Re: PBM design and formulae - a fresh start

From: markiel@callisto.pas.rochester.edu (Andrew Markiel)

Date: Mon, 05 Jul 1993 06:17:52 +0000

In article <214kbe$4kp@snook.ccr-p.ida.org> desj@ccr-p.ida.org (David desJardins) writes:
>
>What the players who want the formulas want to do with them is exactly
>the equivalent of practice, something that you say you are not opposed
>to above.  I want to be able to look at various hypothetical situations
>and learn what will happen in them.  (For that matter, suppose you
>don't publish the formulas, but you provide a "practice arena" for your
>game, in which I can set up any game situation repeatedly and see what
>happens.  This is equivalent to publishing the formulas, as I can very
>quickly deduce from the outcomes all that I need to know.)
>

This is an important point that I think should be emphasized. In the
example of a tennis game (or simulation thereof) the element of
learning is built in. In other words, it's expected that the first
time someone hits the ball, it probably won't go where they want it
to go. But that's fine, because if they make a big mistake, then the
point is over in seconds, and then you start over and completely
reset the game state, so that who wins the second point has nothing
to do with who wins the first.

In contrast, most PB(E)M games are very long (on the order of months)
with no resetting: so if a player makes a mistake in the first turn,
they have to live with the consequences of that throughout the
entire game. They will probably always be weaker than the other players,
and are likely to be eliminated early. It's somewhat analogous to
a tennis match where, everytime you lose a point, your side of the
court becomes larger, making it easier for the opponent to win the
next point as well.

The key difference is that a person may well play thousands of
tennis volleys in their life, so messing up the first 50 or so
is not a problem. Not only do you not have to give formulas, you
don't have to give anything at all: because your players can just
blunder around the game, trying and learning as they go.

In contrast, considering galaxy for example, it's quite likely
that a person may only play one game of galaxy in their entire
life. Thus, whether you give exact formulas or just approximations,
galaxy players have to be extensively "trained", because they
have to know how to play before they start playing. This is a
direct consequence of the fact that while a mistake in tennis
lasts only seconds, a mistake in galaxy lasts months. Few people
would enjoy a months long game that is lost in the first fwe weeks.

Now, you could not give the formulas, and have an introductory
game for learning purposes. But who wants to spend months learning
how a game works? A few people, of course, but not many I think.
Thus, in galaxy (and in most PB(E)M games) it's appropriate
to give extensive information on how the game system works, so
that even a beginning player has the same information as a veteran
player and in principle can formulate an optimal strategy without
making any serious mistakes (the advantage of being a veteran, of
course, is having seen strategies previously and thus judging them
by known results, and similarly knowing how to avoid little mistakes
that hurt you). Essentially, by it's design as a long term game,
galaxy is intended to be played by people who won't make serious
mistakes; to prevent this, you have give new players some ability
to figure out what not to do. As a particular example, you should
tell galaxy players not to build the (1 1 1 1 0) fighters (or whatever
they are) since this is apparently not immediately clear; because if
beginners don't know this, then they will build them, get trounced,
and not have a very fun time.

I argue that giving the formulas is a perfectly reasonable way of
telling people what they need to know. Certainly people will
analyze these formulas carefully, but that's by design: the
players are expected to analyze the formulas to figure out what
the game designer is trying to tell them about how the game works.
You could do the same thing with rules instead of formulas: what
really matters is what kind of information you are trying to give to
the players. What is a formula, but a way of representing information?

If you do choose to go the learning route (probably by having
a system that resets very frequently, consider the Waving Hands
tournament for example) then there is no problem with experience;
note that experienced tennis players are obviously much better
than beginners. The standard way around this is simply to have
people play others of similar skill (because it isn't much fun to
trounce on weaker players, or be trounced upon).

>                                        David desJardins

-Andrew
markiel@callisto.pas.rochester.edu

References

Re: PBM design and formulae - a fresh start
desj@ccr-p.ida.org (David desJardins)
Sat, 03 Jul 1993 18:49:18 +0000
PBM design and formulae - a fresh start
gym@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Graham Matthews)
Fri, 02 Jul 1993 12:01:01 +0000
Re: PBM design and formulae - a fresh start
saschreu@cs.vu.nl (Schreuder SA)
Fri, 02 Jul 1993 14:04:09 +0000
Re: PBM design and formulae - a fresh start
gym@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Graham Matthews)
Fri, 02 Jul 1993 16:20:03 +0000