Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Re: Did you even read the initial post?

[quote name="Zseni"][quote name="Monty Cantsin"][quote name="Zseni"]...The real question under it all though is <i>where is the game</i>? Because it ain't in the same place for mindless Koreans as it is for mindless Americans; it's not in the same place for Kasparov or Sampras as it is for the piker. I want to suggest that not only are the games in different places, they are different games entirely, played for different goals. All the whiny whiteys want to play their particular game and know who is the best at it, but those yellow bastards have taken the gameboard and started doing something completely different and actively destructive to their game. It's not merely a question of high-level and low-level play. [/quote] Yeah, I think that a serious game played at a high level is "fun" of a particular kind, if you can even still call it fun at all. It's more like the higher-stakes and less immediately satisfying work-pleasure of a long-term creative, engineering, or theoretical project. High level players are sort of competing with each other to "solve" the game in a way (have I hedged that statement enough?) so it's not surprising that what they do can look like "breaking" the game to a casual player. Sometimes the game needs to be adjusted to compensate for imbalances (between strategies) that threaten to monopolize the gamespace. So, for example, the size and material of allowable tennis rackets and baseball bats, the legality of zone defense in basketball, the material and build-time cost of units in an rts, etc. Nonetheless, I can't imagine <i>complaining</i> about Boris Becker's serve or Babe Ruth's swing. I can't imagine wanting them to hold back for the good of the game, or being contemptuous of them for reducing the set of viable strategies. If you are serious player of game X it's your <i>job</i> to reduce that set, every match is a hypothesis about reducing that set, and your opponent's <i>job</i> is to test that hypothesis to the best of his or her abilities. You can think of that process as a destructive breaking down, or you can think of it as a collaborative carving away that is progressively revealing essential properties of the system.[/quote] ....but I want to argue that there is more than one system, and that the decision as to which system is the "essential" one is a little arbitrary. I read the Play To Win articles linked and found them interesting and informative, but at the same time I wondered what would happen if the scrubs had their way and the self-imposed rules because The Rules. I have a particular interest in this because, as you'll recall, I have a vision of a scrub government - purposefully wasteful, existing in the most aesthetically pleasing fashion possible. The self-imposed limitations of video games are different in what way from self-imposed limitations in, for example, language? Write a book without the letter e, restrain yourself to the heroic sextet when writing poetry, that kind of thing. I wonder if it is entirely pat that the best "high-level" player is better than the best scrub player if they are playing by the scrub's rules. Furthermore the articles fail to mention another kind of play besides scrub and high-end - a type of player more or less covered in your winners-losers dichotomy: the person who plays to win but just isn't very good. That person wants the deeper satisfaction of the high-end player but they <i>just don't have the moves</i> no matter how much they practice or whatever. Shouldn't there be a place in gaming for those people? They might even be playing better than the scrubs, for that matter; why shuck them into the corner? Are their ludic impulses to be forever delimited by their inability? I guess what I mean by all this is that I don't agree that there is necessarily a system with essential properties etc. at all. That's only one way of looking at it, and I'd like to postulate the langauge-model as another one. Also just as Ray was talking about metagames, what about the metagame of determining the scrub rules? It just seems unnecessarily limiting to talk about it as though Street Fighter can only ever be Street Fighter, even though I see how sensible and workable and practical it is.[/quote]