The key difference between the footrace example and the kind of competitive games I like to play is that the games allow plenty of room to improve during play. You may not be able to meaningfully improve your physical stamina in the course of a few minutes, but in a decision driven game, playing against someone who you know will beat you is often an essential part of improving. Maybe there's no uncertainty in outcome in the sense that I'm not likely to beat this person in this play session, but I can narrow my focus on specific interactions to understand how they function, theorize about how I can perform those better, and put that into practice on the spot. I've absolutely started sessions losing badly and evened the playing field by the end!
@@kode-man23it can also depend radically on your opponent. If they are playing to teach you and are loving seeing you grow it can be great… if they are just enjoying rubbing in their superiority that can be rough for some. (Though I know players who are motivated by that too… just not me!)
@@ChrisBarney I’m talking about specifically playing online. If you have a scene that you can go to in person, then yeah it can be a positive learning experience. But when you’re old, and you can’t make it to weekly locals very much, and when you do everyone is a good 10-15 years younger than you… it kind of makes you want to retreat to just malding online haha
I think you two kind of hit it. Games in the past presented challenges. Games today present tasks. The former is rewarding, the latter is a chore. Of my many criticisms towards Soulsborne, they do a great job at the entire game being a challenge to overcome and never a task to complete.
I dunno, I feel like a lot of Soulsborne games are about memorizing enemy placements and enemy attack animations. My favorite types of action games are ones where you get a pile of "normal" goons with specific powers and your job is to figure out the right approach to make them manageable. The ones that focus on memorizing big enemy attack patterns are what feel most like a chore to me. "Have you eaten your vegetables and shown that you can properly dodge and read all the attack telegraphs?" "Yes, Daddy Dark Souls" "I don't believe you. Show me. Do it 20 times in a row." "Ok, Daddy Dark Souls." "You fucked up on the 19th try and got greedy like a little greedy piggy." "Please Daddy Dark Souls, I'm *so* bored of this." "I don't care, start again."
@@DannoHung oh, now i realized why im not fond of dark souls. I guess those with good memory and low patience tend to get bored by it as we already solved that enemy. I guess elden ring works better because of the myriad of build and approach and potential cheese
@DannoHung It's totally fair to get bored by the grind, but most games are ultimately like that. That's not task completion, that's leveling up. You have to lose a lot, learn why you lose a lot, memorize what you did wrong, then memorize what you did right. It all makes you better at the game, with the important nuance being that even when you've done all that, you can still lose. Learning and leveling up make fhe obstacles manageable so you can overcome. Task completion just removes the obstacles altogether.
"Meaningful decision with an uncertain outcome and measurable feedback." This feels applicable to all of life, and is a really useful heuristic for what we choose to engage in - jobs, hobbies, relationships, personal goals, etc. If something meets all there criteria, it's worth pursuing; just two then it could be worth it, but if something only meets one of those criteria, then your time could probably be better spent on something else.
I think it's important to remember that this "averaged out experience" you mention at 7:20 is a highly abstract simplification that's downstream from the player's perception, a perception that you hopefully want to CONDITION rather than follow as an artist. Everyone experiences this firsthand as they learn something deeply, where situations that seemed to all be the same become extremely varied and meaningful because they're looking at the nuances rather than broad strokes. Taking this as a metric for design is not a good idea because you're wilfully following the blind off a cliff - it encourages completely artificial solutions where you simply spread out the game and hand it over in chunks instead of developing the fundamentals
I wish that you guys would have expanded more on the where unpredictability of outcome is derived in games. In a card game for example, I'd say that a lot of the longevity of the game as a whole comes from the natural variance of the randomness of a deck of cards. This causes a natural uncertainty from "having enough lands", "having a 1-drop", "missing a resource drop", etc. but I also think that some of the uncertainty comes from how players deal with variance in those situations. I think games should have some of these systemic uncertainties, but player driven uncertainty is what makes a game great. Please make more videos diving into each of these three categories ❤
I love the definition of a game. 0:31 "A meaningful decision with an uncertain outcome and measurable feedback." It's so succinct and communicates the absolute simplest form of a good game.
