 We are here today to talk to you about bad games There is a cottage industry in going on YouTube like the angry video game Mary just really the best example of this and talking about this doom clone Games games Games that for example when I was young I saw this somewhere and I didn't remember where and until the internet existed Didn't think that was real I did not know that that actually existed. I knew the CD I was a thing because I saw it in like a department store in the electronic section But you hear rumors like oh, there's selling ever you can play a cell. I was like bullshit. There's not there's no such thing Shaq Fu which uh You guys are expecting us to talk about all kinds of bad games like the ones we have showed you up For example one of the most disastrous game releases of all time But not the most famous bad game of all time. I think you can all anticipate what the most famous Every time anything about ET ever appears all I can think is that time in Spanish class and it made us watch ET in Spanish It was all ET telephone o la casa ET is a perfectly good game in fact ET is Way above average for an Atari 2600 game It is way above average for any entertainment medium That wasn't a movie or a book or a play or music that came out in the year that that game came out And yet everyone shits all over ET Everyone talks about how bad ET is like the default. Oh, please. It's not ET the anger video game They're made a movie and the entire movie's premise was that ET is a bad game What about your revenge? Your revenge is like a ridiculously famous game and it's heralded is like one of the best games on Atari ever Oh my god, that's an Atari classic. You gotta play this. Oh, it's so awesome. Who knows how to play our revenge anybody? Yeah, not many so ET what do you do? You collect all the pieces of the phone and then you phone home and that's it And it's really straightforward in yours revenge. You think you shoot that thing you don't shoot that thing shooting That thing doesn't do anything. What's this thing in the middle? Do fuck you? So Why does everyone hate ET or at least claim to hate ET? I don't even actually played ET Whoa, whoa, a lot of shade being thrown at ET for people who have never actually played it Yeah, when I was a kid, I mean there were some people who had Atari's and had ET I had an Atari we didn't have ET though. It was like the only people who didn't buy that game And you know kids played it we didn't think there was anything wrong It wasn't until years and years later the internet age where people started, you know I started seeing all the hate for ET come out like around the college times, you know And it's like where did where did all this hate come from? It was because emulators and whatnot people were able to go back and play this old game not having played it in its original time Plus the legend of you know the Yeah, right that legend combined with people having played it your way past the time it came out You know created this sort of mystique of ET is so bad. Oh my god I mean we're pretty old now a few people don't really really Kids, but yeah, we're pretty old and when we used to buy video games You sit in your parents car and you'd read the instruction book the really long really thick instruction book that came with the game I mean look it says start with game three. This is what this is find the piece It tells you how to play the game Atari games were incomprehensible without these books But you kids today when you play ET you turn on the emulator you start playing there There's no like mega-man mega-man to tell you what to do So what would why is ET so hated? Why is ET so remembered as being the worst game ever? Well, I mean it's not only the aforementioned reasons of you know it being you know the landfill, right? It's also the fact that they promoted this So much more than any other Atari game had ever been promoted I think they actually printed more copies of this game the cartridge that there were Atari consoles in houses Right, but it's like we look today at like AAA games, you know in their marketing giant booths and conventions Which I guess video game conventions didn't exist then right but you know ads in magazines ads on TV Even before movies ET was like the first game that had some giant marketing campaign And while the game isn't as bad as the legend for tells right it's still not great You know it's really hard to control ET getting out of the you know the holes in the ground And then you fall right back. Yeah, though there is a fan project Oh, I'll you look for this online, but a dude took ET that the game code and rewrote it So it's still run on an Atari, but he fixed all the problems with the game And I kind of go no he'd like take pixels away from the characters to use them to do things in other parts of the game He needed enough memory the cartridge is full so we had to you know optimize Yep, so ET wasn't really worse than other games that came out of the time It just it failed at something it failed something very specific it failed it being the blockbuster It failed it being ET the movie it failed it being literally the greatest gaming experience that the media has ever told you You will ever have in your life and it failed it being better than the other entire games You already owned like combat outlaw So the thing you have to remember what we're gonna talk about for their next up 54 minutes is that no game is bad You can't just say a game is bad games are bad at something It's so weird with the projector over there because every time I change the slide I see everyone go Oh So if you're gonna shit all over someone's game, you can't just say a game is bad You have to be more articulate exactly what it is bad at right because even a really really bad game like the ones We showed at the beginning like Superman 64. Well, yeah, it's a bad game. All right sure whatever, but it's good at something It's good at frustrating someone who's playing it It's good of being a lesson why you shouldn't ship a game early even when the producer tells you to it's good at being Material to make funny YouTube videos. No has a lot of good uses that game, right? It's not completely 100% bad So we're gonna go through serious games to talk about the other first game words. I'll go just can't do that Can you and this bad at being a game? If you remember how to play candy land from your childhood you would remember that in the course of playing this game You make no actual decisions at any point All right, there is no reason to actually play the candy land You could just flip over the cards and look at them and then say Rim one no it is a game We see no you have to chill but it is a game no one's gonna say candy land is not a game yet You don't take any action so you could argue maybe that it isn't a game So it's bad at being a competitive game an ortho game a ranking game a test of skill game It's bad at all that it teaches kids how to count it teaches kids colors. It's family board game time I mean candy land and that kind of board game time is how I kind of got any games It has really awesome characters like Queen Frosty and it was the bomb I mean look in this fake picture like those people look like they're really having fun obviously oh Snap Monopoly Monopoly is a game unlike candy land you make decisions in Monopoly But they don't really matter all that much. Yeah, if you know if you're an adult You can count Monopoly is pretty much just a random game. Monopoly is bad at ending Because yeah, the perfect sport on earth is tennis tennis is like the perfect game Just all across the board a game of tennis if you're still playing tennis you still have a chance to win match point I could still win theoretically as soon as it's over and you cannot possibly win you stop playing at that moment in Monopoly It's over way before it's over You know who's already won But if they want to actually win they're gonna have to sit there for two more hours And that's a big problem which is my strategy because if I'm hanging on to spin it around hanging out in Jail for three hours and Scott gets so fed up that believes I win So Monopoly is bad for all these reasons Monopoly doesn't actually end when it should end so people have fun memories of playing Monopoly And then they