Post Note: This write up was made almost entirely with the purposes of promoting a discourse rather than saying something 'accurate' or 'convincing'. Only 1 day later and I mostly disagree with myself here, for instance swapping Chess out with Stratego instead and respecting input randomness far more. As such, this write up can be almost entirely skipped if you choose to do so, otherwise keep in mind that you're reading a process of understanding rather than a firm opinion as you will find in a majority of my other write ups. Thanks for understanding.
Whirling Wind Companion
I thought about saying something overcomplicated here, but instead I'll just like to this excerpt from Richard Garfield's lecture first
The above clip illustrates the concept that Skill and Luck are almost entirely disconnected in theory. You can play chess well and win or lose regardless to the dice output. Obviously it wouldn't be fun, but there's still a skill being tested otherwise from the play experience. While I think this is an interesting illustration though, I don't quite think the full picture has been realized. For example Randochess would cause a player to focus on quick opening wins since there's still the secondary win condition of mating the King. The issue I have with this reasoning is that, even if we assume that the fun of an independent game isn't always predicated on winning or losing (experimentation being a large factor that randomness supports and keeps exciting), the matrix of overall play and retention is focused on the idea of rewarding mindful play. A bad player winning with a random die roll in Randochess is not going to be happy, they will feel their win as phyric and undeserved. A good player winning with a random die may get some relief in independent games but, the underlying stress of this emergent uncontrollable output probability never goes away.
If this explanation illustrates anything, it probably explains why prolonged sessions of any CCG I play start to make me upset. For one, you never know how the other other player is feeling in these games online and even when you do have access to that communication they are usually just using the 'meta' of communication to taunt you. You can feel what you perceive as the random output unfairness as a 'phyrric' victory over you, but you can't substantiate that opinion onto the other player. Fairness in online gaming is isolated, often only found in solidarity through paratextual forums where people can commiserate with you about it at best. However, it's worth noting that I only play CCGs because my nervous system is crappy and I'm at a severe disadvantage in action games. At the end of his lecture Mr. Garfield shows how invisible randomness elements can keep players around in any game, through revealing that his studies caused the TF2 system of critical hits to happen. This new output randomness was sneaked into the system which he said needs to be done in order to make players not complain. If you add high variable output randomness into an existing game, skilled players will dislike it.
While I don't want to write the book on gaming by any means, I think its worth considering how good Chess is for a moment. Chess is a game with an almost infinite number of decisions to make open to the player, giving them room to test things out. Every decision made is maximally fair, and there's still room for experimentation for players that don't care about direct victory. In these cases, at least until a certain level of skill differential, chess as a meta game utilizes its own anti randomness to be more fun. When I play chess with my mom or my girlfriend, I'm not even that interested in 'beating' them, sometimes I'll sandbag pieces because I like the feeling of confusion and bemusement, along with the fact it often lets me experience new forking situations I wouldn't have learned about otherwise. There's an aspect from the lack of output randomness that makes the game better because it transforms the independent zero sum game into a cooperative experience. Chess and learning chess go hand in hand for any player past the 700 elo mark, and why not? Minimal phyrric victories, maxmimal learning opportunities, a resonance between skill and play, plenty of open experimentation. If I want to be so bold I would say that chess has about as much going in as any open world game in terms of guided exploration, but since its happening on the meta level, people dont view it that way.
Anyway the point of all this is to say that Pokemon Chess is just Randochess 2.0 on the one hand. You can miss attacks and get crits just like in pokemon, except here it causes the passing of turns instead of an outright loss, but for anybody even remotely competent at chess the results are the same. The output variables are moved from the dice into the pieces, but its really just automating a process that would have been done physically anyway irl. You have a choice over what to make each piece's type, and I'm sure pokemon experts know for instance, the exact type for instance that is strongest against any other type, and if you knew the typing charts in their entirety you'd have a leg up but after that point there can't be too much strategy to it. You would still be mapping on a system of strategic randomness checks onto an already existing system of non strategic randomness. This isn't stratego, you can still see all the types of the enemy pieces, so at the point it just becomes following a heuristic and hoping the output is on your side (and of course, trying to close out games asap).
Now Pokemon Chess is a miserable game, or at least not an interesting one to get good at for the majority of people primarily because Chess already exists. However, not every game is interested in making its influences clear. TF2 was likely inspired by Quake Arena but its not going to tell you that. Along with this there's a constant desire to redo engines and combat physics in order to add this novelty back in regardless. So my point is this: I think theres a formal point to be made here in what we do and don't desire in games. I think in the majority of cases that answer is actually in whether a game having random elements is in benefit of the game or not. For instance, all card games by design have randomness, but how much of it can be mitigated while keeping the skill intact? Card game players have known forever that in any game where you have control over the number of cards in your deck, the strongest and most reliable decks have the minimum number of possible cards, with the infamy of cards like Pot of Greed in Yugioh being a clear illustration of this fact. At some point though, digital CCGs realized that fixed card numbers for all players just made the game more enjoyable for everyone while also limiting randomness. In this case the input randomness of the entire genre was mitigated. We can imagine a world in which the toy game randochess was made first, and in that case we would have to imagine a world in which chess was not found from it a fucking tragedy. In what world would that happen you ask? In a world where either the copyrighting of fundamental game design is normalized, and/or a world in which people think random output is so entertaining that taking it out would make the game unfun rather than enhancing the enjoyability of the game.