As a player, one thing I learned from Halo infinite is that a larger gaming ecosystem can train intrinsic motivations out of players. When the game was released, it had less maps and game-modes in multiplayer than it should have, but the base sandbox and mechanics were as good as if not better than the previous successful installments (3 or maybe reach, depending on who you ask.) It was a blunder of an early release to kill battlefield as a competing franchise (an assassination attempt which was largely successful, mind you.) but when players realized the "progression" towards cosmetics and multiplayer rankings was stunted, the game died. Or at least it never recovered to the system seller it aspired to be. To be clear, map variety is very important and they had to fix it for the game itself to be considered complete. But besides that, the launch proved that the intrinsic value of loading up games of halo held no value anymore; if players didn't feel they were building up to a new hat between games, they felt they were wasting their time and dropped it for a game with lootcrates and battle passes.
While intrinsically by your definition, rock-paper-scissors would probably not constitute a game, there is a sort of metagame. Rock is the most commonly thrown sign. I believe it varies by geographical location, though. Additionally, most people would default to the pattern, If I win, I'll use the same sign next round, If I lose, I'll use the sign that beats my opponent's sign next round. Therefore, you could argue that some signs do indeed have a higher percent chance of winning , and therefore there is a meaningful decision.
This one is something I've been thinking about a lot as I try more asymmetric board/card games, from Star Wars Deckbuilding to Root and War of the Ring. Coming from fighting games and RTS, the real-time and execution elements create just enough uncertainty to keep me engaged forever, but that's hard to replicate in turn-based past the initial exploration. Either the game has very complex board states with low variance (hard to get people into) or it's actually symmetric with high input randomness instead, like Arcs vs Root. Shoutouts to Yomi 2 and Ironwood for doing that in a simple, fairly asymmetric game, through simultaneous action selection.
The original Auto Chess mod is one of my favorite examples of using randomness to present an array of easy to interpret meaningful decisions, from the faction bonuses (usually base stats like hp, damage, armor), to synergies between factions, board positioning, item drops, win/lose streaks and rolling for units in enough itself. I feel like autobattlers moving forward made the outcome of battles or effects very hard to predict by going for more flashy bonuses and thus took away from that 'aha' moment.
This reminds me of Pokemon Games where they present you a question, but there's only one right answer. Because they would loop you back to the question if you chose wrong. There was no real choice but why would it have been designed in the first place? It seems rather odd. Maybe I wanted to join Team Rocket.
This is great, but I feel like there’s a bit of an elephant in the room that you’re not talking about: Money. A lot of these decisions can be traced back to money. In big single-player games for example, every element of a game has to be collated and the expense of their creation justified in the game. It’s really really hard to justify the expense of a late-game element, if the majority of players aren’t even going to get far enough to see it. One of the ways studios justify that expense is by making the game easy and approachable enough for enough players to get far enough in to see the late-game content. That’s why they remove the uncertainty of outcome in those cases.
"Interaction" does not equal "Meaningful". Just because a card game gives players ways to "interact" with the opponent, does not mean that it is a meaningful one.
I think this comes up so much when discussing card games. Like say, a MTG player who has never played Pokémon will assume it's uninteractive and low skill because there's no interaction during your opponent's turn (e.g. no counterspells), while failing to see that most of those options in MTG are more luck than skill, because you just had to draw the card and have the mana for it (something which the game almost always does for you), and it's often pretty obvious when the right time is to play it, if you even have a choice in the matter -- e.g. if you would lose if you didn't play it, that wasn't even a decision, and that was 100% RNG, unless you like, foresaw that situation and held off on playing it previously when it would've made sense or tutored it out instead of something else that was more immediately/obviously useful, which are both possible, but definitely not the case most of the time. I can't speak for the highest levels of play, but I think the amount of skill involved in casually competitive MTG is pretty consistently overstated...you're playing a slot machine most of the time. And obviously card games are all doing that to some degree, but a game's skill (excluding deck construction) is directly tied to your ability to play around that randomness, and most card games (including MTG) don't do a great job at that. It's not uncommon in MTG that your hand plays itself at least half of the turns of the game. And when you're making that few decisions, how many meaningful points of interaction can there really be 🙃 Old Yu-Gi-Oh is especially bad for meaningless interaction...I can't comment on the highest level of play, but from a casually competitive perspective, it's just the world's most overcomplicated variation of War. They finally stumbled into something right with Synchros, which essentially make the game play a little more like Pokémon, in terms of giving players more choices and using your hand and deck to setup the correct threats, but then they keep going and printing stupid cards and adding new, much worse summoning mechanics, not to mention the many other issues Yu-Gi-Oh still had in spite of its improvements...I can't speak about modern Yu-Gi-Oh, other than that I know it's ridiculously expensive to play competitively (as it's always been), but from the eras of it that I'm familiar with...what a frustrating game. Sorry for the rant 😅 I do love card games, though
IMO the mechanics of declaring attackers and blockers works alongside instant-speed interaction to create many additional decision points. Maybe my choice of spells is obvious in any given turn, maybe not. But, do I attack with this creature or leave it to block? What interaction might my opponent have? Is it worth making a play into open mana and maybe getting blown out? Will my opponent value having his 2/2 or block and trade for my 2/2? If the game goes longer, whose chance of winning increases? You also mentioned the skill-testing factor then comes with making decisions that will pull you towards certain game states or hedge against things you know may be likely. I have definitely won and lost games because of very small decisions like these. One attack, one un-utilized mana, playing one 3-drop over another, etc. Of course not every game of magic is like this, but I would hardly say that most games of magic play themselves.