go back and try to play it and takes forever and they quit or flip the table over or whatever it is So Monopoly What's it good at Why do people still talk about Monopoly? Why does everyone still play Monopoly? Well, how do we keep forgetting? Well, the theme of Monopoly is really cool I actually like the iron and the dog and the car. I think they changed them all now. You're old It's all different stuff Monopoly doesn't good about Monopoly as a kid Monopoly taught me Matt Monopoly taught me that games can be solved Monopoly was the point and a lot of you might experience this when you play family board game night Know your things and then you start to win because you figured out how to play Monopoly and then suddenly then your little brother Don't want to play anymore Monopoly teaches you that games can reward you for skill Monopoly teaches you all this stuff and Everyone learns Monopoly from their parents. You didn't read the rulebook. If you read the rulebook, you know the free parking doesn't do anything Monopoly also has other social uses right pretty much anyone you meet that's in the United States at least knows how to play Monopoly or Kind of mostly knows enough that you could bust it out and play it So if there's ever some sort of social situation where board game is appropriate and the people aren't necessarily open to Catan or whatever You can monopoly will get the job done Long shot. So if you listen to this point, you know, we kind of craft on Monopoly because you know, it's doesn't really have a good skill input It's not really like you can't say I'm better than you in Monopoly because I win Monopoly. I'm better than you at wasting my time Long shot is a completely random game. You're just betting on horses, right? You just don't need to use actual horses. You're just like come on Right so when you play we but someone busted this game out of the party and we're like, what is this? Just betting on horses. Is this going to be exciting? Yeah, it was crazy exciting Right ponies were in seasons like my little Tony just came out. So we're like, come on rainbow dash. Let's go Give names to all these guys. Right. All you do is literally bet on the horses So it's not really a good game because like you make decisions, but they don't matter Right that horse could just pull from the rear all the way to the front with the other horses not even moving So you don't have anything to know what to bet on you just sort of bet and cheer So it's the game that's bad at ranking players. It's bad at testing skills. It's good at being super fun late at night a little drunk Dungeons and Dragons If you're interested in what we're about to say we have two versions of a lecture we call beyond Dungeons and Dragons So we've done it many penny arcade expos in the past. I love Dungeons and Dragons Dungeons and Dragons I don't I don't love it so much. It was the last time you played Dungeons and Dragons taught me the role-playing games Exits Dungeons and Dragons was a formative part of the first decade and a half of my sentient child Dungeons and Dragons. I've many fond memories of but it is a terrible system to use to role-play If you ever look, yeah, okay You know just to summarize some of the things we say in the other panel right if you look at the Character sheet of Dungeons and Dragons. I don't know about fifth edition ever played that right But I'm pretty sure it holds true there highlight all the parts of the character sheet have to do with fighting And see how much of the sheet is covered in highlighter Pretty much the whole sheet Dungeons and Dragons is a turn-based fantasy combat simulator And all it has in the instruction book that has to do with role-playing is like one sentence. This is oh, by the way You should probably roll play It's a really simple framework and you can use it to you know have a role-playing game yourself conflict and push Your story forward, but it really only excels if you're telling the exact kind of story that it wants to tell Which is basically world of Warcraft raid So if you want to actually role-play and tell stories do not use this go and find unless your story is we're going into a dungeon And we're attacking a bunch of monsters and they're gonna overcome a challenge to slay the dragon sure that's a boring story Have you ever liked that story? I've liked that story on occasion. Yeah, okay There are many many thousands of RPGs indie RPGs out there just like in the video games that Each one is tailored to a specific story So figure out the kind of story that you want to tell with your friends and then go and find the game that tells That story and play that yep I mean if you want elven court drama this game does not give you a lot to make that elven court drama happen cards against humanity so Apples to apples was sort of the first iteration of this in popular gamer culture and apples to apples was a broken game because it was fun Until everyone had a hand of the names of celebrities. They didn't recognize And if you play them it's like well no one knows that celebrity is so you don't get a point Usually played apples to apples either late at night at convention or with your family and the only time you actually had fun Is when someone put out the one really inappropriate answer right well in some ways apples to apples was more clever than cards against humanity Because it would be just as dirty But it would always have to use innuendo because the cards literally were so clean cards against humanity was like we're throwing out That innuendo so my first reaction to seeing cards against humanity was like okay So it's intentionally dirty apples to apples did is going all explicit and I was like there's no way that can be like as funny Because they're not being all intelligent and subtle with their you know dirty humor. They're just coming out with it But no it's way more funny than apples So we're not saying it's bad as a game I mean I've had a lot of fun with cards against humanity is a big part of our convention culture It's bad at being a game that you should play more than once or twice a year If you play this game at every packs You're gonna be really bored with this game in a couple years if you play this game You're not out of packs. You're gonna hate this game I think there was a packs when it was really hot. We played it maybe three times We're playing in the Omega Thonline where you all should be. I don't know why you still haven't listened to me And you know then it was like still funny But most of the cards just like all right seen this card before seen this card before I think you know Dead babies isn't funny the hundredth time or even the third time You're implying that the second time it was hilarious Sure. Yeah, it was all right So you have to keep buying expansions But even then even if you get the expansion in there how often you get draw the expansion card How often is it actually gonna be funny? So it's a good game that very rapidly becomes a bad game if you play it a lot It's a game. That's very bad at being a game that you continue to own Yahtzee Or has anyone played Yahtzee? Okay. All right good. Most convention we go to people don't know how to play Yahtzee And that's really a big problem. Yahtzee is a competitive test of skill. Yahtzee is a straightforward skill game Yahtzee is completely random if you're smart Alright, so the thing with Yahtzee like many games is people argue like it's a skill game And it is because if I have more skills than you at Yahtzee, I am very likely to win But once everyone knows how to play Yahtzee properly and has the same level of skill you can't really get better There's a skill cap as a point at which a human being can easily if you are reasonably intelligent play Yahtzee perfectly And then at that point the winner will be determined by the rolling of the dice So me and Ram will be play Yahtzee It's gonna be like one out of two who wins because dice. Yeah, well we did there was a play with some little kid who can't even add I'm probably gonna beat them every time. There was that website where you play Yahtzee And it compares every action you take to a perfect bot that would play Yahtzee And then it tells you how statistically perfectly you play Yahtzee. We're like 98% like we're good Yeah, everyone we tried was