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What is the quality of not being predictable (end game)

Started by March 18, 2021 02:02 PM
13 comments, last by LorenzoGatti 3 years, 6 months ago

“First person to make a mistake loses” works, but:

  • You need to actually end the game as soon as somebody makes a mistake. Otherwise you end up with a situation where somebody has already lost (because they have already made a mistake) but the game isn't over yet.
  • At a high level of play, you might need to wait arbitrarily long until somebody makes a mistake.
  • The winner always wins due to circumstances out of their control. You don't win when you play correctly, you win when your opponent makes a mistake. Not making a mistake yourself is a matter of skill, but waiting for your opponent to make a mistake is a matter of luck.

There is also the TV gameshow trick. They do a hundred minigames, the first gets 1 point, the next 2, next even more, until the final game, which gives nearly as much points as all other games before. Oblivious viewers think its getting more and more exciting, but actually nearly the whole show is useless filler to keep people for more ad breaks, as only the final game decides.

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wintertime said:
Oblivious viewers think its getting more and more exciting

And this is perhaps one of the biggest reasons to implement comeback mechanics: they are exciting for the viewers. Spectator sports need tension, and comeback mechanics provide that. It may suck for one or another team when they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but it keeps people watching.

If MOBAs relied on first-path-the-post to determine the winning team, viewers wouldn't keep on watching after the first team fight. If you want to design a successful game in the age of streaming, you need some way to keep the tension alive until the final moments…

Tristam MacDonald. Ex-BigTech Software Engineer. Future farmer. [https://trist.am]

A player thinking that they “have a lead” and being actually ahead are two different things, as are having a lead and actually winning.

RTS example: you might feel confident because you control more than half the space or resources and you are building everything you want efficiently and without being attacked, until you make contact with the enemy and you find out that you are threatened by a rush or that you built entirely wrong units.

Chess example: you have more pieces, but you don't see that you are falling into a trap of repeated checks and forced moves.

In some games there is no way to have a significant lead: for example, in a typical racing game the leading player can make a small mistake and be overtaken at the last curve, because the difference between a good and bad player who don't crash is a fraction of a second per lap.

What's important in most endgames is that with or without comebacks, with more ore less random outcomes, the game doesn't drag on through boring and repetitive sections and doesn't last too much. For example, battle royale PvP games often have a shrinking map to maintain a fun balance between fighting and hide and seek as players are eliminated. In chess it's usually easy, and progressively easier as pieces are captured, to force piece captures and clear the board enough to reach a simple finale. In scoring-based or mistake-dependent games there are no boring game states, only constant maximum effort.

There's an important related concept, that of “strategic instability”: a situation where someone is guaranteed to win because a standstill is impossible. For instance, while a plain multiplayer racing game could continue for an arbitrarily long time, usually needing a predetermined limit (laps, fuel, time…), a racing game where cars have front-mounted guns and dropped mines is guaranteed to end dramatically because damage can only accumulate.

Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru

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