@@Kaeranai That's a good point, and I don't disagree that declaring attackers and blockers is an important point of interaction that I didn't cover and probably undervalued. I still think the game could do more to consistently provide players meaningful decisions, but the inherit interaction of combat is certainly a point in MTG's favor, especially as opposed to say...Yu-Gi-Oh.
@@shelby142 I do generally agree that having more meaningful decisions is often better. I think there also is a point where the micro-decisions can start to feel like a drag/cause decision fatigue, which was what I personally experienced while playing Flesh & Blood, because instead of just playing a land or energy, now I had to constantly think about which cards to toss (and also fight the human "loss aversion" tendency) every time time I want resources. That doesn't make it a bad or good game or anything, but it highlighted to me that simplicity in certain decisions can be a boon in decreasing mental load. Meaningful decision-making can also come not just from direct game mechanics but also from simply having meta-knowledge, which is its own area of skill entirely. I'm curious how much everyone's personal interpretation of "meaningful interaction" overlaps or conflicts. If a particular decision pushes your expected win rate up by 5%, is that "meaningful"? What about 2%? 1%? Is it more important that it *feels* meaningful?
@@shelby142 If you mean the very first formats then you could say that Yugioh was like War, but it very quickly evolved past that. It was a bit slower in the OCG since they went through Series 1 but in the TCG, series 1 - the first 2 boosters in the TCG were Legend of Blue Eyes and Metal Raiders, which individually had most of the card pool (and basically all the interesting cards, only cutting out a bunch of low-stat normal monsters) from the OCG's series 1. Yugi-Kaiba Format is the first TCG format (named after the starter decks) and that's really the only one that's strictly defined by your beatsticks (and even with such a limited card pool there is some experimentation with decks like mill and burn, or "Umi" which eschews some of the ratios on blowout cards like Summoned Skull or Judge Man to play a package of Great White and Umi so it can have a higher density of 1800 attackers). Cards like Torrential Tribute, Dark Hole, Heavy Storm and Mirror Force all share a common trait of meaning to punish your opponent for overextending, but they're huge blowout cards that are limited and in many cases can destroy your own field so you need to be selective about when you use them. These are all cards that were present very early on and way more valuable than your big beaters. The very second format in the TCG's history is called "Critter Format", named after Sangan and starting with Metal Raiders. The metagame of that format does have an importance of beatsticks like Summoned Skull, La Jinn and Neo but it's named after Sangan and effect monsters like Man-Eater Bug and Wall of Illusion as well as powerful Spells and Traps are hugely important to the format. In one of the most popular retro formats (Goat) is defined by its resource management and long-term grind game. The 1900 beaters like Gemini Elf and Archfiend Soldier exist in that format but never see play because flip monsters that recur your resources, draw 1, destroy a card, etc. are more valuable. I'm not a huge fan of Goat but it shows very quickly when effects became dominant. Basically every staple in Goat Format is a monster that gives you a resource or tempo advantage - this includes their beatstick monsters. No sane person would play Summoned Skull over Mobius the Frost Monarch in Goat unless they're playing a Fiend-centric deck (and even then, Dark Ruler Ha Des probably would be better since its effect is actually really good for the format's staple cards by shutting off searchers, flip effect monsters, D.D. monsters, etc.). The main issues with the game as it is are: 1. Consistency is TOO HIGH. It's the case where most decks have a very clear and obvious play pattern they're designed around. This is mainly a problem in that if you like a deck you have to get used to doing the same lines unless it's a rare deck that can go off-script. Disruption is often met not with a pivot to a different play but pushing through and making your intended play regardless of the disruption. Part of what made the Synchro era so strong was that it was consistent enough to not be a slog but also not so consistent every game was more or less following a script. This is my main problem with the game as it's developed, there is not enough variance or room for player expression to make it maintain being interesting across multiple games. This is also a problem with the structure of the F&L list and how it's able to hit cards. It was designed for the game way back in 2004 so it really can't account for modern card design, oftentimes hitting a deck means that either they need to be rendered completely gutless or have their entire deck hit in some capacity and possibly also a few generic cards that just happen to be really strong in the deck (like Bonfire). 