like 98% perfect at Yahtzee. So Yahtzee is a great game to get good at games Everyone who goes to a packs and plays tabletop games should be able to just do Yahtzee type games basically perfectly You know how to make combos and do your stuff figure out the risk-reward ratio of going for the Yahtzee or not or giving up on chance So Yahtzee is good at that. It's a game. That's really good and becomes bad once you're smart A few people aren't laughing Oh, I guess we messed up the panel I got the wrong slide here Soccer is bad because diving Soccer is a game Soccer or football is a game where a very in the high levels of play a very small number of points determines the game One to zero is a common score. So the value of a point is extreme Simultaneously, it's extremely hard to score points But use way to score a point is on the penalty kick if you look statistically like an absurd number of goals in very important Soccer games on penalty kicks. It's actually quite rare to just score just while playing soccer normally All right Some and a lot of those scores that aren't on a penalty kick are because the other team had a red card They were missing a player or something like that You know some very important player was injured not to say there is no skill in soccer if you look statistically like Ronaldo You know the best soccer player to exist on earth right now If you look yeah, he scores a ton of goals, right? It's not just like a feeling you have what no mathematically. He is way way better than anyone else but Diving matters a ton in soccer if you can convince the referee to give your team a penalty kick because you fake turning your leg Acting skill can matter just as much as kicking skill No, simultaneously because the officiating is very soft. Soccer is very much against using like instant replays and Miracle they finally put a thing in the balls. I know when it goes over the line So look at the opposite example ice hockey. I don't know how popular ice hockey is down here ice hockey They got the Dallas Stars Respectable team respectable team so still below the nice hockey there are people at the central office of the NHL Watching games and there's a problem Like the goal needs to be reviewed in the NHL There's one room where they are watching video of every hockey game all the time live and they review it not the ref at the site Not whatever they review everything that needs to be reviewed the same people. It's totally perfect You know there's a little bit of subjectiveness and penalties and whatever But you know what if you look statistically power play goals aren't even nearly close to as significant as penalty shots in Soccer the reason for that is a game design reason because soccer is soft officiating the punishment for your average attempt to dive Is practically zero so diving is like the optimal strategy because it's like if it gives you a penalty kick game over man So meanwhile in hockey shirt. There's soft officiating in the penalties There's so many penalties and they're kind of split 50-50 between both teams that it all sort of Right also a penalty shot is very rare in hockey most often you just get a power play Which is a very short amount of time, you know, they don't just get to shoot on the goal You have to actually play hockey and you can defend plus if you are on the power play Right if you're if you're a penalty killing you can just ice the puck So you like you get this extra defensive boost to counter attack the fact that you're a man down So the rules of soccer push the game toward diving being a legitimate and powerful strategy If you remove that from soccer soccer would be an amazing game absolutely amazing so So It's gonna be real here. I hope no one in the room is a weight race walker And I know there was a PAX keynote where you're not supposed to shit on anyone else's joy I'm gonna shit all over race walk And it deserves it race walking is a sports Technically where you walk as fast as possible And by walking the rules are that you have to keep your front legs straight and at least one foot has to be touching That's the difference between you know like a horse a horse has like a gallop in a tree You know about horses in Texas, right? So horses have different gates a human has different gates to We have walking we have walking skipping jogging running just like you know a horse, right? So all of them except for walking involve at some point during the leg motion Both feet being off the ground at the same time when you skip you have a little jump when you jog You sort of have that moment where you switch legs and there's a time period and they were both legs And when you run you're basically jumping forward, right with each step only with walking are both feet always on the ground at all times Or at least one of the two is on the ground. So and people might have already noticed this thought what's going on here? What is going on there zoom and enhance? That is the picture on Wikipedia about race walking It turns out that everyone cheats at race walking because if you truly walk and keep one at least one foot on the ground at all times There's a limit to how fast you can go obviously you can calculate it by the length of your legs So race walking without cheating would simply be a leg measuring contest who has the longest leg We can do that a little bit faster with a tape measure. We can indeed. I mean you might get tired if the race walk is really long Okay, it is actually pretty tiring Sure be fair it is but depending on the marathon length the rules are very very small Can we talk about bad officiating and soccer? Soccer is fine compared to this the judges are not allowed to bend over to look more closely The judges are not allowed to use cameras. They're not allowed to use mirrors They're not allowed to use binoculars and they have to like go talk to each other and use this flag system Even detect that someone's cheating and report it up and disqualify someone and if a cheating person crosses the finish line before the judges take action They win you can't do anything about it So if you're here to finish line of a race walk just frickin sprint What are they gonna do? Race walking is an Olympic sport sellers of guitar I don't think I ever need to play sellers of guitar again. Not in my entire life. Remember Yancey well It turns out that all games all games no matter what kind of game it is Either are in one class of very test of a physical skill physical ability like a sport like Counter-Strike or No, not race walking football But all games they're either random Arbitrary which is effectively the same as random or they're mathematically solvable Chess will not likely be solved anytime soon because the math is hard checkers were solved many years ago Mathematically proven to be a draw no matter what if people are good Thank You Canada two player Limit hold them poker was solved recently like a few weeks ago All games are mathematically solvable solvable doesn't mean practically solvable right it might be such a complex game like chess that yeah Okay, it is solvable, but no computer. We own is gonna do it until we invent the quantum computer very soon But it's it's pot you can be done right you could theoretically make a computer that would win at chess No matter what or at least do as good as chess as is possible no matter what and then already exist for this one variant of poker And it already exists for a whole ton of games out there like that see or connect for And the kinds of games that you play like that was good time It is still solvable if you play settlers it feels like it's really skill-based game just like ya see But if you play this game a bunch and you pay attention to it and you start to really care about games We go to them settlers. I'm confident that we can play settlers perfectly and only thing that matters is the dice Right, so we've been to a few settlers tournaments in our day And you know in the early rounds of a settlers tournament much like the early rounds of yatsi tournament All right The people who are better at settlers will win and the people aren't any good will lose when you get to the late rounds Everyone knows how to play the game really really well So what ends up happening is the winner is determined by the role of the dice up a