5 ms·

Would be nice to see a similar analysis done on Threes given that it came before 2048. By game design standards, 2048 is very poorly designed. 2048 is easily be

by doppp 9y ago

Would be nice to see a similar analysis done on Threes given that it came before 2048. By game design standards, 2048 is very poorly designed. 2048 is easily beatable whereas Threes takes a lot longer to master and beat [0]. [0] http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/ http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/

jdleesmiller 9y ago
I'd agree that 2048 is quite forgiving --- you can make some pretty serious errors and still recover to win [1]. I wouldn't say that makes it poorly designed, however; harder isn't always better, and making a game too hard can make it less fun, so it's about finding a balance that works. That said, flappy bird came out at about the same time as 2048 [2], and it was absurdly hard (at least for me) and still very successful. [1] In my previous post, http://jdlm.info/articles/2017/08/05/markov-chain-2048.html http://jdlm.info/articles/2017/08/05/markov-chain-2048.html, I managed to win in around the minimum number of moves, 938.8 on average, several times. I think that was often because I was able to recover from blunders, rather than because I never made them. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird --- both were very popular in early 2014.
- doppp 9y ago
  Popular does not mean well-designed. Neither was I implying that a difficult game is a well-designed game. But Threes is way better designed than 2048. The super long email chain I linked to earlier really explains why in great detail. I encourage anyone interested in game design and how indie games are made to take some time to read it.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    The intro post says, paraphrasing, "we wanted to design a game with simple rules that was impossible to beat, we succeeded, therefore our game is better". Perhaps the authors prefer games that are impossible to beat - I think it's very unlikely that the target audience of 2048 and similar games do, or in fact most people. Perhaps neither Threes nor 2048 are very well designed - Threes because building a game that is impossible to beat is easy but not actually much fun for most people to play, and 2048 because it wound up with overly methodical ways to beat it easily?
  - hnlmorg 9y ago
    > Popular does not mean well-designed. Maybe but playing devil's advocate for a moment: given the point of a game is to be enjoyable and popularity is as good a measure of group enjoyment as any, you could then argue that a "better designed" game which fewer people prefer is arguably "over designed" compared to the simpler and more popular game. Ergo one could argue that popularity is a perfectly good measure of how well designed a game is. Personally what draws me to 2048 is that it required just the right amount of thinking. It doesn't stimulate me so I can play it fatigued, but equally it doesn't bore me. And it is just the right level of difficulty where I can regularly beat it but equally I cannot take winning as an assumption so I still have to try to beat it. Going back to your Flappy Birds example, that was hard as hell but the mechanics were really really easy to learn and you were only competing against your own personal best (there's no finish goal, no boss, just an infinite number of pipes to navigate through). That means as tough as the game is, it's only as hard as the individual is good at it.
    - dspillett 9y ago