2. Interaction comes in the form of disruption. Tied in with point 1, cards that make their way onto the field are too powerful, often packing things like negates, insane protection, huge stats, play extension, and floating such that the most effective way to combat decks is to prevent them from even getting there. At the same time, the person trying to make plays has to account for what might be in the opponent's hand, and based on what the opponent has done in their turn they might reveal what is or isn't in their hand. Hand traps are not inherently a bad thing, but the game has centralized around them so much that they are mandatory. It causes it to be a snowball where the player with advantage builds further advantage and if their cards are removed from the field usually they net some other sort of benefit to prevent the winning player from being put on the back foot - the game is pushing you into developing a playstyle of not letting the opponent play. It's MEANINGFUL interaction and a level of interaction that comes up often (honestly Yugioh has a lot more interaction than most people would think, just it's all grouped onto a single turn and a few cards) but disruption is almost inherently not interesting interaction. It's usually just a knowledge check on the opponent's deck to know what you're supposed to Ash or when you drop Nibiru, and if it does succeed it's just "the opponent has to not do anything".
@RogerVenn It's funny how, aside from the fight with Dio in Part 3, the most tense "fights" in the series for me were a game of poker and a game of rock paper scissors.
@@SpecterVonBaren haha true, probably because in general non-combat Shonen needs to be extra creative. I read Me & Roboco and it’s a comedy Shonen but has some “fights” like two guys trying to secretly put pants on their friend who’s too withdrawn from Shonen Jump to notice hi bottom half is naked, without him noticing what they’re doing (iirc). It is hilariously tense, and I’m all here for it.
Well, the issue might be in if the table politics of your playgroup negate the meaningful decisions that mtg’s systems are trying to create. Players themselves seem to attempt to avoid this, but there is no rules enforcement to stop it from happening.
People act like arcade style ranking and scoring systems are antiquated but really yearn for them to come back. I say this because those systems are directly addressing all three points mentioned here. Seeing the return of self-imposed challenge runs, speedrunning, etc. we see people trying to put them back into games, without realizing it.
You should play fighting games 😄 Fighting games are just the world's most complicated game of RPS played in real time. For tabletop equivalents, I highly recommend Exceed, which is a card game adaptation of fighting games. There's other good games in the genre too though, like BattleCON (the extra crunchy, no-luck version) or Pocket Paragons (the super quick, literally RPS version).
That's exactly pokemon pocket for me, not much variation and decisions were pretty simple to understand, the dailys and art of the cards are keeping me for now, but I don't feel it'll be for much more time
@@NeonicTrinity Pokémon is good, it's just that Pocket is like playing MTG with only vanilla creatures. The full card game is a lot more interesting. More decisions, longer games, more interesting card designs, more resource management...just generally way more game.
Since you guys say you discuss other peoples games or ideas in Discord, why not discuss some of those on here and maybe it will answer others road blocks or spark an idea.
It's fun to watch Gavin slowly turn into Albert Einstein.
lol, love this comment!
The key difference between the footrace example and the kind of competitive games I like to play is that the games allow plenty of room to improve during play. You may not be able to meaningfully improve your physical stamina in the course of a few minutes, but in a decision driven game, playing against someone who you know will beat you is often an essential part of improving. Maybe there's no uncertainty in outcome in the sense that I'm not likely to beat this person in this play session, but I can narrow my focus on specific interactions to understand how they function, theorize about how I can perform those better, and put that into practice on the spot. I've absolutely started sessions losing badly and evened the playing field by the end!
That right there is the reason that 1v1 games are so niche. Most people can only handle losing so many times before they give up.