two got rolled And I happen to have a settlement there So I got some extra resources and that tilted the tide right in that final round of the settlers tournament look online for like Settlers championship tournaments that final game It will be nine nine nine ten the winner will have ten and every single other player will have been able to get ten if they Got to their turn Almost every time it ends like that. So settlers is still a great game I mean we played settlers for like five or six years on a regular basis All right, this game is good at being the intro to high quality board games It is bad at being the long-lasting continue to play it forever German board now yatsi You know suddenly different is like the teaching game like yatsi teaches you this really core basis skills Settlers teaches you holistic skills being able to play settlers really well Means that you have a really big advantage in every other tabletop game out there Settlers is a good game for that But it is a game that if you play a lot of tabletop games You will never want to play settlers again unless you're teaching a child Silver surfer This game is just a test of skill I mean if you lose silver surfer it's because you just suck It's the same exact the bad guys are in the same place every time they control for the same every time nothing changes All right, you can memorize it. You can get better at it. You can beat it It's it's your fault if the silver surfer has to cry Even though he sort of has the power cosmic and can't die, but he does well somehow ghosts can just kind of come over here And take him out. Yeah, even though like ridiculous cosmic beings can't it doesn't make a lot of sense Uh, but yeah, so this game is really bad The reason it's really bad not only because it doesn't make sense Is because if the silver surfer in all his great cosmic power if his surfboard touches and grazes one pixel of a rock He does The game is precious the game is arbitrary The game you can be good at and you can watch some awesome games done quick Probably if someone's just like blasting through this game Not even like in the screen that we get just like talking about like, oh, yeah, this pad and I memorized it I'll do blindfolded whatever But it's not satisfying to get good at this game because the game doesn't feel fair because while it is you can't perceive that Those pixel borders that collision everything they don't really line up. Meanwhile the game like super meat boy Super meat boy, you feel deep in your heart when you die that it was your fault and your fault alone Silver surfer and super meat boy are not really that different a game super meat boy is actually more evil The pixels are just smaller. There's more of them. And yes, you still die if you touch even one of them All right, the difference isn't super meat boy. The pixels are absolutely clear You can a hundred percent see that yep meat boy's little arm touched that giant spinning chainsaw All right, the silver surfer he'll die from a ghost even like that ghost tail didn't touch me Because the hitboxes are all messed up All right, and in that way super meat boy feels like hard but fair Like you won't be super angry throwing your controller unless you have anger issues silver surfer You're not going to get best screen one Now there's another thing here There's the idea of like if you beat a game you get a reward Like you feel good about the game rewards doing some fashion when you lose you sort of punch you're set back If you fail at a game a whole bunch and then succeed The difference between your top and your bottom is how good you feel Beating a hard game feels better than beating an easy game But this game is so hard that you'll bottom out. You'll just give up Super meat boy gets around that by rewarding you in a unique way. What happens every time you die It remembers that path you took So if you put a thousand meat boys into something You don't want to give that up. You want to see those thousand meat boys All go through the level at once and coalesce into the one motherfucker who made it That is why I will play super meat boy until four in the morning because I've got to finish this map But silver surfer I gave up on after I rented a blockbuster and I actually brought it back a day early Great music though. Really good music. Yeah great music Go remember when we talked about how all games can be theoretically solved It is arguable that go well go solve goes definitely solved However by brought by uh brute force alone Go is so many more orders of magnitude complex than chess That chess will not likely be solved by rock by brute force in the lifetime of anyone in this room And go may not be solvable in the projected lifespan of the universe You might need to create a computer That is in fact the size of an entire universe in order to solve go by brute force alone at least All right, you would need to do some sort of you know hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy level stuff Where you use the entire universe as a computer in order to calculate the solution go go as a game with a fantastic history It is a great game. I'm not trying to say goes a bad game except this is the bad games battle And I'm about to say it's a bad game go does a shit job of teaching you how to play it Go gives no heuristics. It gives you no directional heuristic. You've got a piece down How do you decide where to put the next piece some go expert says yeah, you should do that and you start to just learn Over time you can put a piece and go anywhere on your turn at any of the vertices should you put it out in the middle Of nowhere should have put near the existing pieces if you put it near the existing pieces where right? You can put it literally any move is open to you So how do you know if you're doing a good move or a bad move usually most games video or otherwise Sort of give you some sort of hint like oh you lost victory points doing that Oh, you came victory points doing that. Oh, you did that. Here's a bunch of money Oh, I guess that was a good move and go you put a stone on the board And then 10 turns later all your souls are off the board. You're like, how did that happen? Where did I go wrong 20 turns ago? But simultaneously look at a game like sellers even though sellers is reasonably complex I mean humans can't just run this full state of the game in their brain 100% With like all the odds and everything at once, but when you're playing sellers You at least intuitively have some basic heuristics like building settlements gets me points Scott has more settlements than me. He's doing better than me. That guy's one road away from longest rogue He's got two soft points hanging out in there. I did this thing and I just got a whole bunch more resource cards That was a good move. Yeah Go doesn't give you any of that go gives you no human intelligible feedback Unless you dedicate your life to it. Yeah people who are good at go Usually what they do is they study books. They're books that tell you how to be good at go and they memorize patterns And they can't memorize the whole thing obviously, but they can memorize areas So there's like they'll see something happening somewhere on the board They'll remember the book that had that pattern and what they're supposed to do about it And then in that area, they will make that move that they remember from the book So two good go players is like two good street fighter players They are working on this higher level where I start pattern a and this other guy like response Who was others pattern and oh that was a bluff and it's really crazy But to us who don't play go a lot and you look at it and it makes no sense to us We can't even understand the level they're working at Go you basically it's bad at letting you play other games Because you have to play just go to get to that point you have to play just street fighter to get to that point I don't have time for that mario Much like mario card Yeah, much like El Toro Rosa again. Yeah, okay much like go Mario kart is bad at heuristics now. Wait a minute mario kart gives you heuristics right there You spin out. You know, you did something wrong. You're in first place, which it just tells you, you know, you're doing something good Well, that is true, but at the same time mario