      > popularity is as good a measure of group enjoyment Popularity can depend on a large number of factors. One that has no (direct) effect on quality is cost: threes wasn't free initially, 2048 was, so far more people played 2048. This is why "freemium" is such a common model, trying to get the exposure/market-share benefit of being free while still pulling in income from the product or related addons/services. If you look at "popularity" of similar products of each type as measured by market share or absolute download numbers you most likely see free far outstrips freemium which in turn outstrips any product with an up-front cost.
  - vageli 9y ago
    > When an automated script that alternates pressing up and right and left every hundreth (sic) time can beat the game, then well, that's broken. Is Threes a better game? We think so. To this day, only about 6 people in the world have ever seen a 6144 and nobody in the world has yet to “beat” Threes. But that’s what’s better to us as game designers. We worked really hard to create a simple game system with interesting complexity that you can play forever. To me, it seems the argument of the linked article basically boils down to: their game is too easy so it's bad. Does a game need a really long email chain of back and forth to show that it was well-designed?
iainmerrick 9y ago
Yes, 2048 is a blatant rip-off of Threes, and omits everything that makes Threes interesting.
- maaaats 9y ago
  How is it a rip-off if it omits everything?
  - danharaj 9y ago
    That 'everything' was quite clearly qualified.
    - maaaats 9y ago
      Then why is it a problem? It's a completely different game, just same kind of game.
m12k 9y ago
I agree - I'd been an avid Threes player for a while when I decided to give 2048 a try to see what the fus was all about. Got to 2048 on my first try - it is very much easier than Threes.
andrewla 9y ago
I've seen this before, and it smacks very much of sour grapes. What exactly makes it "better designed"? Is it simply that the goal posts for 2048 are set too low, and the goal posts for Threes is set too high? If you aim for 4096 or 8192 or 16384 (all achievable) in 2048, it's a much more difficult game that requires careful thought and planning. I enjoy Threes immensely, and find myself still replaying it (as I replay 2048), but I don't see an argument for it being objectively better. The fact that tiles only move by one allows you a lot more flexibility in repairing places where bad luck (or bad play) has landed you an out-of-order gap. But Threes has flaws; I think the biggest design flaw in Threes is that the incoming blocks are too varied -- the 1/2 is the central conceit of the game, but higher blocks (and especially the occasional super-large block) make the element of chance way too important. And even the 1/2 thing can get annoying -- when the board is half-full of reds with no blues showing up, what can you do? You're just stuck. At least 2048 is fairly consistent -- the presence of the occasional 4-block is a bit ugly, but otherwise the game has an element of predictability that puts the onus for progress squarely on the player rather than the random number generator, which mainly serves to make sure that each game is different.
- Cogito 9y ago
  In case you're not aware, the reds and blues are not random. The 'deck' of the game has 12 cards in it[1], 4 ones, 4 twos, and 4 threes. These are shuffled and then played one at a time. After all 12 have come out, they are shuffled again. This means you can plan for which card is to come next. Yes, you will sometimes get 4 (or more!) blues in a row, but developing strategies that allow you to survive those situations is one of the things you have to do if you want to get the 6144 tile. [1] this isn't quite accurate, as sometimes a large card is inserted into the deck, I think on average 1 every 36 cards, but I don't actually remember.

