 So, let's go in a totally different direction. Poor Luigi. Let's talk about ortho games. So, Candyland. Candyland, as we talked about yesterday, I almost called this a pseudo game, because it's not a game in the sense that, I mean, it's interactive, it's interactive amusement, but players have no input in this game whatsoever. The definition of all the games we're talking about at this point now are ortho games, Richard Garfield's definition of games in this context. Competitions, trying to win. The games that the Grognar gamers are yelling at you about, not a game, think of as games. So, matchmaking is one interesting area where losing matters. Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, and many games where there are teams and you can play the games online have this problem. It's a problem around losing. If I'm on a team with three other people and we're doing pretty well, we're going to keep playing together. We're having fun. We've formed a group. And in fact, most likely I joined with a friend. So, it's me and a friend and two Randos. And eventually we form a team that's pretty good. We're having fun. We're going to keep playing all day. Meanwhile, Joey Jojo, he joins a random team and it's going to put him in a team that's not full. So, people are rage quitting. People are rage quitting constantly in these games. The teams that have a spot more often than not are going to be teams that have been losing up to this point that people have been rage quitting from. So, as a result, if you join a game through the matchmaking system you're most likely going to be put on a terrible team that's losing and then you're going to rage quit perpetuating the cycle forever. So, you can see how just that feeling of losing you might feel like the game is way hard or that everyone you play a game with is terrible and that's why you're always losing. Sometimes it's because of a meta factor. The matchmaking system isn't making the game feel that way. The matchmaking system has this sort of adverse selection. So, what about skill disparities? What about in one-on-one games? It is not fun to play against people who are good at Dota 2. You are not good at Dota 2. It is not fun to play Street Fighter against someone who's playing even one hour longer than you play. Some games handle this very well. Some games handle this very poorly. A game that handles it probably the best of any game I've ever seen is Dance Dance Revolution. Because Dance Dance Revolution has three or four depending on how old you are difficulty level or five depending on how really old you are difficulty levels. And if you play multiplayer it's competitive. You're both getting a score. But I can have the easy arrows dancing next to the person who had the difficult arrows. And while our scores may be way different scores a tiny little number on the screen. The B result at the end is your grade. So I can get an A playing the super hard level and the beginner next to me can get an A playing the super easy level but we're both dancing to the same song. So it still lets the skilled players have their really horrible competition but it doesn't make the newbie players feel shitty about playing next to those people. Meanwhile other games like for example tennis the sport of tennis or ping pong is a great example. There's a reason why ping pong will never be in the omega thong finale. If one person is even reasonably skilled at ping pong and the other person's never played it the omega thong is over in 30 seconds. So griefing. So I had a joke and I'll just go because this is my flavor of griefing. Now this did backfire on me once. I was playing Counter Strike and we won the last it was basically we were down and we caught up because they had 10, we had 9, we were counter terrorists we won the match. All we had to do was defuse the bomb and that would have been a draw as opposed to also losing. So I thought it would be really funny if I let my guy start defusing the bomb and then I knifed him to death and then I went to defuse the bomb and then I sneezed and knocked my mouse off the computer and by the time I got my wits back together it was too late. I quit before they kicked me off the server. So what is griefing? Griefing is not trolling. Trolling and griefing are two different things. Trolling is trying to get a rise out of someone in the meta context of the game. Yelling things in the Xbox Live chat typing your ridiculous racist nonsense whatever it is you kids do. All those things are trying to get a rise out of people but griefing is playing with alternate utility. Utility is that game theory term that you get out of a game. Now if I'm playing Counter Strike I'm usually trying to win. That is my utility. But at that time when I was griefing when I was that guy and I did that my primary utility was not winning my primary utility was getting a laugh. Griefing doesn't necessarily mean that you are blocking your team. Griefing just means that I am playing for a utility that is different from what everyone else is playing for. Griefing usually occurs when I'm not having fun. If I'm playing Counter Strike and I'm losing and I'm not having fun and I can't have fun by playing the game itself I might have a lot more fun team flashing and just being a dick. And now I'm winning. I'm winning and the other team's winning. Everybody's winning except the rest of my team. So the point of this is that if someone is griefing in a game that you've designed for example you need to think long and hard about why. Why is that person bored? Why does this game allow someone who is losing to grief? Why does this game even give them that affordance? Affordances are like a UX UI tunnel. Affordances are the things that you are afforded the actions you are allowed to have