@@kode-man23it can also depend radically on your opponent. If they are playing to teach you and are loving seeing you grow it can be great… if they are just enjoying rubbing in their superiority that can be rough for some. (Though I know players who are motivated by that too… just not me!)
@@ChrisBarney I’m talking about specifically playing online. If you have a scene that you can go to in person, then yeah it can be a positive learning experience. But when you’re old, and you can’t make it to weekly locals very much, and when you do everyone is a good 10-15 years younger than you… it kind of makes you want to retreat to just malding online haha
I think you two kind of hit it. Games in the past presented challenges. Games today present tasks.
The former is rewarding, the latter is a chore. Of my many criticisms towards Soulsborne, they do a great job at the entire game being a challenge to overcome and never a task to complete.
Well you summed it up better than we did haha. Task vs challenge is exactly right.
I dunno, I feel like a lot of Soulsborne games are about memorizing enemy placements and enemy attack animations. My favorite types of action games are ones where you get a pile of "normal" goons with specific powers and your job is to figure out the right approach to make them manageable. The ones that focus on memorizing big enemy attack patterns are what feel most like a chore to me.
"Have you eaten your vegetables and shown that you can properly dodge and read all the attack telegraphs?"
"Yes, Daddy Dark Souls"
"I don't believe you. Show me. Do it 20 times in a row."
"Ok, Daddy Dark Souls."
"You fucked up on the 19th try and got greedy like a little greedy piggy."
"Please Daddy Dark Souls, I'm *so* bored of this."
"I don't care, start again."
@@DannoHung Strong agree. Souls games suck bc it's just about memorizing enemy attack pattern
@@DannoHung oh, now i realized why im not fond of dark souls. I guess those with good memory and low patience tend to get bored by it as we already solved that enemy. I guess elden ring works better because of the myriad of build and approach and potential cheese
@DannoHung It's totally fair to get bored by the grind, but most games are ultimately like that. That's not task completion, that's leveling up. You have to lose a lot, learn why you lose a lot, memorize what you did wrong, then memorize what you did right. It all makes you better at the game, with the important nuance being that even when you've done all that, you can still lose.
Learning and leveling up make fhe obstacles manageable so you can overcome. Task completion just removes the obstacles altogether.
"Meaningful decision with an uncertain outcome and measurable feedback." This feels applicable to all of life, and is a really useful heuristic for what we choose to engage in - jobs, hobbies, relationships, personal goals, etc. If something meets all there criteria, it's worth pursuing; just two then it could be worth it, but if something only meets one of those criteria, then your time could probably be better spent on something else.
It’s a recipe for growth. Once you stop learning, a game, or anything else, is going to become repetitive.
I think it's important to remember that this "averaged out experience" you mention at 7:20 is a highly abstract simplification that's downstream from the player's perception, a perception that you hopefully want to CONDITION rather than follow as an artist. Everyone experiences this firsthand as they learn something deeply, where situations that seemed to all be the same become extremely varied and meaningful because they're looking at the nuances rather than broad strokes. Taking this as a metric for design is not a good idea because you're wilfully following the blind off a cliff - it encourages completely artificial solutions where you simply spread out the game and hand it over in chunks instead of developing the fundamentals
I wish that you guys would have expanded more on the where unpredictability of outcome is derived in games. In a card game for example, I'd say that a lot of the longevity of the game as a whole comes from the natural variance of the randomness of a deck of cards. This causes a natural uncertainty from "having enough lands", "having a 1-drop", "missing a resource drop", etc. but I also think that some of the uncertainty comes from how players deal with variance in those situations. I think games should have some of these systemic uncertainties, but player driven uncertainty is what makes a game great.
Please make more videos diving into each of these three categories ❤
This was definitely an overview video. We will revisit this.
I love the definition of a game. 0:31
"A meaningful decision with an uncertain outcome and measurable feedback."
It's so succinct and communicates the absolute simplest form of a good game.
As a player, one thing I learned from Halo infinite is that a larger gaming ecosystem can train intrinsic motivations out of players. When the game was released, it had less maps and game-modes in multiplayer than it should have, but the base sandbox and mechanics were as good as if not better than the previous successful installments (3 or maybe reach, depending on who you ask.)
It was a blunder of an early release to kill battlefield as a competing franchise (an assassination attempt which was largely successful, mind you.) but when players realized the "progression" towards cosmetics and multiplayer rankings was stunted, the game died. Or at least it never recovered to the system seller it aspired to be.
