Dinhternet

I have mixed feel­ings about meta-gaming.

Some­times, it adds a lot to a game. Cer­tain games would be down­right bor­ing if you strictly played by the rules. Poker comes to mind with the idea of “play the player, not the cards.” Other times, though, it can break a game. Mafia comes to mind here — I’m sure every­one who has played that game has anec­dotes of out­side fac­tors unin­ten­tion­ally reveal­ing things and spoil­ing a round. I guess it comes down to the pac­ing and atmosphere.

But from a com­pet­i­tive or design per­spec­tive, meta-gaming is nec­es­sary to fuel inter­est and pro­gres­sion. How do you design a game (and match­mak­ing for the game) to make it easy to pick up but impos­si­ble to set down? What makes a com­pet­i­tive game “fun”?

Sirlin’s (admit­ted “hard­core”) take on the issue is to cre­ate a hyper-accurate match­mak­ing sys­tem where you are matched as closely as pos­si­ble to your skill-peers and end up with a roughly 50–50 win-loss record. He believes that the only sta­tis­tic that mat­ters is win-less record, and any other stats can be gamed and thus dis­tort skill rat­ings, match­mak­ing results, and game out­come pre­dic­tions. His ideal sys­tem would be sim­i­lar to TrueSkill, which is based on Glicko, which in turn is based on Elo, the clas­sic chess rat­ing system.

An alter­na­tive sys­tem was cre­ated by Jeff Sagarin, who uses win mar­gins to bet­ter pre­dict future out­comes than the Elo sys­tem (and he applies it to col­lege and pro­fes­sional sports quite suc­cess­fully). In fact, there is cur­rently a com­pe­ti­tion to cre­ate the best chess ranking/matchmaking/predictive sys­tem, and Elo is not doing very well. (The dif­fer­ent teams’ method­olo­gies are not released, so I couldn’t tell you if the cur­rent win­ners are using win-loss or points systems.)

Of course, like pointed out above, all stats can be gamed. Advan­taged play­ers can pur­posely hand­i­cap them­selves. Dis­ad­van­taged play­ers can try to force draws instead of risk­ing losses. I remem­ber when Son D would pur­posely sur­ren­der after absolutely crush­ing an oppo­nent to pur­posely keep a 0-win record. (Even if I still do not under­stand his rea­son­ing for doing so.)

Tak­ing Val­i­da­tion The­ory into con­sid­er­a­tion, a “slip­pery slope” game will teach you the most (assum­ing accu­rate post-mortem analy­sis) and give you the fastest skill pro­gres­sion. How­ever, slip­pery slope games are intim­i­dat­ing to new and more casual play­ers. I think the idea is to cre­ate a per­pet­ual come­back game where in-game stats are con­sid­ered and used to give a slight boost to play­ers who are behind. How­ever, a strictly accu­rate match­mak­ing should be used in between games. This way, play­ers never feel that they are get­ting com­pletely crushed, and they can incre­men­tally grow by learn­ing from peo­ple who are close to them in skill level.

Any­way, end of geeky gam­ing ram­ble. Here’s a cool video for you:

One of the things I miss about Assas­sins is the elab­o­rate obit­u­ar­ies that God would make up for each kill. They would get posted on a blog of some sort for every­one to fol­low, and it was a lot of fun, even when you weren’t play­ing the game. It was par­tic­u­larly hilar­i­ous if you knew how a kill actu­ally went down and com­pared it with the grandios­ity of the obituary.

But yeah, my pri­or­ity this time was to get the game over as quickly as pos­si­ble, so I was wor­ried about mak­ing up 20 kill sto­ries in one night. Instead, I asked peo­ple to send in their own kill sto­ries for a chance at a prize. Here are those stories:

Show Green Crossbow ▼

Show Tran­quil Claw ▼

Show Deadly Crotch ▼

Show Deadly Chrysanthemum ▼

Hope you all enjoyed! To the next God of Assas­sins, if you have the time for a slower game, def­i­nitely do obit­u­ar­ies, they make it a lot more enter­tain­ing for every­one.

