the game fast write those hardcore wikis that talk about damage per second damage per hour and all these things learn how the game actually works because the games is fine by its rules whatever game you need to know all the rules to the game you need to know exactly how the items work this is different from the heart counting I don't need to know the exact numbers where I'm counting in the game because in the game I need to be able to quickly move quickly remember other things the biggest danger if I try to count too much is if someone distracts me and then I lose by a count but in these games in the course of the game that's separate from before the game before the game, research the game if you don't play chess you need to know all the rules of chess you need to know that I'm just something and no one ever remembers if you need to know how that works you need to know when to use it and how to use it strategies if you're playing a game like chess or you're playing a game like Starcraft then read how people have won this game in the past and memorize that shit memorize a build order that wins tournaments that is that will do more for you than anything else you could do in this game memorize a strategy that is known to be effective and be able to execute it without thinking because now I really like Isochi that's one of the reasons I like Isochi so in a sport like League of Legends or Dota 2 or Counter Strike or Isochi any game where there's execution components as opposed to say chess there's no execution component in chess if I'm quadriplegic I can still play chess someone else can move my piece for me my input into the game is take this piece and put it here but in Isochi my input into the game is put it here constantly and it's almost like I'm making trillions and trillions of decisions per second I'm not really doing that I'm thinking at a very high level but there's an execution component it's not just deciding to shoot the puck into the goal it's the execution of how well I shoot it and how I'm skating all this stuff my mouse movement and counter strike my head clicking counter strike has just been bad clicking on head simulator I love counter strike but that is all it is oh we're going to send our team over to the east side and attack them now it won't be able to click on heads faster than human if you want to be good at the head clicking game be the master at head clicking I got good at FPSs by playing them every day for about 20 years if you want to be good at any game the next season's component you literally just have to play that game nothing can teach you those skills but executing those skills continuously against opponents on a similar level and that are better than you so now we have some real talk we're going to talk about some of the highly specialized and highly dickish things that I do in games so remember before pick your smartest friend or your dumbest friend and eliminate them from the game I saw this happen at an omega dot they were playing I think boob locks four players, none of these people knew each other and boob locks so you attack someone every turn you attack someone green was player four three other players won first so in any game like this especially in omega dots if you're in a tournament and it's all strangers and the first player makes their move first player attacks green player two looks at player one looks at the person who's green and also attacks green player three shrugs and green is basically eliminated from the game now that might seem very similar to before but a gang up on the dumb person a gang up on the smart person but this is a very specific idea that you want to attack only one it's a reference to this weird Korean movie called attack the gas station that I highly recommend you all see but in this movie a bunch of thugs decide to attack the gas station and rob because they're bored in the country so they rob the gas station and beat one of the people up and they leave three noodles later and then they're bored so one of them says what should we do now the other one says let's attack the gas station again so you go back and rob the same gas station they just robbed and in that there's one dude and there's a big brawl that starts and his philosophy is attack only one and he says this out loud constantly there's a big brawl there's like a hundred people fighting he looks around and he sees one person he picks that person and chases him through the battle only attacking him it's a whole prison idea that if you go to prison find the baddest dude and break his ear off because once you rip someone's ear off no one else is messing with you so in tournaments in a high level play you're playing a tournament and it's a multi tier tournament identify who's the biggest threat for you ahead of time watch all their games figure out who's the threat and either try to get all your players to attack them early figure out who's the target threat like I keep saying I'm dead serious about that if you're playing a game with two people who aren't good at a game and one person who is bad at the game the game becomes who manipulates the bad person the most manipulating four players at games is one of the most powerful things you can do at a convention because you're almost always playing with strangers two rounds in or whether they throw rock or paper you know they're the person where people are looking at is such an important part of a lot of games that is overlooked that this game's got a little yard comes with a hat to protect the player who's making the secret decisions from this I beat my mom who stopped at time for a long time for a long time and my strategy was whenever you're playing it's a shield you have time to sit behind your shield like I think I should attack that team with blue and you would always reliably look down at his pieces to see how many blue we had and if you had more than two or three like you had more than two so three, four, or five you would come at the pile from the top it was kind of a tall pile and pick up if you had fewer you would come in from the side and pick it up so I reliably knew if I could attack him or not if a player is constantly looking at one part of the board they're probably going to have to do something in that part of the board if someone gets quiet and is looking at their hand a whole bunch, watch them as soon as they look up whoever they look at first they're going to attack whatever area of the board they look at first they're going to play that thing somewhere in that area of the board you guys are clever among skill players that's all bullshit I'm literally looking at random places the entire time I have rules about how long I'll look at different parts of the board different waters and agree to look at them depending on what's sitting there like that kind of crap I'm running out of time here mind games so I'm losing every game that I'm playing until I win every game that I play I wait until a moment where someone attacks you especially if it's like your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your mom if someone attacks you in a game and the bench wasn't that great like it didn't hurt you that bad I feel like this is a fucking end of the world I'm going to go with this game I'm just gonna I'm just gonna act right until the end of the game this game's over and oh yeah by the way I won it is amazing how well that works act potentially, act kissy and act mad that people dare to attack you and that this game is bullshit the rules are crap and that people will stop attacking you so I gotta wrap this up when you play games after the game talk about the game we spent as much time talking about the game we played as we did playing the game we talked about the discussion like oh I won this four rounds back you did this move we step back until we find the point the person won or lost the game and finally play a ton of games you can only learn so much skiing by watching other people ski eventually you gotta just do it and do it and do it over a hundred times once a summer living alone with two friends we played four or five times a day every day and we got really good at it do that for every game play a ton of games and a ton of different games and you'll become a player of games my homework for you is to play sportigo and to come up with a strategy because there's a strategy to become a bouncing bullshit that is guaranteed to beat any simpleton and any child so in conclusion because I think it's out of the room play games and try to win them but really actually try to win them every single turn you're thinking about how to win when it's not your turn you're thinking about how to win every time you lose understand why every time you win understand why if you win a game and you don't know exactly why and how you effectively lost that game be a dick but Will Wheaton says don't be a dick be a dick in the context of the game inside of the game when you attack another player you're the worst genocidal warlord the world has ever seen your armies will conquer and village before them but outside of the game you've got to be a human being but really be a dick in the game so thank you all obviously I don't have time for questions if you want to see more of this the other side of the coin losing will be tomorrow right here at 2pm and if you want to see videos of this and I don't know, 30 or 40 of my other past lectures this QR code is a link to our youtube channel and also count I did vote so you can complain about us in the future well me, keep saying us my post is not me thank you all