based on your interface. So this table it has some affordances I can flip it over. Table lets me do that. However if they chain it down then I can't. I no longer have that affordance. A bus shifter that has a glass window and affordance of that glass window is that I can't break it if I'm a vandal. But I can't really write on it. But if it's wooden I can't easily break it but now I can write on it. So games that have a lot of griefing in them either are not serving the interests of the utility of the majority of players who are playing them are poorly designed in some fashion or just have a really bad community around them. People who play the game not for the purposes of the game itself. The game's utility structure is jank. What about ending? Losing only happens when a game ends. You've played Monopoly. You lost Monopoly three hours ago. But there's two people going around in circles until someone goes home or flips the table over. So the reason games like that never end is partly because if I know I've lost I could just say let's just stop you win. However I don't say that you lost. I just keep playing. Maybe the other person's going to give up. Maybe they're going to go home and then I win. Which is just another a lot of games have this problem where the game is over but the game does not give the winner a way to end the game or it does not give the loser a way to end the game. Games need to end about at the point where the majority of the players have figured out that the game has actually ended and is over. Otherwise, this is one of the prime reasons griefing starts occurring. This is where your friend who already lost settlers starts making all these ridiculous trades with that girly likes because he lost anyway and the game's going on forever and he just wants it to end. Catching up. Now, in the previous lecture I talked about how there's no such thing as catching up in games. That literally does not exist. If you could have caught up you were never behind. You just didn't understand the game sufficiently. So even though it's illusory there's no possible way to catch up if you are behind because you aren't actually that far behind. Games still have the appearances of catching up. Power grid, initial D, all these games, those rubber bands they do things to take a player who feels like they're very far behind and at least tricks them into thinking that they still have a chance of winning or if they think that they're far behind gives them this hope that maybe they'll catch up and maybe they'll get the blue shell. It's actually very good game design to obscure the mechanics, to obscure the heuristics just enough so that players who aren't super pro and have lost a long time ago don't realize they've lost yet. That way they'll keep playing, they'll keep enjoying the game. There are two very interesting ways to do this and these two railroad games they're not crayon railroad games they're more like ticket to ride style railroad games. These are games, railroad, and age of steam. Basically the same make some trains, move cubes around, get victory points. In age of steam if you fuck up, if you're doing too badly if you're mathematically eliminated from winning the game kicks you out you're done, go leave the table, come back in a couple hours. So you're not stuck there. If I'm stuck there I'll grief, if I can go away I'll go play smash instead. Railroad tycoon, you're stuck there until the end but railroad tycoon has a huge board and a million pieces and you're physically moving all these cubes and trains and things around so it's really fun, it's like sim train. So as a result and I've seen this experience people who have lost railroad tycoon even if they realize it are more than happy to play to the end of the game because one, the game makes them feel like they could catch up and two it's pretty fun to keep trying to maximize your score even if you can't win in the end. Small World very popular game is actually a reskin and a slight update to an older game by the same person called Vinci. There are subtle differences between the two. As an aside, the problem is if you ever played one of these you can never play the other one. You will mess up really subtle rules. But, Vinci's big difference in these purposes is that victory points are open and public the entire game. There's a score track around the board and the game ends once one player has passed a certain number of points. So the game becomes very skill based around the idea of managing the ebb and flow of the game of figuring out do I want to push it past 150 right now but what if the player after me then surges way past me and I don't get another turn. The game, however is not fun for very bad players because they can see the entire game how far behind they actually are. Small World is mostly the same game except it has a set number of turns and victory points are secret. They're not really secret if you want to win that game you should be counting the victory points the whole time. You can know how many victory points everyone has. It's public information but once that information is revealed it's that hidden unless you remembered it. So people keep playing Small World thinking they're way more ahead than they are. As a result the losers are more than happy to keep playing until the end usually because skeleton whatever's are super fun. Excitement you'll notice that sports and popular e-sports they're the same thing but games that are popular among the mass public that are long-standing that have long histories tend to have this idea that the game ends the exact second the winner and loser are determined. Neither player has won the game yet. Either of these players at least theoretically has an equal chance of winning the game because it's