Please visit my Assas­sins album on Face­book and vote for your favorite weapon. All prizes will be dis­trib­uted tonight at the CAPS meeting.

Now that nom­i­na­tions are closed, I want to say a few things about mascots.

First off, damn the the Jaro­mays for tak­ing Bat­man! The “5 Things About Dinh” slideshow was about 50% lies, but my love for Bat­man is def­i­nitely true. I was actu­ally going to make this whole post about Bat­man, mostly through heavy use of Dinosaur Comics. I’ve waited for Bat­man to be mas­cot for a long time, and I even had a shirt design in my back pocket. And then Jaro­may term came around and I wasn’t around to take advan­tage. But oh well, maybe I’ll turn my shirt design into a line shirt. Any­way, now that I’ve got­ten that off my chest…

A lit­tle dis­claimer before I go any fur­ther — if Bat­man had been a pos­si­bil­ity, I would have been all over that like Scrooge McDuck on the Num­ber One Dime, but since that’s not the case, I would be happy to rep Luong Class with any of the nom­i­nated mas­cots. The fol­low­ing is purely for fun, and not advo­ca­tion for any mas­cot nom­i­nee over any other.

Like I said in a pre­vi­ous post, a mas­cot is sup­posed to be a liv­ing embod­i­ment of Lead­er­ship, Friend­ship, and Ser­vice. That is tech­ni­cally the only requirement.

How­ever, see­ing as girls usu­ally out­num­ber guys in pledge classes (it’s roughly 8 girls to every 5 guys in this pledge class, a clear major­ity), a prac­ti­cal con­sid­er­a­tion is that a mas­cot should be cute, or at least shown to have the poten­tial for cute­ness. (I like how Tracey L is adver­tis­ing her nom­i­nee with the cutest ver­sion pos­si­ble of Iron Man.)

And like I said in the Face­book group, the mas­cot should be some­thing that can be eas­ily put on a shirt, mean­ing you should be able to make it look good in about three or four col­ors and sim­ple lines. (Comic book char­ac­ters are great at this, because comics used to be printed in four-color dot-matrix.)

After that, I’d like our mas­cot to be able to beat up any other mas­cot. Well, any other except Bat­man. That would be impos­si­ble. To fig­ure out who would win, I sug­gest we fol­low the usual mas­cot brack­e­tol­ogy rules:

1. Inan­i­mate objects, e.g. col­ors and plants, always lose to ani­mate objects.
2. Preda­tors beat non-predators and unarmed humans.
3. Humans beat non-predators.
4. Humans with weapons beat predators.
5. Humans with weapons beat humans with­out weapons.
6. Humans with supe­rior weapons win.
7. Super­nat­ural beings and weather sys­tems beat almost anyone.

(There were actu­ally two more rules, but I don’t think they will ever come up, as our mas­cot elec­tions do not have seeds, and I can’t see any­one nom­i­nat­ing a preposition.)

I believe this is the most cur­rent list of nom­i­nated mas­cots. It is a cou­ple of days old, so there might be some changes, but I’ll base my brack­ets off this list.

• Mr. Fan­tas­tic
• Pikachu
• Link
• Kirby
• Ash Ketchum
• Trog­dor
• Dorae­mon
• Taeyang
• Avatar
• Domokun
• Oli­mar
• Daniel Kim
• Totoro
• Iron Man

Keep­ing the above rules in mind, this is how I see things going down:

EDIT: I’ve been informed that the Avatar nom­i­na­tion was in ref­er­ence to the Nick­elodeon car­toon, not the Cameron movie, and I’ve changed things accordingly.

