
Game Theory - Marginal Advantage - s_baar
http://interactive.usc.edu/members/splott/2009/02/the_marginal_advantage.html
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lmkg
For me, one of the reasons that the concept of Marginal Advantage is important
for game design, is because you have to interact with, or at least react to,
your opponent. In the Mancala example, the greedy AI was basically playing a
single-player optimization game, and ignoring its opponent. Meanwhile, the
clever AI paid attention to what its opponent could do and played around it.
The Starcraft example continues the theme: amateurs concentrate on what's best
for them in an absolute sense, while the pros consider their opponents.

FYI, the author, Sean Plott, is better known as Day[9], one of the top-ranked
Starcraft players in the United States. Also a mathematician, as it turns out.
His podcasts on the SCII beta are really insightful.

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Terry_B
I've had a really hard time finding writing of this quality and insight into
good game design.

There's lots of fluffy, high level stuff at one end of the spectrum and then
lots of stuff that discusses the details of specific well trodden genres ad
nauseum.

There's not so much that's of direct use when you sit down and try and design
an orginal type of game by applying principals like this it seems to me.

I don't know how much of that is because the people with such insight haven't
written it down, or they really just do it by feel and trial and error rather
than by applying easy to describe techniques.

Does anyone have any other recommendations like this?

~~~
crystalis
Sirlin has written what seems to be the most commonly referenced piece
whenever games and "thinking" come up. Playing to Win, available free at his
website (www.sirlin.net/ptw/), doesn't directly deal with game design, but it
comes up throughout. His blog generally trends on game design topics. (He's
been a fighting game pro, rebalanced SF2 for the most recent version, and is
in the process of releasing some physical games now.)

Costikyan writes a lot of good stuff. <http://playthisthing.com/randomness-
blight-or-bane> is a great example, and you can find some other writings of
his in various archives. PTT itself has him (and a few other contributors of
varying flavors) writing on new (indie, board, etc.) games.

Soren Johnson (Lead designer on Civ4) had a series going at
<http://www.designer-notes.com/>, but hasn't appeared to have posted recently.
<http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=132> is a good example, discussing how
easily players can perceive an AI to be "cheating".

Brenda Braithwaite (Wizardry series, Train) has a similar, seemingly modestly
defunct blog that is worth reading regardless.

Edmund McMillen of Super Meatboy posted about difficulty:
<http://supermeatboy.com/13/Why_am_I_so____hard_/>. There's a similar post
somewhere on the blog.

Gama Sutra occasionally has useful things, but you need to filter a lot.

Without endorsing it overly, Less Talk More Rock
(<http://boingboing.net/features/morerock.html>) is worth consideration. (For
balance, <http://sinisterdesign.net/?p=457>).

~~~
Terry_B
Thanks! I'd read Costikyan and plenty of Gama Sutra before but not the others.

When sitting down to prototype a game I usually find the first iteration turns
out to not have the fun gameplay you had imagined at all. It's then a matter
of how to think about the problem and what things you should try in attmpet to
make it fun and challenging. Perhaps you could identify that the idea just
stinks to being with..

Having not worked along side an experienced game designer I'm always curious
as to whether they know of ideas and tools to apply that aren't commonly known
or whether it is just instinct.

I feel like there must be a large catalogue of game design rules of thumb in
the heads of successful designers that have not been written down and I'd love
to know them :)

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Xurinos
I cannot help but think that these examples share a different commonality --
that they are war simulations where the winners in these examples were the
ones who did not overextend and instead fortified or played a better numbers
game. This is not marginal advantage; it is fortification and resource
consolidation. I forget the word for it... where you are trying to reduce your
opponent's resources before yours... but that resource management skill is
what makes good players good. Viewed that way, what is really going on is much
less mystical.

~~~
carbocation
The word is attrition, by the way.

~~~
Xurinos
That's it! War of attrition. Point for you.

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snowbird122
Insightful: all reasonably designed competitive games share three basic
traits: 1\. ambiguity of optimal play 2\. diversity of play 3\. allowance for
skill

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michael_dorfman
_Third, a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the
element of chance or luck. Ideally, the probability of a weak player defeating
a good player should be as close to zero as possible._

I'd disagree that this is the ideal. Personally, I enjoy games that mix luck
and skill. Take Cribbage, for example-- the weaker player will still win about
45% of the time, by virtue of having been dealt better cards-- which is why
tournaments consist of a number of games, to even out the luck.

I think it's great if weaker players can defeat stronger players, on occasion.
It helps keep the game interesting for everybody.

Put another way: when I play chess with my children, I have to handicap
myself-- otherwise, they'd lose every time, and quickly lose interest. When I
play cribbage with them, they still win often enough to keep things
interesting.

~~~
derefr
That just means that the "real game" of Cribbage lasts for one tournament, not
one session. If you only played chess openings, rather than entire games, they
might win some of the time as well. Almost all games that adults play
competitively are made to decisively rank their players' powers of strategy
over their proper play-length. Games for children introduce progressively
higher levels of chance, the younger and therefore less-equipped the child is
to deal with real strategy. The maximum of this slope comes in early-childhood
"games" such as Chutes and Ladders—not really a game at all, as there are no
strategic choices made at any point.

From this, you can take the idea that _any_ game can be adapted for players of
unequal strategic strength simply by adding chance components to it, or
replacing some choice points with chance. What if, in Chess for example, you
had to roll a die at the beginning of your turn to find out the maximum number
of squares any of your pieces could move that turn? Or if, upon a bad roll,
your opponent got to decide which of your pieces you must move?

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jplewicke
If you're interested in game theory and strategy and looking for a non-
technical introduction, I'd heavily recommend the book Thinking Strategically
by Dixit and Nalebuff ( <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310353> ). I'd
been exposed to a lot of the concepts before, but they hadn't completely
clicked until reading their engaging examples.

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JoeAltmaier
Marginal Advantage implies looking one turn ahead, to determine how the
opponent can react to your move. The Greedy approach doesn't have to look
ahead at all. The difference is that simple - the more moves you look ahead,
the better you play. Chess programs became "expert level" when there was
enough CPU horsepower to look 6 moves ahead.

