Re: PBM design and formulae - a fresh start

From: gym@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Graham Matthews)

Date: Sat, 03 Jul 1993 17:01:52 +0000

Me:
> >The only way to counter this is to let the players treat experience
> >equitably by helping newbies or by playing with people of the same
> >experience.
markiel@callisto.pas.rochester.edu (Andrew Markiel) writes:
> One way of helping newbies is telling them the formulas :-)

This seems to be at the crux of this debate. To my mind Andrew your statement
is false. Telling people the formulas only helps if the formulas are
dead simple (eg.linear), or the formulas are not simple but the players are
mathematically sophisticated. Now I have yet to see a decent simulation
where the formulas are simple (simple formulas usually mean brain-dead
equations). Also I game with a lot of people who are not mathematicians.
Telling them formulas is just wasting your breath. They understand
linear formulas, but thats about all...

Me:
[on tennis and its imprecision - Mark saying that my argument works for
the tennis example but not for ...]
markiel@callisto.pas.rochester.edu (Andrew Markiel) writes:
> However, this follows directly from your construction of this as
> a scenario which all players are able to envision without extensive
> description, and in which players are expected to start from basic
> principles and develop skill at the game. If, instead, the game
> involved consideration of the fuel requirements of a battlecruiser
> moving at 1.7 times the speed of light through a region containing
> approximately 60% ionized dilithium, I think you would agree that a
> formula may well be needed, since there is certainly no intuitive way
> for a player to approximate this, while an experienced player would
> know the appropriate value. Furthermore, I doubt it would be interesting
> for people to have to deduce this by trial and error; it's more
> appropriate simply to provide the formula, so that people can calculate
> the movement capabilities of their ship.

Now we get to the tricky question of the level of the simulation. If
we are simulating the actions of a captain then he wouldn't need to know
(nor even know) the exact values for such things. He would leave it to
the engineer or the ship's computers. In essence I am suggesting that this
level of detail is usually irrelevant. We were talking about strategy
games after all, and what has knowing this sort of thing got to do
with strategy. Its interesting that so far all the people on the other
side of the debate are talking about strategy games and then in the
same breath talking about knowing how much fuel is in a ship. Wierd sort
of stragety game ....

If we were simulating the game from the level of an engineer then indeed
we would have to know exact formula, but the question then is how do we
learn those formula? Now how does our engineer learn them - certainly
not by consulting the source code for the universe. He learns it by
training, so lets put some training into our game.

graham

References

PBM design and formulae - a summary
rob@ccc.govt.nz (Rob McNeur)
Mon, 28 Jun 1993 09:53:02 +0000
Re: PBM design and formulae - a summary
gym@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Graham Matthews)
Thu, 01 Jul 1993 11:40:27 +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
markiel@callisto.pas.rochester.edu (Andrew Markiel)
Sat, 03 Jul 1993 08:32:51 +0000