Open­ing Round:
Mr. Fan­tas­tic def. Pikachu — Rule 3. Even if I were gen­er­ous and bumped Pikachu to a preda­tor, Rule 4 — Mr. Fan­tas­tic would use sci­ence giz­mos to ground Pikachu’s elec­tric attacks.
Link def. Kirby — Rule 4. Link’s sil­ver arrows would keep Kirby out of eat­ing range.
Trog­dor def. Ash Ketchum — This one is a tough call, since Ash could use his Poke­mon, but I’m going to have to fall back on Rule 7.
Dorae­mon def. Taeyang — This was dif­fi­cult in that I wasn’t sure how to clas­sify Ding Dong. I think he’d have to get bumped up to preda­tor due to the poten­tial for pulling weapons out of his pouch, and Taeyang has no weapons I know of, so this seems like a case of Rule 2.
Avatar def. Domokun — I thought about call­ing a Rule 7 since Domokun has been called God, but if we stick to canon, Avatar has shown that while they he prefers not to kill, the Navi are Aang is quite capa­ble of it mess­ing up mon­sters that attack him. Rule 2.
Oli­mar def. Daniel Kim — I was going to call Rule 5 on this, but remem­bered that Oli­mar is actu­ally an alien, so I guess I would re-classify him as a preda­tor based on his fight­ing abil­i­ties as shown in Brawl. Rule 2. (Sorry Daniel!)
Iron Man def. Totoro — Unless we go into fan art, this is clearly a case of Rule 3. Even then, I’d have to call Rule 4.

Excit­ing! Next, the quarter-finals:
Mr. Fan­tas­tic def. Link — This opens up the whole sci­ence vs. magic debate, but I’d have to believe that super-genius Reed Richards could nul­lify any magic weapons Link could have. Rule 6.
Dorae­mon def. Trog­dor — This is a major upset for what could be a case of Rule 7, but Dorae­mon could have things in his pouch that would with­stand against the Burn­i­na­tor. Mod­i­fied Rule 4.
Avatar def. Oli­mar — This would be a mas­sacre. The Navi could com­mu­ni­cate with the Pik­min Aang could bend away all the Pik­min and leave Oli­mar weapon­less, or even turn them against him, since Pik­min are basi­cally small ele­men­tals. Mod­i­fied Rule 5.
Iron Man gets a by week and promptly gets wasted on the good stuff.

In the semi-finals:
Mr. Fan­tas­tic def. Dorae­mon — Clearly, Mr. Fan­tas­tic could out-gizmo the great Ding Dong. Mod­i­fied Rule 6.
Iron Man def. Avatar — Clever mil­i­tary tac­tics fall to repul­sors. This match is sud­denly a lot more inter­est­ing. Aang did fight guys in suits before, and although weak on metal bend­ing, he could crush Tony. How­ever, I think Iron Man would be smart enough to avoid and/or nul­lify Aang’s bend­ing abil­i­ties. Satellite-based attach sys­tems push Aang into full Avatar mode, where he goes on a mind­less frenzy. Iron Man unleashes his suit’s full power and knocks Aang out just like he did with Hulk. Mod­i­fied Rule 6 again.

That leaves a Mar­vel show­down in the Cham­pi­onship match!
Two geniuses with a lot of expen­sive toys would be quite the throw down. Mr. Fan­tas­tic is the smarter of the two, and should have bet­ter toys. How­ever, Iron Man has the full resources of Stark Enter­prises and SHIELD, so he’d have more toys. Iron Man might be hung over from his by week, putting him at an ini­tial dis­ad­van­tage. I see them slug­ging it out and destroy­ing most of New York City. Then Mr. Fan­tas­tic would make some­thing to deac­ti­vate the Iron Man suits. But in his tra­di­tion of unfore­seen con­se­quences, the device would over­load and destroy the world.

Pyrrhic vic­tory for Mr. Fan­tas­tic. Rule 6.

Any­way, I hope you enjoyed my take on things. I’m very eager to see how things actu­ally turn out tonight. Good luck to every­one running!

Oh, and I also would have enjoyed Admi­ral Ack­bar.