by doppp 9y ago

jdleesmiller 9y ago

I'd agree that 2048 is quite forgiving --- you can make some pretty serious errors and still recover to win [1]. I wouldn't say that makes it poorly designed, however; harder isn't always better, and making a game too hard can make it less fun, so it's about finding a balance that works. That said, flappy bird came out at about the same time as 2048 [2], and it was absurdly hard (at least for me) and still very successful. [1] In my previous post, http://jdlm.info/articles/2017/08/05/markov-chain-2048.html http://jdlm.info/articles/2017/08/05/markov-chain-2048.html, I managed to win in around the minimum number of moves, 938.8 on average, several times. I think that was often because I was able to recover from blunders, rather than because I never made them. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird --- both were very popular in early 2014.

doppp 9y ago
Popular does not mean well-designed. Neither was I implying that a difficult game is a well-designed game. But Threes is way better designed than 2048. The super long email chain I linked to earlier really explains why in great detail. I encourage anyone interested in game design and how indie games are made to take some time to read it.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  The intro post says, paraphrasing, "we wanted to design a game with simple rules that was impossible to beat, we succeeded, therefore our game is better". Perhaps the authors prefer games that are impossible to beat - I think it's very unlikely that the target audience of 2048 and similar games do, or in fact most people. Perhaps neither Threes nor 2048 are very well designed - Threes because building a game that is impossible to beat is easy but not actually much fun for most people to play, and 2048 because it wound up with overly methodical ways to beat it easily?
- hnlmorg 9y ago
  > Popular does not mean well-designed. Maybe but playing devil's advocate for a moment: given the point of a game is to be enjoyable and popularity is as good a measure of group enjoyment as any, you could then argue that a "better designed" game which fewer people prefer is arguably "over designed" compared to the simpler and more popular game. Ergo one could argue that popularity is a perfectly good measure of how well designed a game is. Personally what draws me to 2048 is that it required just the right amount of thinking. It doesn't stimulate me so I can play it fatigued, but equally it doesn't bore me. And it is just the right level of difficulty where I can regularly beat it but equally I cannot take winning as an assumption so I still have to try to beat it. Going back to your Flappy Birds example, that was hard as hell but the mechanics were really really easy to learn and you were only competing against your own personal best (there's no finish goal, no boss, just an infinite number of pipes to navigate through). That means as tough as the game is, it's only as hard as the individual is good at it.
  - dspillett 9y ago
    > popularity is as good a measure of group enjoyment Popularity can depend on a large number of factors. One that has no (direct) effect on quality is cost: threes wasn't free initially, 2048 was, so far more people played 2048. This is why "freemium" is such a common model, trying to get the exposure/market-share benefit of being free while still pulling in income from the product or related addons/services. If you look at "popularity" of similar products of each type as measured by market share or absolute download numbers you most likely see free far outstrips freemium which in turn outstrips any product with an up-front cost.
- vageli 9y ago
  > When an automated script that alternates pressing up and right and left every hundreth (sic) time can beat the game, then well, that's broken. Is Threes a better game? We think so. To this day, only about 6 people in the world have ever seen a 6144 and nobody in the world has yet to “beat” Threes. But that’s what’s better to us as game designers. We worked really hard to create a simple game system with interesting complexity that you can play forever. To me, it seems the argument of the linked article basically boils down to: their game is too easy so it's bad. Does a game need a really long email chain of back and forth to show that it was well-designed?

iainmerrick 9y ago

Yes, 2048 is a blatant rip-off of Threes, and omits everything that makes Threes interesting.

maaaats 9y ago
How is it a rip-off if it omits everything?
- danharaj 9y ago
  That 'everything' was quite clearly qualified.
  - maaaats 9y ago
    Then why is it a problem? It's a completely different game, just same kind of game.

m12k 9y ago

I agree - I'd been an avid Threes player for a while when I decided to give 2048 a try to see what the fus was all about. Got to 2048 on my first try - it is very much easier than Threes.

andrewla 9y ago

I've seen this before, and it smacks very much of sour grapes. What exactly makes it "better designed"? Is it simply that the goal posts for 2048 are set too low, and the goal posts for Threes is set too high? If you aim for 4096 or 8192 or 16384 (all achievable) in 2048, it's a much more difficult game that requires careful thought and planning. I enjoy Threes immensely, and find myself still replaying it (as I replay 2048), but I don't see an argument for it being objectively better. The fact that tiles only move by one allows you a lot more flexibility in repairing places where bad luck (or bad play) has landed you an out-of-order gap. But Threes has flaws; I think the biggest design flaw in Threes is that the incoming blocks are too varied -- the 1/2 is the central conceit of the game, but higher blocks (and especially the occasional super-large block) make the element of chance way too important. And even the 1/2 thing can get annoying -- when the board is half-full of reds with no blues showing up, what can you do? You're just stuck. At least 2048 is fairly consistent -- the presence of the occasional 4-block is a bit ugly, but otherwise the game has an element of predictability that puts the onus for progress squarely on the player rather than the random number generator, which mainly serves to make sure that each game is different.

Cogito 9y ago
In case you're not aware, the reds and blues are not random. The 'deck' of the game has 12 cards in it[1], 4 ones, 4 twos, and 4 threes. These are shuffled and then played one at a time. After all 12 have come out, they are shuffled again. This means you can plan for which card is to come next. Yes, you will sometimes get 4 (or more!) blues in a row, but developing strategies that allow you to survive those situations is one of the things you have to do if you want to get the 6144 tile. [1] this isn't quite accurate, as sometimes a large card is inserted into the deck, I think on average 1 every 36 cards, but I don't actually remember.