just points I could just keep scoring points it's just my execution it's just my skill. So games like this are the games that are used in omegathons that are used in tournaments. Games where any player no matter what could catch up could win the game until the moment the game is over. As a result losing a game like this can be really fun because if you're losing a game like this it's still exciting you're still learning you're still playing you're not eliminated and forced to go through the motions anymore ego shields are very important so I lose games even though I just did a lecture on how to win games but I lose games everybody loses games because it's ran in bullshit every game I lost is ran in bullshit every game I win is 100% skill but it is very important especially for novice gamers to give them an ego shield even though they made terrible decisions in sellers of katan the entire time they made poor trades they put their settlement on the edge of the desert because they didn't understand the rules whatever that is in the very least because the dice are random because there's some fudge factor there's actually a lot of fudge factor in that game they at least have a crotch to fall back on of yeah I didn't do that well but the dice screwed me in the end. It's also important for very skilled players because games that are pure pure tests of skill where there is no randomness where it is literally just your decisions or your executions versus your opponents if I lose a game like that against someone they are objectively better than me at that and there's nothing I can say around that now really competitive people are totally okay with that normal people not so much the limits of skill are also very important a lot of people when they start getting good at games they'll start winning games a lot more often that is true but for example if you play poker the percentage that you'll win in terms of hands over everybody else even if you're a very skilled poker player is in the single digits being very good at poker gives you a relatively tiny edge among other pretty good players you'll crush people of no idea but you're going to lose a lot of hands if you play poker you're going to fold most of the time so when you lose games and when you design a game you need to really pay attention to what is that percentage because that determines who's going to play your game what the experience of losing is like an example of this, forget poker there's a game called Pandante Pandante is Panda Texas Holden it has a panda deck it has panda stuff it's basically Texas Holden but with a few different rules but what it does is it condenses and distills the experience of poker and if you're good at those skills the bluffing part, the bidding part all the fun parts of poker you'll win 20, 30, 40% more often as opposed to 0.1, 0.2, 0.3% more often but the game is also themed and set such that if you're losing and you're folding all the time the game either ends really quickly so you don't feel bad about it or the game is just super fun to play the whole time so heuristics and feedback this is a very important thing I'm going to look all ahead and you're actually going to see my desktop for a second very unprofessional so this is from a Japanese animation called Fist of the North Star also known as Hukitonoke I'm just going to show this to you and then we'll discuss it that's a good guess it's the bad guy so so what I'll say is that that is what Fist of the North Star is like and I have one more clip and this will tell you if you would enjoy Fist of the North Star and not so that is Fist of the North Star so that is Fist of the North Star and I promise it's relevant to what we're talking about because Cobra Commander Guy in the second bit when did he lose that fight he lost the fight when the elbow came up because Kenshiro's power his catchphrase in that whole show is you are already dead he pokes people in there whatever chakra stuff and that does things to the body and then they explode so we did that to the dude with his elbow way early so the guy lost the fight long before he even realized it he had no idea that he was dead Dota 2 League of Legends Heroes of New Earth they have a problem with heuristics and feedback they do not tell players who are learning and losing when how and why they lost if you lose a game of Dota 2 if you lose here you made the mistake here and here the game never tells you that that was when you made a mistake your teammates might tell you usually very angrily but the game does not tell you the game does not give you feedback games that don't tell players how and why they're losing that don't give you feedback when you're making poor decisions or at least soon after you make the poor decisions they can't actually teach you how to play themselves you can only learn them in the meta, you can learn them from instruction but you can't actually learn them by doing them so as a result that's why a lot of people when they start to play those really high skill cap games Counter-Strike is another example people think that there's a big skill component like sneaking around and looking in the window and flank left, flank left now click on the guy's head click on his head faster than everybody else if you've mastered that skill you've mastered Counter-Strike the game doesn't tell you that you have to figure that out so people who start to play games like this either join the community get yelled at, learn outside of the game and then eventually get good or they quit because that game is bullshit and that game sucks if a game is going to make you lose and losing is your fault it needs to tell you that it's your fault or at least make you think it's your fault that is why Silver Surfer is not fun when you're