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Topic: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games (Read 522461 times) |
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MarkSteere
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #840 on: Dec 29th, 2011, 2:31pm » |
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In summary:
1. No abstract game is free of zugzwang. It's just a matter of degree.
2. No abstract game is perfectly balanced. It's just a matter of degree.
Imperfection is essential, both in games and in the people who play them. Games wouldn't be games without imperfection. It's something to embrace, not eradicate.
Ideally, i.e. in a finite, scalable, and otherwise well architected game, turn order advantage is inversely related to board size. It's a tradeoff, balancing lengthiness against TOA.
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christianF
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #841 on: Dec 29th, 2011, 2:35pm » |
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on Dec 29th, 2011, 2:31pm, MarkSteere wrote:| Imperfection is essential, both in games and in the people who play them. |
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You're a point in case.
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MarkSteere
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #842 on: Dec 29th, 2011, 5:41pm » |
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For designers, imperfection is a choice.
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christianF
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #843 on: Dec 30th, 2011, 5:35am » |
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on Dec 29th, 2011, 5:41pm, MarkSteere wrote:| For designers, imperfection is a choice. |
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Mark Steere Games - Imperfection by Choice!
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| « Last Edit: Dec 30th, 2011, 5:50am by christianF » |
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christianF
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #844 on: Jan 1st, 2012, 6:15am » |
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I wish all posters and viewers a fruitful, creative and above all happy new year. 
Mindsports has added 13x13 and 15x15 applets for Symple. The choice is given in a menu if you start a game.
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| « Last Edit: Jan 1st, 2012, 6:41am by christianF » |
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christianF
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #845 on: Jan 1st, 2012, 7:58am » |
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on Dec 26th, 2011, 12:38pm, clyring wrote:The optimal strategy would seem to be for each player to fill in these holes one stone at a time until one player runs out of holes to fill and is forced to lose points by invading. If there are enough such small holes this may drag on for quite awhile... Since the game is 'hot' until near the end anyway, perhaps a remedy for this potential problem would be to change
* Grow any or all (but at least one) of his groups by one stone ... to
* Grow all of his groups that can be grown by one stone
...such that this dull phase of the game would really only add 5-10 turns and not many more. |
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on Dec 28th, 2011, 3:32pm, christianF wrote:| But there are doubts about that and I allow for the possibility that I'm wrong. |
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The doubts in question are well worded by Clyring and the first game I play(ed) under the current rules suggests that the least intrusive form of compusory capture may indeed add little more than delayed moves serving the same strategy with little difference in the outcome. Small tactical differences if players have an unequal number of groups are irrelevant with regard to the main focuspoint in that phase: how much room does each player have left to grow. Mutually slowing down doesn't alter the outcome of that to any significant degree.
So we did indeed make growth, if chosen, compulsory for every possible 'live' group (to borrow a convenient Go term).
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| « Last Edit: Jan 1st, 2012, 3:21pm by christianF » |
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christianF
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #846 on: Jan 2nd, 2012, 6:16am » |
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The game behaves as it intended but now the applet doesn't. The game between Jos and me ended in a draw! 
A quick count got met to 146-143 for black, so the applet has lost a couple of black points along the way. We'll try to find & fix the bug asap.
Edit: OK, bug fixed, the first forced invasion under compulsory capture was the final stone of the game. For drama it would have been better if it had resulted in the reverse score. 
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| « Last Edit: Jan 2nd, 2012, 1:53pm by christianF » |
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MarkSteere
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #847 on: Jan 3rd, 2012, 9:37pm » |
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Rive is a very cool game, Christian and Nick's complaints notwithstanding. I played a few rounds with Daniel in person the other day and we both enjoyed it thoroughly.
Rive was engineered for massive recycling. So you have a full size game on a tiny board with a correspondingly small number of full size Go stones. It's the perfect travel game (or restaurant table game).
That's why the Shibumi contest is so bass ackwards. In twenty years and at least that many games, only two of my games, 3x5 Cephalopod and 3x3x5 Rive, are really small because of massive recycling. The Shibumi set is only half the size of those two games. Yes, you have the extra color, but...
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NickBentley
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #849 on: Jan 4th, 2012, 11:32am » |
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on Jan 3rd, 2012, 9:37pm, MarkSteere wrote:Rive is a very cool game, Christian and Nick's complaints notwithstanding. I played a few rounds with Daniel in person the other day and we both enjoyed it thoroughly.
Rive was engineered for massive recycling. So you have a full size game on a tiny board with a correspondingly small number of full size Go stones. It's the perfect travel game (or restaurant table game). |
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I really want to like Rive. Can you provide some strategy considerations or ways to think about the game so that I can see into it a little?
To be fair to Shibumi, the system was chosen specifically so that it could be represented with a 64-bit integer, so that Cameron can run his game evolution algo efficiently with it. So it's not about choosing the best materials for game design;it's about choosing the best materials for software development. And the future of the software is no doubt to design games for systems larger than Shibumi. All in all, I've got no problem with the approach.
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christianF
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #850 on: Jan 4th, 2012, 11:43am » |
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on Jan 4th, 2012, 11:32am, NickBentley wrote:| I really want to like Rive. |
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Never mind the game, but why would you really want to like a game?
Hey, I don't like this game, but I really want to!
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NickBentley
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #851 on: Jan 4th, 2012, 11:53am » |
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on Jan 4th, 2012, 11:43am, christianF wrote:
Never mind the game, but why would you really want to like a game? |
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Because I too like the idea of "massive recycling" (as Mark calls it), and I want to see what a good one looks like.
It remains possible that, though Rive is terribly opaque to a n00b like me (which is indeed a weakness from my point of view), a bit of strategic insight might allow me to see redeeming qualities of which I'm now unaware.
At the least, if it does turn out to be the failure that it at first seemed, exploring it further will help me understand what's required to make a good recycling game. Because Mark's games are thoughtfully composed, they help me to think about game design even when they're nuts
ty to play.
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christianF
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #852 on: Jan 4th, 2012, 1:45pm » |
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Marcel Vlastuin is a Dutch programmer with extensive experience in game programming, and organizer of the yearly CodeCup Challenge. His MCTS based Symple bot is the first to give a P4 base-15 game a try. Strategically the program has little eye for securing connections. I on the other hand was probably a bit too fast, in particular the 3-stone connection at W18. I should have placed H8 elsewhere.
I connected to slow down growth as is required at a certain stage, to secure internal liberties and win the race to force the opponent to invade. But now (at move 20) I'm so slow that my opponent can catch up in the scoring. He'll be forced to invade at some point, and though that's precisely what I'm aiming at, I'm less flexible in the response than I should have liked.
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MarkSteere
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #853 on: Jan 4th, 2012, 2:03pm » |
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on Jan 4th, 2012, 11:17am, christianF wrote:
Oops. Didn't mean to hijack your topic...
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MarkSteere
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Re: Essay by Christian Freeling on inventing games
« Reply #854 on: Jan 4th, 2012, 2:23pm » |
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on Jan 4th, 2012, 11:32am, NickBentley wrote:
I really want to like Rive. Can you provide some strategy considerations or ways to think about the game so that I can see into it a little?.
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All I know about Rive is how to lose gracefully, which I did with Daniel every time. Rive is fun even when you lose though. It's a game of territory, not annihilation. You just get a lower score. You don't get wiped out, which can ruin your whole day. Oust is particularly brutal on the loser.
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