kart lies Who's in first place? It's not the guy in first place. It's the guy in second place because of the blue shell If the guy in second place is actually pretty close to the guy in first place The blue shell might hit both of those guys and third place is actually first place So mario kart is a game that is super fun to play because it sort of evens out all the skill And mario kart is a great game But if you want to have a competition like you want to say I am better at racing game than you and you leave the items on Mario kart really feels bad for the people who are actually good at mario kart And the worst mario kart player in your friend group will often win because everyone else attacks each other constantly He has the blue shell and then he gets the lightning bolt and then just blast past at the end on rainbow road Whatever if you want to play mario kart where driving skill actually matters There is the mario kart that is the least appreciated Which is mario kart super circuit for the gba People do not remember this game because it was gba mario kart obviously and most of the maps are just from the snes one But in gba mario kart if you drive perfectly 100 perfectly you drift around every corner You never touch the brakes you make every jump you never touch the wall You never go off-road and the blue shell or red shell is fired It will hover behind your ass And it will not touch you as long as you continue to drive absolutely 100% perfectly And if you continue to do so either to the end of the race or long enough It will eventually just give up and say all right. Fuck it And because of that I win a lot of mario kart super circuit almost all the time and I hardly ever win Any other mario kart mario kart is bad at getting your friends who are good at mario kart to actually want to play it with you So mall of horror This there's a lot of board games like this tons of board games like this in fact arguably Every board game that has more than two players Or more than two teams and allows player interaction is the same as this game because this game is highly political Political is a term you can steal from a richard garfield's book Characteristics of games the idea is that in mall of horror you basically go into rooms and then you vote someone out of the room They get eaten by zombies Yeah, the zombies outside. So it's like you're in the security zone. You're like, all right We're we're holed up in this office, but in order to escape this room We're going to need to feed someone to the zombies and run past. Who's it going to be? But there's more than two people So you vote on all the people in the room vote and then they send someone out So these games can all be boiled down to something called the balloon popping game So you have a bunch of people we won't try to play it interactively here So as we do that say you have four people and everyone has three balloons on your turn pick one person And pop their balloon the last person with balloons wins That means the person who is least hated by everyone else in the room is the one who's going to win It's a vote who wins game and this is the vote who wins game. So is risk the vote who wins game Yup It doesn't matter how well you attack the math of when you should attack and when you don't attack and risk is solved Risk is mostly a solved game risk is a terrible game But if you attack someone you can think of your score as i of plus one and scott as minus one because I attacked scott If my friend pete then attack scott scott's at minus two me and peter now doing better Right, so him and pete both attack me. They pop two of my balloons. I'm down to one balloon I'm gonna lose not because i'm better or worse at risk than they are because they pop my balloons because there's nothing Who wins game there's very rarely in all these political games where there's more than two players One person's not winning. They're already mathematically limited doesn't matter But they still have to play the game. They're gonna get in your way They're gonna take that worker slot that you needed in lores and water team They're gonna hit you with that green shell. They're gonna attack you because they don't want you to win They're gonna lose a game right for ram like I did yesterday Or two days ago Yeah, think about if pete and ram both pop my balloons now I have no chance of winning But I still have to play I can basically decide who wins. I'm still playing I can still pop balloons Right, but I'm losing so I'm gonna pop rims balloons pete wins I just decide p1 why because I said so yep All games that aren't two players or two teams where players interact are political games in some level this will happen You've seen it happen Well of horror is a bad game because it's so pure that it is literally just an iterative popularity contest At least riz tries to cover it up Counter strike is one of my favorite games and it's just a head clicking simulator Heuristic one you want to be good at counter strike heuristic one played for 20 years Heuristic to be young so young when you're three so you can be good at 23 your reaction times peak 22 23 is all downhill from there Like that's that's true. You're screwed. Yeah number three memorize every map a hundred percent memorize your corners Where exactly should you point the crosshair everywhere you go in every map and for just be able to flick and click on heads If you do those things you can be pro counter strike and make money If you like clicking on heads counter strikes a great game It's amazing if you don't have time for that shit counter strike is a terrible game or if you're old So team fortress 2 solves all those problems Counter strike has a really high skill cap. You have to it's like go But on a smaller scale you have to dedicate yourself to counter strike the fps is to be good at it Once you are good at counter strike if you have a whole team of people who can click on heads What separates them everyone's good at clicking on heads everyone knows the map everyone's young So what happens the winner is determined by team works and strategies and those sorts of things. Yeah, oh, we went left They went right recovered bombside b. They went to bombside a I threw the smoke. We had a cool strategy. It was all fun For most pub games, especially just playing with many people on the internet if one guy's just better at clicking on heads He just walks around like neo just popping everyone with his cc No amount of teamwork can stop someone who can actually click on heads if you cannot also click on heads So team fortress 2 Kind of made baby mode team fortress They pulled the fps strike skill cap baby mode fps They pulled the skill cap way down. You can be a perfect sniper You can play this game perfectly as a person everyone's moving really slow All the character models are really big. All the weapons are really inaccurate small numbers of weapons Small numbers of options in the players cool down times limited ammo the game made sure that even if I Am the god of team fortress 2 if my team is uncoordinated We'll lose. I don't have that much personal input into the game. No matter how well you can click on heads It's not going to matter that much. You can get a random crit on someone and you'll die. Oh, it happens That makes it a great game for anyone who doesn't want to spend their entire life being good at counter strike In regular team fortress or anyone is really old Yeah, can't click on heads anymore because suddenly because we pulled the skill cap of that one piece down All the other pieces get visible the tide came down. You see all the gold hanging out there Suddenly the strategy that the counter strike people do of two people go this way one person go this way faint with the decoy grenade Come back around all that fun stuff Everybody can do that in team fortress Everybody it's a bad game for people like me who remember games like this Team fortress 2 is the sequel to team fortress classic, which is the sequel to team fortress mega team fortress The peak complexity and the peak skill cap of all those games was a game called weapons factory There's a mod for quick 2 It's like team fortress. Isn't it played weapons factory anyone in this room those two people laughed over that so imagine if team fortress 2 were 40 times faster