losing and Super Meat Boy is when you die in Super Meat Boy you know you messed up the game is like Yo Bro, you messed up right there you feel it, you know it's your fault you blame yourself when Silver Surfer dies you blame the game you blame the programmer, you blame the controller because that game is bullshit, it feels random you don't feel like that thing touched the Silver Surfer it totally, that pixel wasn't even close to me in Super Meat Boy it's pixel perfect the one pixel of that razor blade touches you and you're dead so we're going to go in a completely different direction now that is my gaming group I don't think they realize I travel around the world showing this awful picture of them in their pajamas and we're playing Dungeons & Dragons at that point that we later moved on to Burning Wheel and Tabletop RPG is winning and losing are a very interesting thing here and I want to use a game called the Burning Wheel have any of you played Burning Wheel the roleplaying game oh so if this seems interesting I recommend you grab one of these flyers at the end because last packs Australia we did a panel called Beyond Dungeons & Dragons and we talked at length about this game and other similar games so in Burning Wheel if my character wants to get better at sword fighting I test my sword fighting skill whenever I'm using sword fighting I test my climbing skill when I want to climb something I test my lock picking skill every time I roll the dice if they're going to succeed or fail success has huge consequences and failure has huge consequences in order to level up my sword skill I must succeed a certain number of times and I effectively must also fail a certain number of times trying to use a skill succeeding and failing at it is the only way to advance my skills so I must lose sword fights that cripple my character I must lose debates that get him thrown in jail I must try to climb mountains that are likely to kill my character because that is the only way to advance so as a result characters follow more realistic narrative driven arcs because characters will strive for something succeed sometimes fail sometimes be changed and disfigured and scarred in ways we never expected and then eventually that is how they become the swordsman or they die fernie wheel also has a system of beliefs and instincts beliefs, you write them on your character sheet you have a belief I will avenge my father's death I will kill that motherfucker I will have traits like harry you can write harry and my uncle is kelvin blackstaff and all that stuff you write on all your dnd character sheets doesn't mean anything spend points at character creation and your character has the trait harry that means he is harry and it matters the game master will use that negative traits cost just as much as positive traits traits that make your character suck cost more sometimes than traits that make him or her awesome and you have instincts I might have an instinct like when I see an enemy draw my sword or never leave anyone behind or never trust an elf so say that instinct could get me in trouble let's say I have that instinct because I'm a clever player and I want to use these instincts as macros in the game to protect me from the game master so if I see an enemy draw my sword so if there's a fight I've already got my sword out I'm in the king's court I'm debating in front of the king my enemy appears to give testimony against me and the game master will look at me and say do you want to draw your sword if I choose not to that's fine if I choose to I basically get experience points burning wheel in particular does this very interesting thing where it reminds you of something that most role playing games most video games, most everything either hide from you or actively try to keep you from experiencing the player and the character are different things a great example of this I usually do this with a cohost up here but imagine you take two people from the audience I'm not going to try to bother doing that you put them up on stage, you tell one of them they're Bilbo Baggins and you hand them a ring and then the other character is on the other side, you tell Bilbo you have the ring you don't want anyone to steal the ring from you you tell the other character you'd really like to find the one ring you put them on opposite sides of the room and you say walk past each other I each other warily walk away that's it, nothing interesting happens so that's because by default we always identify too much with our characters we feel like if our character loses we lost now when I'm playing Super Meat Boy that's true, the challenge is the game so me losing is Super Meat Boy losing but in Chrono Trigger me losing isn't necessarily Chrono losing in a role playing game me losing might be the funnest thing that's ever happened in that game so as a result if you change the instructions a little bit you tell Bilbo and his friend the exact same rules but then you tell them one more thing you tell them to share information you tell them to do the thing that will make the story interesting and then what happens every time we do this, every time we get volunteers the person who's playing Bilbo will walk by like this and suddenly we have a story where I was a standard D&D player doing my standard thing where I'm guarded I'm really afraid of losing and failing I never want to lose because losing sucks as a result I never lose and I never experience that but your character dying in a game like Burning Wheel your fortress collapsing in a game like Dwarf Fortress is some of the most fun you can have many of you have played Dungeons & Dragons right, how many times you tell the story where you beat the dungeon and how many times over dinner, late at night you tell the