Bad Games - PAX South

MrPeriod

Bad Games
PAX South 2015

We’ve all played “bad” games, but what truly makes a game “bad?” Is one’s miserable experience not simply subjective opinion? It turns out that the problem is not in defining what makes a game “bad,” but in what makes a game a “game.” Candyland teaches children colors and counting, but is terrible for a serious tournament. Dungeons & Dragons is great for that heroic fantasy adventure, but not so much for your future cyberpunk transhumanist court drama.

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chaosof99

Watched this yesterday. On of the last kinds of bad games you talk about are tie-in games. While a lot of your points are valid, I think one thing you miss is that most of those games are not just bad games in terms of gameplay, but also bad in adapting their source material. Campster has a good video on the difference between good and bad adaptation of other source material into video games.

Luke Burrage

I watched this last weekend, and was more than half way through before I remembered watching the lecture before. You even used an ET image for the video thumbnail for both.



I still watched to the end though.

I'd be interested in you doing "Good Sports" as a podcast topic. As in, Scott says tennis is the perfect game (or similar wording) and I'd like to hear, in depth, what qualities you like in various sports that make them "good", even if you don't particularly pay much attention to them or follow them yourself.

Personally I think Snooker is one of the greatest sports ever, but I never watch it or follow the results any more. Meanwhile I think F1 is stupid and broken, but I can't help following along some times. Also I love the concept or idea of some sports, but the resulting spectacle is dull, while other sports are dumb from the start, but end up being fascinating to watch (maybe why curling becomes such a hit every four years?)

Rym

Luke Burrage said:

I'd be interested in you doing "Good Sports" as a podcast topic.

That is one of our potential lectures for PAX Prime at the end of the summer this year. It's called "Sports are Games," and we discuss a number of different sports purely from a game perspective.

That aside, this was interesting in that we took a lecture we'd already done and did it again. While this is common (we spent a while perfecting a new one, hitting all the more minor cons with it, and then do it once "for real" at a PAX), I had video of both instances. There are so many PAXes now that we can't hope to have all new content for all of them all the time.

I almost want to get video for ALL of the iterations of one of these once. Not to put them all online, but to make a meta-video analyzing how we evolve the structure and content over time.

Rym

zehaeva

Go does have terrible heuristics for figuring out if something is a good move or a bad move. It's the hardest part about teaching the game to new players, nothing is immediately obvious about why playing move x is better than playing move y, even though they are right next to each other on the board.

Being able to read out the next 20 or 30 moves is a practiced skill. To even just compare two different plays on the board takes an immense amount of effort and skill.

There is more study of actual play than reading books however. Every bit of advise you get in a book about go comes with a tiny asterisk that goes "yeah in this contrived example this works but make sure that this doesn't fuck you else where". A go board is a huge battlefield, it's easy to let a small skirmish take over the whole field.

I don't blame anyone for not wanting to dive into that pool, I can't even see the bottom of the kiddy end.

Coldguy

Go players found out about the go segment. Sharing for those who didn't catch it on twitter, the range of discussion is going from polite debate to dumb arguments and its a hoot to read.

Rym

Coldguy said:

Go players found out about the go segment. Sharing for those who didn't catch it on twitter, the range of discussion is going from polite debate to dumb arguments and its a hoot to read.

Some of them make really good points. Some of them agree with us and then argue amongst themselves in detail.

Some of them are a little butthurt.

Rym

TheWhaleShark

Rym said:

Coldguy said:

Go players found out about the go segment. Sharing for those who didn't catch it on twitter, the range of discussion is going from polite debate to dumb arguments and its a hoot to read.

Some of them make really good points. Some of them agree with us and then argue amongst themselves in detail.

Some of them are a little butthurt.

Overall, it spawned a pretty good discussion. The most butthurt people obviously didn't get it, but there's a lot of well-reasoned disagreement and agreement.

Rym

TheWhaleShark said:

Overall, it spawned a pretty good discussion. The most butthurt people obviously didn't get it, but there's a lot of well-reasoned disagreement and agreement.

Funny. It's almost as though reddit is fine if you have basic moderation. It's almost as though the people banned from reddit were the problem, and not necessarily the intrinsic wrong of their speech itself.

If the GO community ever fled reddit to something like voat I'd eat my hat.

Apreche

Rym said:

TheWhaleShark said:

Overall, it spawned a pretty good discussion. The most butthurt people obviously didn't get it, but there's a lot of well-reasoned disagreement and agreement.

Funny. It's almost as though reddit is fine if you have basic moderation. It's almost as though the people banned from reddit were the problem, and not necessarily the intrinsic wrong of their speech itself.

If the GO community ever fled reddit to something like voat I'd eat my hat.

It's almost as if reddit is fine if you are in a subreddit covering a very specific topic and not part of the greater reddit community.

Neito

Reddit is one of those things where it'd be fine if it didn't immediately turn into a lot of people's only website.

Rym

Neito said:

Reddit is one of those things where it'd be fine if it didn't immediately turn into a lot of people's only website.

Most people are only really into one thing.

Churba

Neito said:

Reddit is one of those things where it'd be fine if it didn't immediately turn into a lot of people's only website.

Fun facts - there's actually a problem in marketing regarding how difficult it can be getting people from one website to another, which is often called the "Reddit Problem."