If the character models were 10 times smaller if the maps were 10 times bigger If everyone had a grappling hook and could move around in three dimensions all the time like crazy If every character had like nine fucking weapons and they were all way different The marine can throw a turret and he's got like two different kinds of rocket launchers and another weird grenade And to use all these weapons you have to write in the quake scripting language in your terminal to configure buttons for all of them Yeah, uh quick quick one had offhand grenades hit a button grenade pops out quake 2 did not have that Anyone who's good at this game wrote a script with weight statements that would switch weapons throw a grenade switch back And if you didn't do that you could not play pro A Pretty good player at this game would be able to throw a grenade such that it would land on your feet Bouncing you into the air or you would come in contact with the grenade. They shot before they came in the room This game was so complex And the individual skill cap was so high that back when I was a young man and I would actually do stuff like this If I played on a puppy here, it'd be like a recon I would just fly around the ceiling with a grappling hook and everything going crazy Just like killing people. No one could stop me. I was the invisible neo One dude could carry an entire team regardless of strategy if he was just that good However, much like go no one has time to learn a game like that. This game is not fun for anyone who isn't a ridiculous nerve So this is a better game for 80 90 percent of humans This is a better game for crazy people and this is a better game for old crazy people but For the reasons we just explained you're never going to see team fortress 2 taken seriously as an esport Right because there's no sport in it. It's it's down to you know, non-sport activities Yep I mean if you want to learn team fortress 2 just start playing you'll figure it out learn the script To start So tribes to the greatest game that has ever existed. I don't know how many of you have played tribes terms really cute Oh good. Whoa. We got some awesome people in this room. Thanks to you know, we're at the penny our gate expo, right Until recently like the last few several years tribes 2 was talked about a lot On penny arcade There are many many penny arcade comics About this game that is completely forgotten by most people I don't think you understand how important two gamers tribes 2 was when it was out No game has ever really been like tribes 2 Uh, I don't want to get into all the details about why this game was amazing But nothing else has ever been like it tribes 2. However Back when penny arcade did the we're right awards won the saddest award ever Best game until they fucked it up Tribes 2 one of the things it had is a forum built into the game So every player in the game had a forum account It wasn't like the counter strike forum We had to be dedicated and go seek it out on the web All right, the official forum was built into the game So everyone could easily go when they're in school read your own tribes email address in the game Just to talk about the game. It was amazing So people went in there and they said the things that you should change about tribes Players know what's best to do in a game, right? Make skiing easier Make the weapons bigger make more automatically enter a vehicle when I buy it So I can't buy one for my friend to get in So what happened is they fucked it up They did a lot of those things they the community was saying he made changes And they actually paid attention to what the community wanted And it turns out that most people are in the gaming community are not game designers Tribes 2 Eventually fractured into a million different servers Every one of us was running some bullshit mod that broke the game And you didn't really know how it worked No one play tested this stuff and then simultaneously the game and DRM Related to central servers Yeah, the servers are gone Long gone There are some ways to play it, but it's with great difficulty You want to play this game today? Download an exe file from a dude. I swear it's legit Tribes 2 was bad at continuing to exist Adventure games are just movies You click and the movie keeps going I love adventure games I loved that game But you just clicked to see more of Star Wars Imagine if you were watching Lord of the Rings in the movie theater And every five minutes it stopped and it said here's a trivia question If you choose right we'll show you more of the movie If not we'll show you like a five second clip and then you'll have to start from the beginning Or at least come back to this trivia question Now there are adventure games that had branching stories Decisions mattered Or they punish you in some way You die the world would change and all that But most adventure games Were pretty much just click until you succeed Maybe it makes you restart because you died Or maybe it just says some funny joke They're games, we're not saying they're not games But they're not orthogames They're not skill games You're not going to do a competitive speed run of this Kind of want to see that Maybe you could, yeah I think that's, yeah, no, AGDQ get on that They're not IQ games They're not like a series of interesting decisions Because the decisions aren't pushing the game a different direction If you fail to solve a puzzle It's the same as Mario Fallen in the Pit So there's no skill and there's no branching It's just a movie It's an interactive experience It's a hilarious interactive experience It's an amazing interactive experience But it's just an interactive experience Watching an adventure game on YouTube is 99% as good as playing it yourself Right In fact I'd recommend if you want a pirate old adventure games Watch Walkthroughs, watch Let's Plays That's the same as playing them Almost the same Almost the same Pandemic is an awful goddamn game This game is garbage I'm not even going to hold back Pandemic is completely awful So on the surface, pandemic is supposed to be this co-op game Where you work together with your friends To sort of save the world from the horrible virus In reality, it's a game it's solitary game One person saves the world from a horrible virus One person among your friends who is best at pandemic Pandemic is bad at being a cooperative game The thing that it's trying to be Because the rules are set up such that It's a cooperative game Not game theory cooperative Which is an entirely different kind of game But like me and Scott We're trying to beat the board together Because of the way the game works There's no real communication rules Or other games like Shadows over Camelot Similar game Same problem Battles over Galactica Same problem Same problem Those games give these soft bullshit rules Like you can't say the card you got in your hand But you can kind of wink it not a notch Like I'm feeling good I'm feeling too good about this hand right now Yeah, yeah I'm feeling I'm feeling pretty blue Oh, on my hands I'm also feeling blue and really sad I'm too sad Sad equals blue I have two blue cards Right, so I mean That's the one thing that's supposed to keep you From sort of just turning into a solitary game Is this hidden information But they don't actually prevent you from sharing it And it ends up just being solitary The other way to do that Is what the new XCOM game does We played it in the last packs Where there's a timeline But there's a computer saying Space alert does the same thing Go go go You've got eight resources Spend them now Oh too late Fuck you it's gone Now the aliens are coming What do you do Like yeah You don't have time to talk with your friend And be like yeah Three three resource aliens killed you You know XCOM works I was the like CEO Whatever So I'm dilling out money Right The money I pass around Doesn't mean anything Scott says I need four money I say you get three Deal with it And then If I spend the four money It's spent He can spend it And at the end of the round That money tokens that he's using Those are just helpful They're not the real deal You calculate at the end of the round How much money you spent And if you went over budget Oh Scott spent more money Than he said he did Because he was in a hurry He didn't listen