We live in both of those worlds, so chew on that for a moment. If random input and output aspects can be mitigated, and those random elements don't have an explicit narrative application, they almost certainly should be removed, but given the opportunity that simplification of randomness should actually be expressed through a new game or a patched version. Along with that, I strongly believe criticizing these luck based elements and thinking about how they can be simplified away from should be a central struggle of game criticism and design. Let's stop worshipping luck and start focusing on incentivizing systems that give the players a large number of interesting decision making opportunities.
Whirling Wind Companion
I thought about saying something overcomplicated here, but instead I'll just like to this excerpt from Richard Garfield's lecture first
The above clip illustrates the concept that Skill and Luck are almost entirely disconnected in theory. You can play chess well and win or lose regardless to the dice output. Obviously it wouldn't be fun, but there's still a skill being tested otherwise from the play experience. While I think this is an interesting illustration though, I don't quite think the full picture has been realized. For example Randochess would cause a player to focus on quick opening wins since there's still the secondary win condition of mating the King. The issue I have with this reasoning is that, even if we assume that the fun of an independent game isn't always predicated on winning or losing (experimentation being a large factor that randomness supports and keeps exciting), the matrix of overall play and retention is focused on the idea of rewarding mindful play. A bad player winning with a random die roll in Randochess is not going to be happy, they will feel their win as phyric and undeserved. A good player winning with a random die may get some relief in independent games but, the underlying stress of this emergent uncontrollable output probability never goes away.
If this explanation illustrates anything, it probably explains why prolonged sessions of any CCG I play start to make me upset. For one, you never know how the other other player is feeling in these games online and even when you do have access to that communication they are usually just using the 'meta' of communication to taunt you. You can feel what you perceive as the random output unfairness as a 'phyrric' victory over you, but you can't substantiate that opinion onto the other player. Fairness in online gaming is isolated, often only found in solidarity through paratextual forums where people can commiserate with you about it at best. However, it's worth noting that I only play CCGs because my nervous system is crappy and I'm at a severe disadvantage in action games. At the end of his lecture Mr. Garfield shows how invisible randomness elements can keep players around in any game, through revealing that his studies caused the TF2 system of critical hits to happen. This new output randomness was sneaked into the system which he said needs to be done in order to make players not complain. If you add high variable output randomness into an existing game, skilled players will dislike it.
While I don't want to write the book on gaming by any means, I think its worth considering how good Chess is for a moment. Chess is a game with an almost infinite number of decisions to make open to the player, giving them room to test things out. Every decision made is maximally fair, and there's still room for experimentation for players that don't care about direct victory. In these cases, at least until a certain level of skill differential, chess as a meta game utilizes its own anti randomness to be more fun. When I play chess with my mom or my girlfriend, I'm not even that interested in 'beating' them, sometimes I'll sandbag pieces because I like the feeling of confusion and bemusement, along with the fact it often lets me experience new forking situations I wouldn't have learned about otherwise. There's an aspect from the lack of output randomness that makes the game better because it transforms the independent zero sum game into a cooperative experience. Chess and learning chess go hand in hand for any player past the 700 elo mark, and why not? Minimal phyrric victories, maxmimal learning opportunities, a resonance between skill and play, plenty of open experimentation. If I want to be so bold I would say that chess has about as much going in as any open world game in terms of guided exploration, but since its happening on the meta level, people dont view it that way.
Anyway the point of all this is to say that Pokemon Chess is just Randochess 2.0 on the one hand. You can miss attacks and get crits just like in pokemon, except here it causes the passing of turns instead of an outright loss, but for anybody even remotely competent at chess the results are the same. The output variables are moved from the dice into the pieces, but its really just automating a process that would have been done physically anyway irl. You have a choice over what to make each piece's type, and I'm sure pokemon experts know for instance, the exact type for instance that is strongest against any other type, and if you knew the typing charts in their entirety you'd have a leg up but after that point there can't be too much strategy to it. You would still be mapping on a system of strategic randomness checks onto an already existing system of non strategic randomness. This isn't stratego, you can still see all the types of the enemy pieces, so at the point it just becomes following a heuristic and hoping the output is on your side (and of course, trying to close out games asap).
