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Mestroyer comments on Rationality Quotes January 2014 - Less Wrong
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David Sirlin on self-handicapping in competitive games
I played a defender in high school school football. In football the defender can not touch or physically interfere the receiver of a pass from the time the pass is thrown until they catch the ball, to do so is a moderate penalty for the defenders team and considered bad sportsmanship at the amateur levels. As a adolescent that identified with Lawful Good, it came naturally to see Interference as against the rules, and not to be done.
It was an enlightening moment when a mentor explained that the penalties are not there to discourage and exclude types of behavior from the game. When they explained that penalties are part of the game with clearly defined rules, just another mechanical system to be gamed. That the penalty is not a punishment for bad behavior, but the price payed to implement certain tactics.
Yes and no. Sometimes certain things are against the rules because they risk injuring someone. I wish more sports would make explicit the difference between the rules you're allowed to break and pay the penalty and the rules you should never intentionally break, because disagreements over which category a particular rule falls into can be very vicious.
Do you have any case studies of the line being explicitly drawn in that sand, and working to deter harmful behavior, even at the playing to win level? I know the NHL (National Hockey League, North America) has been working on this problem with player fines, game suspensions, and occasion criminal charges.
Now sports are just a easy to relate to example where the mechanics of system can fail to represent the intent of the system when it comes to discouraging harmful tactics. This problem is near universal.
The Extra Credits Political Series deals with this root problem under the light of the American political system. A good watch if you are at all interested in how behavior is shaped by the reward mechanics in a system.
No case studies, I'd be interested to hear of any. At university I was part of a society for a competitive game with an evolving ruleset, and making that distinction explicit was one of the things we experimented with.
I don't think the only point of many games is winning. If you play Go and want it to be an enjoyable experience it makes sense to stick to the general of code of conduct for Go.
Competitive games like Go are most enjoyable when people all agree on the same rules, when losing grants you no excuses to salvage pride at the cost of the victor. For this to work, the rules must be unambigious. You either broke them and are a cheater and the match is invalid, or you exploited them and won fairly. Subjective codes of honor are extremely ambigious. My competitive game of choice (though I rarely play it these days) is Warcraft III, and the online community associated with it is rife with these kind of "codes of honor" (mostly in the mid levels of the skill hierarchy, or "ladder"; the low skill people are trying to learn, the high skill people got that way because they don't self-handicap, but the mid skill people want to imagine themselves as high skill people but with honor). I have seen several of these codes of honor. I once followed one. Examples are: "No mortar/sorceress, no mass chimera, no hero worker harass, no air worker harass no tower rushes, no tower/tank, no mass batriders, no mass raiders". There is never a clear line between honorable and dishonorable behavior. How many mortars and sorceresses do you have to have before it's mortar/sorceress? etc.
A game where you win by inching closer to "dishonorable" behavior is no fun. In addition, Warcraft III players will note that the majority of prohibited strategies are mainstays of the orc and human races. The game is already patched by Blizzard to make the races balanced in professional play, and professionals do not self-handicap. So taking them out of the game would strengthen night-elf and undead players.
And I can attest that beating a "scrub" with a strategy they deem dishonorable and hearing them protest is extremely fun. I can also attest that being a scrub and running into players who don't abide by your "code of honor" is not fun at all. I have even been a scrub and ran into other scrubs who had different "codes of honor", such that we were each violating each others, and that is sort of fun for the victor (if they are hypocritical enough to think that their code is the "correct" one, while laughing at the other one for their code's arbitrariness) and very unfun for the loser.
Besides enjoyment, there is another goal of gaming that you get by playing to win, which is self-improvement. If you allow yourself to think that you lost because you are good and honorable, then you will think about your choices during the game and your thought processes and ask "what can I improve?". And there are transferable Slytherin skills to learn from gaming, such as deceit, modeling your opponent's mind, and searching with (as Quirrell would say) "censors off" for ways to win. Scrubs don't only hurt their own development, but if there are enough of them, they hurt the development of their opponents. You can't really test "Is this a good stratregy" against a scrub, because often it will be a bad strategy but it's against their code so they won't have learned the counter to it, and it will work on them. There are players who do nothing but play anti-scrub strategies to exploit this, but they are also missing out on most of the depth of the game because that's not how you beat high-level players.
But for a related point, see this.
Go works quite well with rules that aren't unambiguous. Especially the Japanese Go rules have their quirks.
As far as Warcraft III goes, I played the game ages ago, in a clan the year before Frozen Throne came out.
Back in the day you could hide building in the woods to drag on a game an additional 10 minutes against a lot of opponents with the hope that the opponent leaves the game out of boredom.
On the other hand I have no problem with the idea of tower rushes.
I you are a good player in Warcraft you can win with any strategy against bad players.
I don't think that you become good at Warcraft by practicing tower/tank to perfection.
Can you give an example of the type of code you're thinking about?
An example in chess could be the enforcement of the touch-move rule in a "friendly" game not played under tournament conditions. Personally, I would tend to see someone who insisted on applying this rule in a friendly game when the opponent makes a mistaken touch as a bit of a jerk who cares too much about winning. I am sure this varies across different people and different chess circles though.
I agree. As usual, the key question is what are you trying to accomplish. To win? To socialize? To have an interesting game? If you are playing a friendly game, and an interesting position develops, and then your opponent makes a huge and immediately obvious blunder, there's something to be said for letting him retract his move. There's something unaesthetic about an interesting game -- hard fought and well played on both sides -- which is won because of a stupid move.
I suppose Sirlin's response would be to suggest you have a clear idea in your head at the beginning of what you are trying to accomplish; and to try to avoid from changing that objective after the fact in order to save face.
One could observe that in most competitions, there are a lot of objectives besides just winning the competition. For example a runner up on America's Top Model who nevertheless lands a modeling contract due to her exposure on the show.
No Sirlin, is very much advocating that games should be about winning. It's one of his key ideas on the philosophy of game design.
What is the point of this rule? I never understood it.
I think it's to avoid a situation where a player does a move, sees how his opponent reacts, realizes his mistake and retracts his move - leading to argument, or players having to control their reactions until they're really really sure their opponent finished his move, etc. Chess is supposed to be about strategy, not about bickering about whether a move was really confirmed and trying to guess which move is good by watching your opponent's face.
Also, it's to force new players to think quietly, which is good for them anyway in the long run.
I don't know about its history, but I imagine that the point is to discourage grabbing a piece and hovering it over where you are thinking of moving it to visualize better the new situation that would arise. Doing this seems to violate the spirit of the game if you think an important part of it is to be able to look ahead and calculate in your mind's eye. Plus it could be annoying/distracting for the opponent.
That makes sense. Even so, it seems a little excessive.
Playing mirror Go is often considered dishonorable. In practice it's not a major problem because it's a suboptimal strategy.
In general plays where you know thaty they that only work when the opponent makes a mistake are considered dishonorable in go.
This guy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Lasker) was a chess generalist (able to play most position types comfortably), and chess world champion for 27 years. He succeeded by playing moves his opponents found most uncomfortable (murky tactics vs positional players, 'boring positional plays' vs flashy tactical players).
There is some disagreement today on whether Lasker was really about psychology or merely ahead of his time. My opinion is he did use psychology, but he also had very good positional sense which most of his contemporaries did not share (lots of Lasker's supposedly dubious plays are established modern lines). So he did play in questionable ways but not as questionable as might have seemed back in the day.
My favorite players are Capablanca, and Karpov (I don't like Lasker's style much, but the dude was amazing. His style most resembles machine play out of all players I know).