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"Munchkinism" already has a commonly-known name. It's called hacking.
Yes, let's please call it "hacking," or anything other than "Munchkinism."
Feel free to make concrete alternative suggestions. "Hacking" is taken.
Isn't 'munchkin' sort of taken too? The impression I got from a little googling is that the word as used by RPG players is a derogatory term. Calling someone that isn't a compliment on their cleverness in exploiting the mechanics but mockery for missing much of the point of the game and being an annoyance to other players.
If that's true then calling cryonics munchkinism would sound like agreement with people who say that death gives meaning to life or something like that.
The core of the insult is in the framing of the behavior as a negative (and an assertion of higher status of the speaker). The actual descriptive element of the behavior is a pretty close match to what we are talking about. This is perhaps enough of a reason to discard the word and create a synonym that doesn't have the negative association.
The problem with the MIN-MAXing munchkin - or rather the thing that causes munchkin-callers to insult them is that they think Role Playing Games are about actually taking on the role and doing what the character should do. The whole @#%@# world is at stake so you learn what you need to about the physics and the current challenges. You work out the best way to eliminate the threat and if possible ensure a literal 'happily ever after' scenario. Then you gain the power necessary to ensure that your chance of success is maximised.
But the role of the character is not what (the name-caller implies) the point of the game is about. It is about out what the game master expects, working out your own status within the group and achieving a level of success that matches your station (and no higher). The incentive to the speaker is to secure their higher position in the hierarchy and maintain their own behavior as the accepted model of sophistication. Object level actions are to be deprecated in favor of the universal game of social politics.
Many of the same behaviours and judgments apply to life as well. Optimising for whatever your own preferences are as an alternative to doing what you think you are supposed to do. Optimising your behavior for status gain only if and when status gain is what you want or need.
I don't play roleplaying games myself. I much prefer cards, board games or games that are physical. Both the social aspect and the games themselves are for more fun and the roleplaying just slow, with the 'role' of an individual borderline insulting. If I want to socialise I'll socialise. If I want to hear someone else's story I'll read a book. If I want to play a roleplaying game I'll download one on the computer. If I want to guess the boss's password I'll get a job - and I damn well be being payed well for it.
I may be a little biased. The last time I did, in fact, play a group RPG one of my companions thought it was ok to steal something of mine. I gave her fair warning and plenty of chances to comply but I ended up having to fight both her and her and the two allies she recruited (while the other two in the group stayed out of it.) Once I defeated them I took my pick of their stuff by way of appropriate reprisal. It's exactly what the character I was roleplaying would have done and I wouldn't roleplay a pushover but at the same time the overall social experience isn't especially rewarding. I haven't once had to beat the crap through three of my friends in the real world, which suits me just fine! :)
There is no problem with "Munchkinism." The problem is that in old RPG's the rules imply poorly designed (see lack of challenge upon full understanding of the system) tactical battle simulation games with some elements of strategy, while the advertising implies a social interaction and story-telling game without giving the necessary rules to support it. Thus different people think they're playing different games together and social interaction devolves into what people imagine they would do given a hypothetical situation without consequences (at least until the consequences are made explicit, violating their expectations as you note in your example).
Put all my points into charisma and charm skills and go find me some wenches? Oh, you mean saving the world. Got it.
Actually that is another problem with RPG designs. There are social skills and stats provided but they are damn near pointless in practice. Even when you want to role play a lovable rogue who can charm, manipulate and deceive his way out of problems you may as well put your skills into battle axes. Because the only person that you need to use social skills on is the DM and that is an out of character action. Unless you somehow manage to find a DM who considers the interaction to be about the character trying to persuade an NPC and not the player trying to persuade him and just lets the player roll some dice already.
"What is the skill check for "seduce the maidservant and get her to show you the secret entrance to the castle"?"
... "No, I don't need to tell you what lines I'm going to use... since I would just have to lie so as to not offend the sensibilities of the company. Dice. I want to use dice and charm wenches!"
... "What? Oh, this is just too much hassle. Let's do what we know works. Guys, you take the guard on the left and I'll take the guard on the right. Rescue the princess and kill everything that tries to stop us."
Of course, what actions players enjoy actually role-playing out, and what actions they prefer to just encapsulate into a die-roll, varies a lot among potential players.