to rim Oh yeah you guys are fucked now The other game that solves this problem perfectly Is to field this yarn Winning Hanabi The greatest co-op game to ever exist Hanabi It means fireworks in Japanese The way Hanabi works If you haven't played it Is everyone gets a hand of cards And you are simply trying to play the cards In order In the different colors Like one red One green Two red One blue And there's five colors And you're just trying to count to five In each color You hold your hand Facing all the other players You never see your own hand You may not look at the own cards In your own hand But you have to play them And the game has very strict rules On your turn you either Play a card Sight unseen Throw away a card Sight unseen Or spend a token To tell someone One of two things about their hand Rim you have Three blue cards Three blue cards All right All right Why would Scott have told me that? So Scott You have One red card Oh I do That one All right All right It's my turn again Yep I'm gonna play this red card That I haven't seen ever in my life I hope it's the next one we need to play See what happened there I'm gonna find the first crude Why would I tell Scott about that Fucking red card right then and there Unless I had some reason for it That game Is a true cooperative game You're all trying to raid each other's minds And the rules are very explicit You can say the number or the color Of a set of cards someone has And that's it Right And it costs an action And you can't conceal right So Rim had three blue cards I can't be like you have one blue card When he has three Scott wants to play this one He can't say you have one blue card Cause he has three I have to say all three I can't be like yeah that one If he has three ones And I wanted to play one of them I just gotta be like well you have three ones Harabi and XCOM Are the only good cooperative tabletop games I've ever seen Space Alert's okay Space Alert's pretty good The problem with Space Alert is You need to be much smarter Everyone needs to know how to program a computer Fine Harabi and XCOM Are the only great co-op games I've ever seen Okay sure Pandemic literally just becomes One guy knows what's going on And so if the person who's good Like says oh do that What are you gonna do Are you gonna say no man I'm doing something different So I'm gonna make us lose I'm gonna do a worse move Cause I wanna do my own turn There's a little bit of world man Who are not good at RTSs Baked in here MOBAs Well it depends There's a lot of things wrong with MOBAs MOBAs have the go problem They don't give good feedback Because At least the ones that are out now Yeah most of the MOBAs that are out today It's very difficult to learn how to play them Without reading guides That fans wrote Explaining the math Or having someone who knows What they're doing Sitting down and literally teaching you Walk here, do this Stand exactly there For five minutes Then back up and stand exactly here For five minutes If you fuck up The magic route From the magic route It reappears every exactly this many seconds So every that many seconds You have to go over and take a look And see which one it is And make sure there's no one else trying to get it Yup So they're great games If you learn them They don't teach you how to play them They hide the information you need To get good at them And as her And because they're competitive They're ranked There's leaderboards If you fuck up at all You get kicked You're gone No but if you I mean you play Those of you who play MOBAs If someone on your team is just feeding How bad do you feel? How do you feel about them as a person? And often And the games that try to punish you for leaving Like in Dota It's like well I can't kick them Because I'll get in trouble for that For you know But what am I supposed to do? Just stay here and lose until we're done It's like I'll just rage quit That's fine You know it punishes you for that too So it basically forces you to sit there And suffer with the rest of a bad game MOBAs are bad at getting new people To play them Who don't have that too Yeah somehow they have the most They somehow have the most players of like in a game Somehow It's some kind of miracle Quite a reaction from the crowd here on this one MOBAs are bad at something else This might sound kind of Kind of off key here MOBAs are bad at being spectator sports Despite being the biggest spectator sport in all of gaming right now Oh well I guess football is gaming Sure Yeah hockey is gaming Right MOBAs are bad at being spectator sports Unless you know how they work If I watch a MOBA that I've never played And the crowd starts cheering And usually like nothing happened on the screen I can't tell what's going on They're only great spectator sports If someone next to you is like Yes okay And then they explain what happened So it's the same thing We were at the big League of Legends area At PAX Prime And there was you know big game going on Whatever everyone's watching it And you saw some crazy stuff happen on the screen And some people cheered like yeah And there's a delay Or a whole bunch of other people cheered All right You go to football game You ever see a touchdown Or like three people are like yes And then everyone else is like oh It was like okay Now people know it's a touchdown They can tell But football has that too Like say I don't know about football and scout does We're sitting here and like They're setting up for an outside kick Like something weird's about to happen in football And I don't know No until they kicked in Yeah like you suspect Like you suspect like Like you suspect like this is not the situation They might do the crazy thing Something cool is going to happen So the expert football person Is going to be like Hey something cool might happen They must start explaining like Why this thing's exciting It's the same thing with MOBAs MOBAs are only exciting To people who don't play them When they're watching them If someone else is pumping them off And telling them what's going on And getting them going The breakout for eSports Is going to be the accessible spectator game Come on here is in the storm Don't suck Doesn't have to be accessible to players Please don't suck It only has to be accessible to spectators Some hard story time Story time right Story time How I ever told you No I haven't about the vanilla coke We were at Isn't the vanilla coke So I was going to say that for the end No No So So so so There was a game You know the game store There was a Yu-Gi-Oh turn The game store owned A lot of Yu-Gi-Oh cards This was in early days of Yu-Gi-Oh Relatively speaking in the US Like 2000-2001 There weren't that many Yu-Gi-Oh cards The store owned Every Yu-Gi-Oh card there was to own Because it was a game store So some people got together Some friends of ours And they borrowed The best possible deck from the game store They made the best Most expensive amazing Yu-Gi-Oh deck You could possibly conceivably make And they entered it into the tournament And they got our champion here To play the deck There was no player At all The cards played themselves They had They set up some sort of rule structure Like every turn it will draw And then it will play a card If it can play It'll play like each card If it can play it going this direction In its deck And like it's really simple rules And they set up a little simple rule set For how it would play And the vanilla coke just obeyed that rule set And played that very expensive Yu-Gi-Oh deck And came in second place I hope I don't need to tell you Why pay-to-win games are a bad idea Because ostensibly you're playing a game For some enjoyment But is it enjoyable to lose Because you didn't spend enough money? The grand champion of Yu-Gi-Oh is Bill Gates The grand champion of Magic the Gathering Might be Bill Gates Well, but look at how Magic the Gathering Fixed that Yes, you can collect magic cards You can play those kind of tournaments Most people play drafts Most people play the formats That remove the money factor Because they know the money factor is bullshit There's also a bit of rock, paper, scissors You might bring really expensive deck A If someone brings really expensive deck B And you lose to it That kind of thing goes on So there's another kind of free-to-play