To be clear, map variety is very important and they had to fix it for the game itself to be considered complete. But besides that, the launch proved that the intrinsic value of loading up games of halo held no value anymore; if players didn't feel they were building up to a new hat between games, they felt they were wasting their time and dropped it for a game with lootcrates and battle passes.
While intrinsically by your definition, rock-paper-scissors would probably not constitute a game, there is a sort of metagame. Rock is the most commonly thrown sign. I believe it varies by geographical location, though. Additionally, most people would default to the pattern, If I win, I'll use the same sign next round, If I lose, I'll use the sign that beats my opponent's sign next round. Therefore, you could argue that some signs do indeed have a higher percent chance of winning , and therefore there is a meaningful decision.
That is an interesting point. I’m seeing this as two lessons. The way you present your rules shapes player behavior and always throw paper first. 😆
This one is something I've been thinking about a lot as I try more asymmetric board/card games, from Star Wars Deckbuilding to Root and War of the Ring. Coming from fighting games and RTS, the real-time and execution elements create just enough uncertainty to keep me engaged forever, but that's hard to replicate in turn-based past the initial exploration.
Either the game has very complex board states with low variance (hard to get people into) or it's actually symmetric with high input randomness instead, like Arcs vs Root. Shoutouts to Yomi 2 and Ironwood for doing that in a simple, fairly asymmetric game, through simultaneous action selection.
Great point. Real time buys a lot of uncertainty for sure.
My measure of if a choice was real, game theory wise, was if, after the fact, I can understand the ramifications.
The original Auto Chess mod is one of my favorite examples of using randomness to present an array of easy to interpret meaningful decisions, from the faction bonuses (usually base stats like hp, damage, armor), to synergies between factions, board positioning, item drops, win/lose streaks and rolling for units in enough itself. I feel like autobattlers moving forward made the outcome of battles or effects very hard to predict by going for more flashy bonuses and thus took away from that 'aha' moment.
This reminds me of Pokemon Games where they present you a question, but there's only one right answer. Because they would loop you back to the question if you chose wrong. There was no real choice but why would it have been designed in the first place? It seems rather odd.
Maybe I wanted to join Team Rocket.
Did the rise and availability of Online Guides made outcomes more certain?
For sure
@@distractionmakers What is one way you've seen developers take that in mind?
This is great, but I feel like there’s a bit of an elephant in the room that you’re not talking about: Money. A lot of these decisions can be traced back to money.
In big single-player games for example, every element of a game has to be collated and the expense of their creation justified in the game. It’s really really hard to justify the expense of a late-game element, if the majority of players aren’t even going to get far enough to see it. One of the ways studios justify that expense is by making the game easy and approachable enough for enough players to get far enough in to see the late-game content. That’s why they remove the uncertainty of outcome in those cases.
"Interaction" does not equal "Meaningful". Just because a card game gives players ways to "interact" with the opponent, does not mean that it is a meaningful one.
I think this comes up so much when discussing card games. Like say, a MTG player who has never played Pokémon will assume it's uninteractive and low skill because there's no interaction during your opponent's turn (e.g. no counterspells), while failing to see that most of those options in MTG are more luck than skill, because you just had to draw the card and have the mana for it (something which the game almost always does for you), and it's often pretty obvious when the right time is to play it, if you even have a choice in the matter -- e.g. if you would lose if you didn't play it, that wasn't even a decision, and that was 100% RNG, unless you like, foresaw that situation and held off on playing it previously when it would've made sense or tutored it out instead of something else that was more immediately/obviously useful, which are both possible, but definitely not the case most of the time. I can't speak for the highest levels of play, but I think the amount of skill involved in casually competitive MTG is pretty consistently overstated...you're playing a slot machine most of the time. And obviously card games are all doing that to some degree, but a game's skill (excluding deck construction) is directly tied to your ability to play around that randomness, and most card games (including MTG) don't do a great job at that. It's not uncommon in MTG that your hand plays itself at least half of the turns of the game. And when you're making that few decisions, how many meaningful points of interaction can there really be 🙃
Old Yu-Gi-Oh is especially bad for meaningless interaction...I can't comment on the highest level of play, but from a casually competitive perspective, it's just the world's most overcomplicated variation of War. They finally stumbled into something right with Synchros, which essentially make the game play a little more like Pokémon, in terms of giving players more choices and using your hand and deck to setup the correct threats, but then they keep going and printing stupid cards and adding new, much worse summoning mechanics, not to mention the many other issues Yu-Gi-Oh still had in spite of its improvements...I can't speak about modern Yu-Gi-Oh, other than that I know it's ridiculously expensive to play competitively (as it's always been), but from the eras of it that I'm familiar with...what a frustrating game.
