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This is, of course, a universal problem in game design. The answer is to iterate on the rules. I don't play WoW, for much the same reason that I've never tried
by mechanical_fish 16y ago
This is, of course, a universal problem in game design. The answer is to iterate on the rules. I don't play WoW, for much the same reason that I've never tried heroin, but I have heard the term to nerf; it was obviously invented by people whose killer strategies were neutralized by a new iteration of the rules.
With luck you eventually discover chess or Go: a game with no obvious degenerate case in the rules. But that takes lots of design work.
My suspicion is that writing AIs is so much work, and the player base is so rarefied, that there's not quite enough energy to support a game that evolves quickly enough to be constantly escaping from the degenerate case of the week, wandering through game-design space in search of the next chess. But I suppose that could change. There didn't used to be a core audience for a card game whose rules and cards changed constantly, but now there apparently is.
- Benjo 16y agoI love your point about chess and go. Is there any way to objectively evaluate that a game with no obvious degenerate cases?
- jerf 16y agoI am fairly sure that for any non-trivial game that would boil down to a solution to the halting problem, though I lack time to prove it. (Or possibly what I think of as the "finite halting problem" somewhat colloquially; a system that isn't actually Turing Complete because it's finite and bounded, but shares "enough" aspects of Turing Completeness that it still means that it's completely computationally infeasible to "prove" the property in question in the real world. Technically the halting problem on real computers falls into this class, a program running without IO is technically on a finite state machine but you're still not going to solve even that halting problem in a world where the bidding opens at 4GB of RAM.)
- mechanical_fish 16y agoThis is going to be like the second half of a joke about a mathematician and an engineer walking into a bar.... ... but, to objectively evaluate whether a game has a degenerate winning condition, make it good enough that twelve-year-olds want to play it, then wait a month or two. ;)
- Tichy 16y agoCorewar might be worth looking into. I don't think it has hit a degenerative case yet, or if it has, it has lasted pretty long. The hill (when Corewar is played king of the hill style on the internet) could be considered the environment. Of course different kinds of hills could be envisioned, for example arranging warriors on a grid.