Most RPG systems I've seen seem optimized for players who enjoy making tactical decisions (do I wield a sword or cast a spell? do I go through this door or that one, and do I check it for traps before I open it?), and so devote an enormous amount of attention to the specifics of different weapon types but don't care very much about the specifics of different wench-charming lines.
I could imagine it being different: e.g., the session starts with three or four hours of hanging out at the local tavern swapping stories, and otherwise navigating the tribal monkey politics of a simulated adventuring party, finding out which vendors have the best equipment and give the best deals, bartering with salespeople, etc., etc., etc. ... and then everyone rolls against their "explore dungeon" to determine how successful they were, how much loot they got, who died, how many monsters they killed, etc. ("No, I don't need to tell you which door I'm going to enter through. Dice. I want to use dice and explore dungeons!")
But I expect they would appeal to a vastly different audience.
The analogy doesn't fit. The salient difference here isn't one of emphasis on a different aspects of adventuring. It's that the bulk of the significant decisions for everything except the tactics boil down to guessing the DM's password. And that just isn't that fun. Nor is it compulsory (school) or economically worthwhile (paid employment), the other times that password guessing is the whole point of the game.
The reason the disgruntled charmer had to fall back on tactical combat is because that is the one aspect of the situation over which the players actually have influence. Because no matter how much attention you pay to that aspect it still amounts to trying to guess how some roleplaying nerd thinks you should pick up wenches! Something just isn't right there.
On the hand designing an entire gaming system around a solid theory of social dynamics has real potential as a learning tool if run by those with solid competence themselves. "Lookt! It's a 9 HB. They have a 30 second timeout. Quick, use a +3 neghit then follow up with that new 2d8 identity conveying routine you've been preparing all week! Let me run interference on the AMOG to hold agro while you establish rapport" (No, on second thought, let's not go to Camelot. 'Tis a silly place.)
I agree completely with you that "how some roleplaying nerd thinks you should pick up wenches" bears no meaningful relationship to real social dynamics, so it's all password-guessing.
From my perspective, the same thing was true of slicing swords through armor, raising allied morale, casting spells, praying for divine intervention, avoiding diseases in the swamp, etc. None of those simulated activities bore any meaningful relationship to the real thing they ostensibly simulated.
But I'll grant that in the latter cases, there were usually formal rules written down, so I didn't have to guess the passwords: I could read them in a book, memorize them, and optimize for them. (At least, assuming the GM followed them scrupulously.)
That's an issue that traditional-game GMs go back and forth on all the time - some say "but it's more interesting if you role-play it out", and some say "but you're not making the fighter actually stab people when he wants to make an attack". Personally, in that sort of game I like to have players in-character to an extent, but their social stats should be the thing that determines their character's success at social tasks.
There are a ton of spectacular indie games that deal with this in other ways!
Wuthering Heights Roleplay is just incredible. Your main stats are Despair and Rage. There are general rules for matching tasks to stat rolls, and specific rules for Duels, Murder, Art, and Seduction. The general trajectory of a game is: a bunch of terrible people obsessed with their own problems (or rather, their Problems) start falling in love with each other and making dramatic revelations, until eventually they're all hacking each other to pieces. It's a fun evening.
The Mountain Witch is another interesting one. All "conflicts" are decided by a simple roll-off, d6 versus d6. You get more d6s (keep the highest) if you're working with other people. Players keep track of how much they Trust each other player, and you can spend someone else's Trust in you to help them out with bonuses in conflicts, to gain control of the narration of the outcome of their conflicts, or to give yourself bonuses when directly opposing them. (There's a lot more to this one, but that's the gist of the conflict mechanic.) Cool stuff.
What, no d20s? Or even a d8? Where's the geeky fun in that? P
Instead, you use poker chips to represent trust! I find that appealing somehow...
Yeah, that one just uses d6 - though there's an interesting "duel" mechanic where you and an opponent roll secretly, then decide together whether you'll each roll again - to emulate two ronin staring each other down before deciding the battle with a single cut. (The game has a very specific setting - you're a group of ronin who've been hired to climb Mt. Fuji and kill the Witch (though he's a dude?) that lives on top. You all have secret ulterior motives! I think it's been adapted to similar scenarios such as bank heists.)