Sorry for the rant 😅
I do love card games, though
IMO the mechanics of declaring attackers and blockers works alongside instant-speed interaction to create many additional decision points. Maybe my choice of spells is obvious in any given turn, maybe not. But, do I attack with this creature or leave it to block? What interaction might my opponent have? Is it worth making a play into open mana and maybe getting blown out? Will my opponent value having his 2/2 or block and trade for my 2/2? If the game goes longer, whose chance of winning increases? You also mentioned the skill-testing factor then comes with making decisions that will pull you towards certain game states or hedge against things you know may be likely. I have definitely won and lost games because of very small decisions like these. One attack, one un-utilized mana, playing one 3-drop over another, etc. Of course not every game of magic is like this, but I would hardly say that most games of magic play themselves.
@@Kaeranai That's a good point, and I don't disagree that declaring attackers and blockers is an important point of interaction that I didn't cover and probably undervalued.
I still think the game could do more to consistently provide players meaningful decisions, but the inherit interaction of combat is certainly a point in MTG's favor, especially as opposed to say...Yu-Gi-Oh.
@@shelby142 I do generally agree that having more meaningful decisions is often better. I think there also is a point where the micro-decisions can start to feel like a drag/cause decision fatigue, which was what I personally experienced while playing Flesh & Blood, because instead of just playing a land or energy, now I had to constantly think about which cards to toss (and also fight the human "loss aversion" tendency) every time time I want resources. That doesn't make it a bad or good game or anything, but it highlighted to me that simplicity in certain decisions can be a boon in decreasing mental load. Meaningful decision-making can also come not just from direct game mechanics but also from simply having meta-knowledge, which is its own area of skill entirely.
I'm curious how much everyone's personal interpretation of "meaningful interaction" overlaps or conflicts. If a particular decision pushes your expected win rate up by 5%, is that "meaningful"? What about 2%? 1%? Is it more important that it *feels* meaningful?
@@shelby142 If you mean the very first formats then you could say that Yugioh was like War, but it very quickly evolved past that. It was a bit slower in the OCG since they went through Series 1 but in the TCG, series 1 - the first 2 boosters in the TCG were Legend of Blue Eyes and Metal Raiders, which individually had most of the card pool (and basically all the interesting cards, only cutting out a bunch of low-stat normal monsters) from the OCG's series 1.
Yugi-Kaiba Format is the first TCG format (named after the starter decks) and that's really the only one that's strictly defined by your beatsticks (and even with such a limited card pool there is some experimentation with decks like mill and burn, or "Umi" which eschews some of the ratios on blowout cards like Summoned Skull or Judge Man to play a package of Great White and Umi so it can have a higher density of 1800 attackers).
Cards like Torrential Tribute, Dark Hole, Heavy Storm and Mirror Force all share a common trait of meaning to punish your opponent for overextending, but they're huge blowout cards that are limited and in many cases can destroy your own field so you need to be selective about when you use them. These are all cards that were present very early on and way more valuable than your big beaters.
The very second format in the TCG's history is called "Critter Format", named after Sangan and starting with Metal Raiders. The metagame of that format does have an importance of beatsticks like Summoned Skull, La Jinn and Neo but it's named after Sangan and effect monsters like Man-Eater Bug and Wall of Illusion as well as powerful Spells and Traps are hugely important to the format.
In one of the most popular retro formats (Goat) is defined by its resource management and long-term grind game. The 1900 beaters like Gemini Elf and Archfiend Soldier exist in that format but never see play because flip monsters that recur your resources, draw 1, destroy a card, etc. are more valuable. I'm not a huge fan of Goat but it shows very quickly when effects became dominant. Basically every staple in Goat Format is a monster that gives you a resource or tempo advantage - this includes their beatstick monsters. No sane person would play Summoned Skull over Mobius the Frost Monarch in Goat unless they're playing a Fiend-centric deck (and even then, Dark Ruler Ha Des probably would be better since its effect is actually really good for the format's staple cards by shutting off searchers, flip effect monsters, D.D. monsters, etc.).