game Someone topical here You're gonna be blunt These games are bad and They're bad at being ethical That's how I want to describe it Because these games And if you saw the South Park If you didn't, you should watch it They just trick you Into having just enough fun to keep playing These games are fucking bad And you should not play them These are the games that people play I've seen studies People play these kinds of games More often when they're depressed When they have psychological issues When things are going on These games suck the life out of you And they're designed to Now Borderlands is quite similar In fact, to many of these pay-to-win games It's just instead of paying with money You pay with time Right? Oh, I'm not gonna get all my Farmville farm Way boosted up by paying money I'm gonna get my Borderlands gear Boosted up by sitting around shooting skull What do they go? Skaggs? Skaggulch Hanging out in Skaggulch Borderlands 1? For an hour Yeah, that'll work You hang out in Skaggulch Yeah Spent a lot of time in Skaggulch Borderlands 1 was a perfect example of this Because it had all the problems that MMOs That Stiefel games have In a game that didn't have to have those problems I'd level up with Scott And then I would play with my friend Phil Oh, he's only level 4 We both have to start over I guess we gotta go back to Skaggulch again We gotta go level up again Well, I couldn't I just make a character at the level I needed Who's hurt by that? Who's hurt if they just let me make a character At any level I want to make a character? Because I'm just playing with my friends There's no central server It's not like I'm like doing the raid It's not like just some world competition Just let me choose my level If we're gonna have levels, just let me choose it And then anyone can play with anyone at any time So these games have that feedback cycle With their loot And simultaneously they enforce the Statefulness of an MMO without actually being an MMO So they take all these things that could be good Mash them together And then take all the bad baggage of all those things You could have made a game Removed some baggage And the game would have just objectively been better And have hurt no one If you ever played WarioWare for the GameCube That is the greatest party game to ever exist Maybe It's pretty close It's pretty good Right You basically play the micro games And you get the disco mode The turtle mode The... What was the other mode? It is versus WarioWare Four players, you're all playing micro games Alternatingly or at the same time And it's crazy Nintendo didn't seem to realize why that game was popular Because WarioWare is a single player experience They realized it was popular because they made another one Yeah But they didn't realize why They made this sequel on the Wii The Wii had that controller That could have been the holy grail of party games There's no multiplayer in that game Well there is But it doesn't really count There is There is technically multiplayer in that game Yeah, you couldn't all use the Wii mode to play a thing at the same time There was like one Wii mode and like passing it around And multiplayer modes in that were garbage This game was bad at being the sequel it should have been There's another example of this Actraiser Actraiser on the SNES It's sim medieval town Sim God And it's side scroller go fight And you power up the side scroller by playing God And Actraiser 1 is a classic all time favorite game Why? Because the town part The town part was so amazing No one cared about the side scroller The sword part That was the like oh I have to play this in order to get to this next town I wanted to do the town part Actraiser 2 no town part Just the sword part These games you're all playing this You're all playing this This game is the same as this game We call them candy boxes Go online This is your homework Type candy box into you into Google And play candy box Every second you get one candy Just wait Just wait Games where there's no incremental cost to taking an action Are usually bad Because you can just take an infinite number of those actions Time games So yeah When you see a game that has a license You know usually a movie a game a TV show The reason they went and paid for a license Because they don't think their game can hold up on its own They think you know If we want to sell this thing We're gonna have to you know get adventure time fans to buy it If this didn't have you know Finn and Jake on the cover Who would buy this game If it was made up characters we just invented Nobody Because it's a bad game All the adventure time games specifically Are lazily and badly designed The first five minutes seem well designed And then the rest is just literal garbage These games are awful Unequivocably awful And you can pretty much assume That any game that's based on some IP Is gonna be awful Because the exceptions The internet will tell you about them Everybody realized High Fighter was a good game Pretty early on So yeah If you see some licensed game You should be highly skeptical No matter how much you love that license Some guy came to me and was like You love Mega Man, right? This is a Mega Man board game Aren't you excited? I'm like no I am very not excited about that That is going to be bad Until proven otherwise We're running out of time We gotta get to the point So the controversial Virtual part of this panel We're gonna skip But Kickstarter table top games Are almost always really bad And the Omegathon also has some problems Even though you should be at it But what's the point of this whole panel? If you're gonna shit on someone's job If you're gonna say That the game that your friend likes is a bad game Play the game Understand what the game is bad at And then articulate that Say why it's bad Give them an hour long talk About why it's bad And keep calling them back When they keep hanging up on you If the only thing that you can say When you don't like this game Your friend is playing Is like that game sucks It's a waste of time You shouldn't play it Then you really don't have anything do you Right? You saw how much info we had to lay down When we wanted to hate on the game Right? I could go on all day about it Any of these games sucks I could give you a two-hour lecture On freaking Simon's Quest Right? Study games You can't do that Keep your mouth shut These games are bad But they're not bad for the reasons Everyone says they're bad They're bad for very specific mechanical reasons I like these games And you're probably gonna say They're bad games I'm not personally offended If someone says a thing you like is bad And backs it up You have to agree with them If they're right I like a lot of bad games It's okay to like a bad game Don't flip out when someone says That your game is poorly designed A lot of people take things personally They're like, if I say Adventure Link is bad Someone out there who really loves Adventure Link Thinks that I'm saying Because that is bad That they are bad Because they like it And that is not true I like a lot of bad things as well And if you say they are bad I will say yes they are bad But I like them Because that is the person who I am And I know that you do not think That I'm a bad person Because I like this bad thing And last and not least Most importantly If you like a game Like a candy box And you can't articulate Why you like it Specifically What's good about it A lot of people are mad Like, oh, pandemic is a bad game What do you like about pandemic And how much fun do you actually have playing it Think about that If you can't say why a game you like is a good game It's probably a bad game And it's probably doing something to you We are out of time And bags is over No If you have questions When you want to see videos Of all our other talks about this stuff Grab one of these things On our YouTube channel We will not be able to talk to you Up in the front of the room Because we do have to let the enforcers Clear this out As quickly as possible Also, as you can hear I'm losing my voice Frappity El Toro Rosso Is not as powerful as you thought And I highly suggest That you go and see if there's room In the Omega 5 finale Because the Omega 5 is a good game To watch Let's get my camera We're gonna take more time for the problem