Uh, Wuthering Heights uses d100, and you roll under or over your Despair / Rage depending on what you want to do. For example, killing someone means rolling below Rage (easier to do the angrier you are), whereas noticing other peoples' feelings and stuff requires a roll over Despair. Ooh, plus, if you're into nerdy dice-related stuff, there's a big Random Table of Problems, like "You are an alcoholic", "You are a homosexual", "You are Irish", "You are in love with a member of your family", or "You are a poet", and everyone has to roll d100 a few times to get their Problems.
Oh! And if you just want to chuck lots of different kinds of dice around, you can't go wrong with Dogs in the Vineyard - where you play itinerant teenage pseudo-Mormon enforcers of the faith in a west that never was. All your traits have some amount of dice of some size next to them, and when they come up in a conflict, you roll them into your pool and can use them when raising / seeing. For instance - possessions of any sort are 1d6, 1d4 if they're sorta worthless, 1d8 if they're excellent (criterion: in order to be excellent, a thing has to be good enough that people might remark on how excellent it is), 2 dice if they're big, and an extra d4 if it's a gun (so a big, excellent pistol is 2d8+1d4).
Huh, kinda geeked out there. ^-^;
The other problem with Munchkinism is that, once your character actually achieves godlike power by breaking the game system, there's no actual challenge left. It's like solving a Rubix Cube by peeling the colored stickers off of the sides and sticking them back on in the "solved" position; there's really no point to it. So you self-handicap and choose to play a character that isn't Pun-Pun.
Munchkinism is definitely not the same as cheating. You don't break the Rubix cube physics, you work within them. A munchkin probably would google "solve rubix cube" and then apply a dozen or so step algorithm that will solve the cube from any given starting configuration. In fact peeling the stickers isn't even cheating properly. The result doesn't even constitute a solved rubix cube. It constitutes an ugly block that used to be a rubix cube. It is far better to simply dismantle the cube and click it back into place correctly. (This is actually necessary if some clown has taken out one of the blocks and swapped it around such that the entire cube is unsolvable. A cruel trick.)
A legitimate challenge there is to set yourself the task of solving it without external knowledge. The one I would go with (if I was interested in playing with the cubes beyond being able to solve them all at will) is to learn to solve the cube blindfolded. You get to look at the cube once for a couple of seconds then you have to do the whole thing by touch (and no, there is no braille there to help you). As a bonus this is exactly the sort of task that grants general improvements in mental focus!
That's the kind of thing I like to demonstrate once in principle and then propose a rule change. My usual example is that of playing 500 and the open misere call. I usually propose something of a limitation on frequency of misere calls (and allow any 10 call to beat it). If the other players don't want the limitation I proceed to play open misere every time it is rational to do so (about 1/4 hands, depending on the score at the time). And ask them if they have changed their mind every time I win.
I like self-handicaps. At least in the form of giving yourself a genuinely challenging task and then trying to overcome it. My character selections (in RPGs when I have played them and in CRPGs) tend to be based on novelty or and emotional appeal. All the choices after that can be made intelligently.
RPGs are kind of a weird case; they're not "games" in the same sense as a competitive game, because there's not one fixed thing specified in the rules that you're supposed to be maximizing (this is part of why I don't play RPGs :P ). With those you start getting derogatory nicknames for those who don't do everything possible to win (e.g. "scrubs"). Though I don't know of any short term for those who do (aside from just "people who play to win"), except in the context of Magic where they're known as "Spikes". Of course, if we're speaking of "winning at life", there it is also not clear should to be maximized! People aren't very good at knowing their own goals. So that's something of a disanalogy.
Duh, winning.
Twice.
Munchkinism's more vivid in my mind. Then again, I love to make up new words.
On the other hand if 'real' munchkins were anything like 'munchkins' in this sense they would have taken a level in badass then dealt with both the wicked witches themselves without waiting for a fortuitous outside intervention. And made the yellow brick road straight.
It's not the same thing. Picking locks is a hack. Cryonics is something more, which is why even most people who can pick locks don't go for it.
I wonder if it's accurate to say that for hacks, it's the means that's considered "cheating", whereas for cryonics, it's the end itself that's considered "cheating".