The main issues with the game as it is are:
1. Consistency is TOO HIGH. It's the case where most decks have a very clear and obvious play pattern they're designed around. This is mainly a problem in that if you like a deck you have to get used to doing the same lines unless it's a rare deck that can go off-script. Disruption is often met not with a pivot to a different play but pushing through and making your intended play regardless of the disruption. Part of what made the Synchro era so strong was that it was consistent enough to not be a slog but also not so consistent every game was more or less following a script. This is my main problem with the game as it's developed, there is not enough variance or room for player expression to make it maintain being interesting across multiple games.
This is also a problem with the structure of the F&L list and how it's able to hit cards. It was designed for the game way back in 2004 so it really can't account for modern card design, oftentimes hitting a deck means that either they need to be rendered completely gutless or have their entire deck hit in some capacity and possibly also a few generic cards that just happen to be really strong in the deck (like Bonfire).
2. Interaction comes in the form of disruption. Tied in with point 1, cards that make their way onto the field are too powerful, often packing things like negates, insane protection, huge stats, play extension, and floating such that the most effective way to combat decks is to prevent them from even getting there. At the same time, the person trying to make plays has to account for what might be in the opponent's hand, and based on what the opponent has done in their turn they might reveal what is or isn't in their hand.
Hand traps are not inherently a bad thing, but the game has centralized around them so much that they are mandatory. It causes it to be a snowball where the player with advantage builds further advantage and if their cards are removed from the field usually they net some other sort of benefit to prevent the winning player from being put on the back foot - the game is pushing you into developing a playstyle of not letting the opponent play.
It's MEANINGFUL interaction and a level of interaction that comes up often (honestly Yugioh has a lot more interaction than most people would think, just it's all grouped onto a single turn and a few cards) but disruption is almost inherently not interesting interaction. It's usually just a knowledge check on the opponent's deck to know what you're supposed to Ash or when you drop Nibiru, and if it does succeed it's just "the opponent has to not do anything".
1:49 Well you've clearly just never watched Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part 4.
The whole Boy 2 Man arc gave me so much anxiety lol
@RogerVenn It's funny how, aside from the fight with Dio in Part 3, the most tense "fights" in the series for me were a game of poker and a game of rock paper scissors.
@@SpecterVonBaren haha true, probably because in general non-combat Shonen needs to be extra creative. I read Me & Roboco and it’s a comedy Shonen but has some “fights” like two guys trying to secretly put pants on their friend who’s too withdrawn from Shonen Jump to notice hi bottom half is naked, without him noticing what they’re doing (iirc). It is hilariously tense, and I’m all here for it.
so does commander have less meaningful decisions? Or what in this framework makes it problematic?
Well, the issue might be in if the table politics of your playgroup negate the meaningful decisions that mtg’s systems are trying to create. Players themselves seem to attempt to avoid this, but there is no rules enforcement to stop it from happening.
People act like arcade style ranking and scoring systems are antiquated but really yearn for them to come back. I say this because those systems are directly addressing all three points mentioned here.
Seeing the return of self-imposed challenge runs, speedrunning, etc. we see people trying to put them back into games, without realizing it.
I've been thinking a lot about what kind of meta would develop if rock had a 1% probability of beating paper
You should play fighting games 😄
Fighting games are just the world's most complicated game of RPS played in real time.
For tabletop equivalents, I highly recommend Exceed, which is a card game adaptation of fighting games. There's other good games in the genre too though, like BattleCON (the extra crunchy, no-luck version) or Pocket Paragons (the super quick, literally RPS version).
That's exactly pokemon pocket for me, not much variation and decisions were pretty simple to understand, the dailys and art of the cards are keeping me for now, but I don't feel it'll be for much more time
@@NeonicTrinity Pokémon is good, it's just that Pocket is like playing MTG with only vanilla creatures. The full card game is a lot more interesting. More decisions, longer games, more interesting card designs, more resource management...just generally way more game.
Since you guys say you discuss other peoples games or ideas in Discord, why not discuss some of those on here and maybe it will answer others road blocks or spark an idea.
Funny question, ever played the splatoon 2rd person shooter video game? Shockingly novel game play from relatively intuitive innovation in the design.
POOL SHARK. That's the name you're looking for instead of Donkey Space.