Re: PBM design and formulae - a summary

From: desj@ccr-p.ida.org (David desJardins)

Date: Thu, 01 Jul 1993 23:30:52 +0000

Doug Bonar <bonar@gnumath.rutgers.edu> writes:
> I wonder about the actual effect of all this on the game
> though.  It will take a large amount of data (if the game's formulas
> are complex).  So, your statistics will take some time to come into
> play.  During that same time, someone who plays the game has time to
> get a feel for how the world works (you will too as well, but your
> effort is going into analyzing the data statistically).  In a well
> designed game, I'm not sure that your quasi-formulas will give any
> real advantage over the other gamer's experiential knowledge.
> (Perhaps  that is even a measure of a well designed game.)

Great.  This makes my point even better.  My sole point has nothing to
do with mathematics or statistics.  It is simply that a player who has a
lot of experience with the game is likely to learn a lot more about how
it works, and that information will be in a form that he can turn to his
advantage.  It doesn't matter to me whether it is in the form of
deriving exact or approximate formulas, or developing an "intuition"
about the game, or anything else.

There are only two sides to this argument that I can see.  One side has
argued that if the rules are well written and give much but not all of
the information that one needs to play, then one can use just the
information provided in the rules to play well.  That experience doesn't
make a very big difference to overall strategy.

You, on the other hand, are taking my side.  That experienced players
are going to be able to learn about how the game works, regardless of
whether they do it mathematically or statistically or intuitively.

To be honest, in most cases that I know of, the players who gain large
advantages through accumulated knowledge _don't_ do so through
statistical analysis.  That's just an example that illustrates my
particular approach.  In most cases, people just learn through
experience tactics or strategies or maneuvers that work much better than
they perhaps "should," and things that work much worse.  (These are what
I was calling "bugs" before but that apparently led to a lot of
confusion.  Let's just call them "details" and see how that works.)

Again, look at any of the Legends posts in this very group
(rec.games.pbm) for plenty of illustration of how this happens and what
the effect is, in a relatively non-mathematical context.

> A non-analyst would play around, but wouldn't get treat the
> resulting data the same way.  He probably wouldn't treat the formulas
> (if given) in the same way either.  So, he is probably better off (at
> least in the short run) with the formulas hidden.

I absolutely agree, in the short term.  If a game is going to be one
turn long, or maybe two, this is a very reasonable method.  The problem
is that most game designers don't want to write their games for the
short term.  No one wants to put months or years of work into a design
which will be played for a few days or weeks.

I also think that all players benefit from formulas, if they are well
presented.  The basic reason to provide formulas, in my view, is so
players can see what-if.  So they can figure out what will happen if
they do a certain thing, without being at a big disadvantage through
having to try it in a game against someone who already has all that
information.

If the formulas in a game are too complicated for a player to figure out
approximately what the result of a hypothetical set of actions will be,
then that player probably shouldn't be playing that game.  If you can't
predict the results of your actions even approximately, then you are
probably just going to be frustrated by the game system.  Take the
Gladius et Pilum example posted a while back.  That system sounds like
it is simply too complicated for some people who aren't interested in
that sort of thing; they should just play a different kind of game.

There have been various red herrings presented of the form, "What if the
formulas tell the expert that attacking with 100 men will have a certain
result, and attacking with 101 men will have a certain very different
result?"  The answer is that games that are designed that way, have to
be simple enough for the players to be very comfortable with, or they
are unplayable.  Diplomacy is an example of a game with this mechanism.
If you attack with N supports you will win, if you have N-1 you will
lose.  Having the critical number is very important.  But I don't think
that most people find the published formulas of Diplomacy intimidating
or unhelpful.

Games which have much more complicated interactions between units almost
invariably add significant random factors.  This is only sensible---no
one wants to play a game where if you have N factors you lose
overwhelmingly, but if you have N+1 you win overwhelmingly, and figuring
out what N is is very hard.  This is exactly the kind of game I have
been criticizing throughout this entire discussion: games in which
detailed knowledge and analysis of the formulas is extremely important.
Just don't make the formulas so that they have this property, and you
won't have this problem, regardless of what you publish.

David desJardins

References

Re: PBM design and formulae - a summary
gym@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Graham Matthews)
Thu, 01 Jul 1993 11:15:09 +0000
Re: PBM design and formulae - a summary
desj@ccr-p.ida.org (David desJardins)
Thu, 01 Jul 1993 17:38:04 +0000
Re: PBM design and formulae - a summary
bonar@gnumath.rutgers.edu (Doug Bonar)
Thu, 01 Jul 1993 20:51:56 +0000

Referenced By

Re: PBM design and formulae - a summary
gym@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Graham Matthews)
Thu, 01 Jul 1993 11:15:09 +0000
Re: PBM design and formulae - a summary
desj@ccr-p.ida.org (David desJardins)
Thu, 01 Jul 1993 17:38:04 +0000
Re: PBM design and formulae - a summary
bonar@gnumath.rutgers.edu (Doug Bonar)
Thu, 01 Jul 1993 20:51:56 +0000