That seems like a good distinction between Munchkinism and Hacking, as I've seen them used by their respective cultures. Munchkinism is about using the rules to accomplish an "unacceptable" goal, whereas Hacking is about accomplishing acceptable goals via "unacceptable" methods. Thank you for helping me cement why the two terms felt like very separate ones :)
http://home.netcom.com/~shagbert/pages/munchkins.html :
Not all hackers go for the same type of hacks.
Though I agree "hacking" isn't quite the right word,
Only under the most anemic criteria. Overlap between lock pickers and hackers does not make lock picking hacking. Using something not-as-it-was-intended is the start of many hacks, but a simple reversal of function or overcoming of function by itself doesn't make the cut.
No, it's quite the same thing.
-- rms, "On Hacking"
Does not the bolded section describe cryonics? Isn't death a "silly rule"? I think your sense of the word "hacking" is too strict.
As another example, the Jargon file has a general definition of 'hacker':
That seems to fit pretty well.
It certainly fits 'hacker' (and myself) well. It doesn't fit people who are indifferent to intellectual challenge but just want to live (and so do cryonics) or just want to win (and so min-max the @#%$ out of life).
"Min-maxer". Now that could be a reasonable label.
Slang meaning's very similar to 'munchkin', but doesn't make people who aren't gamers think of fairy-tale midgets. Sounds good to me. It's also got decision theory connotations as a bonus.
Min-maxing connotes being extremely good at some things by being extremely bad at some others (the "min" part), so it's not quite the right fit.
Recognizing things that are not worth putting effort in as well as things that are isn't a bad thing, given that there is an infinite number of skills you could use your time to get good at. Such as shaping gravel into mounds exactly 17 centimeters tall, memorizing telephone directories, or playing chmess competitively.
Okay, but that's not what defines munchkins. Munchkinism, as I see it, is less about getting points in good areas by burning points in bad areas (min-maxing) than it is about getting points in good areas by burning the spirit of the game.
--game theory connotations, to be specific.
Upvoted for this:
I think your model of the space of human attitudes is insufficiently nuanced. I like the 'hacking' attitude as well as that which is being referred to as being a munchkin but they are two complementary features.
The part of your quote that you didn't bold is loosely relevant to the distinction.
I am sorry, are you really saying that people don't go for cryonics because it is something more than a hack? I find this causal relationship hard to believe. Do people in general don't go for things that are more than hacks?
I think it is a lot more likely that people don't go for cryonics because it is weird, and maybe because it requires thinking about your own mortality. And most importantly, because it is not the default option.
Probably a third cause. There is some reason why people don't go for cryonics, which is also the reason it isn't a hack. Too weird might be that cause.
I get the impression that you draw the distinction between 'hacking' and 'munchkining' as "They both work, but would the average guy think that it's clever or dismiss it as crazy / unfair / uncustomary?" Am I correct?
Not really. It involves the ability to do things that would make other people look at you funny, and a relentlessly optimizing attitude toward all of real life and not just computer science problems or particular locks. There may be something more to it, too. In any case Timothy Ferriss != John McCarthy (albeit McCarthy himself may also have the Munchkin-nature) and people who build championship Magic decks don't think in quite the same way as great programming hackers, though you can also be both.
So, new attempt:
Closer?
A hacker is just a satisficer that places little value on a norm or norms. A munchkin is an optimiser.
Removing one constraint allows a satisficer to achieve better results on all the other constraints; by contrast, an optimiser will violate as many constraints as it takes to get the best result on the optimised criterion.
I came back to ask a similar question. I would not call the issue of choosing cryonics more then a hack. I think it is the difference is that a hacker is often some one who has optimized well in a narrow area while a munchkin will look at the whole system and optimize it and constantly look for new rules to exploit. The difference I see EY drawing is one of local optimization verses global optimization(or at least an attempting to).
Munchkinism in gaming is also generally connected to zero-sum games, so when gaming against a munchkin you either lose or have to out-munchkin them. The meaning is generally pejorative because more collaborative games tend to become unfun at this point. I've never seen gamers who do odd and massively optimized things that aren't intended for winning zero-sum games, such as building a working CPU in Minecraft, called munchkins. There always seems to be the aspect of outshining the other players within the game in munchkinism.
The analogy of this to the social sphere might be why Tim Ferriss got flak from his 4-Hour Workweek.