[MUD-Dev] Cognitively Interesting Combat (was Better Combat)

[ceo]

cruise wrote:

> game like chess an enjoyable passtime - at least for some. I love
> chess and could probably play it all day if I could find a willing
> opponent. Ditto Connect-4.

You say that, but ... have you ever tried it? (I have done with c-4
on many occasions and with chess only very rarely; it revealed some
very interesting stuff about mental alertness that I'm sure would
make a good a PhD topic...).

> Would you be more willing to play a game of chess, then a game of
> connect-4, then say, Settlers of Catan, maybe tic-tac-toe,

TTT requires very little mental effort and is inherently dull for
most resonably smart people because the rapidity with which you
learn that it's a pointless game.

C-4 surprised me because I expected it to turn out the same. In
fact, with only a moderate time limit per move (1 minute), I found
that C-4 is never a foregone conclusion (testing was amongst the top
C.S. undergrads at my university, playing online against
anyone). Given how incredibly simple the forwards looking analysis
is, i.e. any human can quite easily predict every possible outcome
from the current position, I was expecting it to end up rapidly like
TTT. In practice, it ends up adopting several of the mannerisms of
chess - deliberately sub-optimal opening moves in an attempt to
either lull the opponent into a false sense of superiority (goading
them into making sub-optimal gambles of their own, which you hope to
turn into a trap), or else gambling that they make one tiny mistake
and accidentally "check-mate" themself.

C-4 is especially interesting because you can compress all future
states simply because they are binary strings - most of the time,
C-4 comes down to whether each of the 8 columns has an odd number of
holes or an even number of holes between the current position and
the lower of "the highest row" and "a row where if I place a piece I
lose automatically". You would have thought that counting odd or
even was trivial enough; on a 30-second time limit (still quite a
lot of time!), very good players often lose to mediocre players.

All of which is only intended to illustrate how C-4 is itself
arguably closer to chess and go (albeit faster and more constrained)
than TTT and friends.

> etc. ie. Is it the fundemental process of competing
> intellectually, or is it the specifics involved each time?

I thought I explained that originally: it's the mental exhaustion of
playing these games. Or, to put it another way, with an IQ close to
200 I don't have any difficulty with pattern-based games, and
*without effort* I can beat any mediocre opponent. In that sense,
chess can be simple and cheap in terms of concentration and effort;
but I'm not really playing chess: I'm just adopting a couple of
simultaneous strategies (so that when a forced move blocks one I can
switch to one of the others) and doing minor analysis to avoid
making more than a few stupid mistakes.

But if I'm playing someone who I know to be a regular chess player,
I have to try really hard, because I'm simply not going to get away
with trivial analysis, and actually play "properly". Perhaps if I
didn't have a day-job which required intensive design, planning, and
execution (enough to feel physically exhausted from doing nothing
more than thinking all day) then I would relish playing chess
properly. As it stands, I'd rather do something that is more fun and
requires less "work".

For instance, Shogun: Total War is a realtime massive battle game
(akin to tabletop war games). It is excessively tactical (with huge
bonuses for troops attacking on a flank, from the rear, etc), yet
because it's real-time the actual process involves a lot of watching
how your plan is developing, and tweaking it as it goes along. If
something unexpected happens (as it often does), you are cued for a
few minutes of intensive planning and action (having to think and
issue new orders in realtime), but then it's back to the
non-intensive (though still active) play for the next 5
minutes. This is a game I find great for after work - it allows you
to be intensive for small bursts (although even then you don't
*have* to if your plan was good: you'll still win, but will lose
more troops in the process), without tieing you up with a long
exhaustive session with no relent.

Of course, my reasons for disliking chess / C-4 / etc as a leisure
activity may be unique to me. Certainly, I've always found chess
peculiarly frustrating, even to an extent "boring", simply because
you can only ever do one thing at once. Games like Shogun appeal
because you can easily have 12 units, arranged into 4-6 groups, with
each group simultaneously carrying out independent orders. Perhaps I
just prefer inherently parallel games to inherently sequential
ones...

> If, say, combat vs. each weapon is a different "game", would that
> suffice to retain interest?

Do you mean, one weapon's game would be like chess, another would be
like the card-game "snap" (A combination of chance and reflexes),
etc?

If so, then "YES!", since that would give me some kind of choice of
what kind of game I was playing when.

Adam M
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