story where you rolled the critical failure and you drop the McGuffin in the lava my story is it involves us accidentally setting an entire town on fire and killing everyone in it thanks to a poorly timed fireball spell in a sewer that was filled with gas but those are the stories we tell because those stories are interesting and awesome and role-playing games need to take advantage of the fact that you are not your character Burning Wheel, the ultimate example of this, you can have a belief or a trait, sorry, and the trait basically is martyr if your character dies attempting to achieve one of his goals you get experience points effectively for your next character think about what that does to a game so role-playing games have an advantage however because role-playing games in role-playing games in the video sense there's AIs as much as I would love to say that this panel is going to be all about procedural content generation and how that's a way to really flesh out the narrative of failure and to have all these branching pads and audio games technology is just not there yet but when you're playing a role-playing game you don't have an AI, you have an AI you have a human, a human being who can make arbitrary calls to make things interesting that's why games like this can have very complex rules there's a philosophy in indie RPGs like Burning Wheel say yes or roll the dice if a character says I want to do X, I do Y I jump out the window, I kick down the door either say yes, that's awesome that happens or make them roll dice never tell them no without letting them roll dice and thus if a decision or a choice or an action a character is taking does not have an interesting consequence of failure if the character failing to gather information in Dungeons & Dragons is the best example of this ever you've got a story, you've got a plot and you're the game master and there's a thieves guild and they gotta root out this thieves guild so a character rolls his gather information why would you even have him roll that if he fails what are you going to do have him take 20, have him keep rolling until he eventually gets it that's boring so you either say yes, let them find the information or if you have an interesting idea about what to do with failure then you make them roll dice so that success lets them move onward failure makes them move onward in a different direction the burning wheel book actually gives an example of this, if I'm trying to pick a lock and my goal, my stated intent I want to pick the lock before the guards get here if I fail that roll D&D, the default thought would be you fail to pick the lock you break your lock pick something like that but the game suggests instead you do pick the lock you do open the door there is no trap but you open the door as the guards arrive suddenly I've added drama I've added urgency I've added conflict instead of just adding a roadblock instead of there's Mario going into pit and having to find a different direction I force the game to go in a different direction because roleplaying games at their heart I'm not going to make up another pretentious definition for this roleplaying games Dungeons and Dragons tells a very particular kind of story and the rules are focused around that I'm going to be a dick and say that that story is basically World of Warcraft combat it's getting better though fifth edition is going in interesting directions but if you want to tell the kinds of stories that Dungeons and Dragons doesn't tell if you want to tell stories where losing is a narrative look for a system that supports that or even if you're going to play D&D have a Game Master who is brilliant we've all seen videos of brilliant Game Masters who can at least use those concepts even if they're not playing the game they don't just say you fail to roll the gather information and you don't find the Thieves Guild if you fail that role you find the Thieves Guild finds you so where did we go with all this we touched on a whole bunch of different topics I love science questions one, games should be fun games should always be fun games should never not be fun if you're playing a game and you're not having fun either that game is a shitty game or that game is not for you that game is for someone else I for example really like ball's hard really competitive crazy games those games beat me into the ground they're stressful they're challenging but the enjoyment out of eventually overcoming those or failing to the game is fun for me the losing itself might not be fun but the reward is worth it to me if the reward of Super Meat Boy is not worth it to you don't play Super Meat Boy games that are not fun are terrible games losing is contextual losing is not a necessary part of games some games use losing in order to give you a test of skill to let you explore all these crazy spidery deaths but losing is different in games not all games have losing things don't need to have losing to be a game losing affects winning and yes I'm using the word affects in the only verb correct way you can use it here without this you cannot have this if you cannot lose a game that is a test of a skill of some kind then nor can you win that game so if you want to have a game where there's an idea of winning then you also need to have an idea of losing if a game is just a movie on to the end and dying is just Mario falling in the pit then the game is not winning and losing the game is just a narrative interactive experience toward an end it's an exploration but winning and losing don't mean the same thing that they mean in Silver Surfer and finally if someone ever tries to tell you that something's not a game or that you're not a gamer they're full of shit I hope that was enjoyable I'm afraid I'm mostly out of time