Now Pokemon Chess is a miserable game, or at least not an interesting one to get good at for the majority of people primarily because Chess already exists. However, not every game is interested in making its influences clear. TF2 was likely inspired by Quake Arena but its not going to tell you that. Along with this there's a constant desire to redo engines and combat physics in order to add this novelty back in regardless. So my point is this: I think theres a formal point to be made here in what we do and don't desire in games. I think in the majority of cases that answer is actually in whether a game having random elements is in benefit of the game or not. For instance, all card games by design have randomness, but how much of it can be mitigated while keeping the skill intact? Card game players have known forever that in any game where you have control over the number of cards in your deck, the strongest and most reliable decks have the minimum number of possible cards, with the infamy of cards like Pot of Greed in Yugioh being a clear illustration of this fact. At some point though, digital CCGs realized that fixed card numbers for all players just made the game more enjoyable for everyone while also limiting randomness. In this case the input randomness of the entire genre was mitigated. We can imagine a world in which the toy game randochess was made first, and in that case we would have to imagine a world in which chess was not found from it a fucking tragedy. In what world would that happen you ask? In a world where either the copyrighting of fundamental game design is normalized, and/or a world in which people think random output is so entertaining that taking it out would make the game unfun rather than enhancing the enjoyability of the game.
We live in both of those worlds, so chew on that for a moment. If random input and output aspects can be mitigated, and those random elements don't have an explicit narrative application, they almost certainly should be removed, but given the opportunity that simplification of randomness should actually be expressed through a new game or a patched version. Along with that, I strongly believe criticizing these luck based elements and thinking about how they can be simplified away from should be a central struggle of game criticism and design. Let's stop worshipping luck and start focusing on incentivizing systems that give the players a large number of interesting decision making opportunities.
4 Comments
This comment was deleted
If you're looking to create a large number of emergent game states, curation is always going to lose in quantity to randomness. That's why a lot of people who play randomizers rarely ever go back to the base, unmodded game. It's exceptionally difficult, maybe even outright impossible in the case of turn-based gameplay, to create a curated experience where an avid player does not eventually enter a fugue state. (Not that Pokémon is any better in this regard, but that's because its challenges are purposefully trivial.) Chess was and still is regularly criticized by traditional gamers for its meaningless granularity and lack of actionable game states when played at a high level; and the only reason it's recently seen a comeback is because they took the esports route. I share your preference for more deterministic experiences but if there's anything I've learned from modding RPGs, it's that deterministic turn-based combat can get real old real quick.
Don't mistake me for a "luck-based mechanics can lead to memorable moments 5% of the time so that makes it fine to suck the other 95% of the time" guy, because I actually hate that argument, but stuff like what happens here explains why people keep luck-based mechanics around. Sometimes it's just too funny to pass up.
Giving Pokémon more moves would make the game more complex, but probably not in the way that either casual fans or competitive players would want. For competitive players, it would actually make typing and raw stats even more important than they already are, because every generation of Pokémon has tons of creatures that, if given every move in their movepool, would be capable of two hit KOing if not outright one hit KOing every Pokémon in the game. Outside of obvious stuff like Rayquaza and Arceus, Pokémon like Nidoking, Cinderace, and most of the dragons would just obliterate everything. ...Though you could argue that this is already happening in Scarlet/Violet where every Pokemon can now be any type and have a coverage option of any type. Which just goes to show that no matter how potentially harmful a proposed fix to Pokemon's gameplay is, what Gamefreak is doing is probably still worse.
Here is a topic discussing the option of more moves.
Don't mistake me for a "luck-based mechanics can lead to memorable moments 5% of the time so that makes it fine to suck the other 95% of the time" guy, because I actually hate that argument, but stuff like what happens here explains why people keep luck-based mechanics around. Sometimes it's just too funny to pass up.
Giving Pokémon more moves would make the game more complex, but probably not in the way that either casual fans or competitive players would want. For competitive players, it would actually make typing and raw stats even more important than they already are, because every generation of Pokémon has tons of creatures that, if given every move in their movepool, would be capable of two hit KOing if not outright one hit KOing every Pokémon in the game. Outside of obvious stuff like Rayquaza and Arceus, Pokémon like Nidoking, Cinderace, and most of the dragons would just obliterate everything. ...Though you could argue that this is already happening in Scarlet/Violet where every Pokemon can now be any type and have a coverage option of any type. Which just goes to show that no matter how potentially harmful a proposed fix to Pokemon's gameplay is, what Gamefreak is doing is probably still worse.
Here is a topic discussing the option of more moves.
@Parma Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
I didnt consider that the chess playing ability of your average 1100 (me) is far away from the 'automated' high skill ceiling of deterministic chess so while theres still plenty of room for me to enjoy and learn forks, at high play it would run dry since the decision making would be automated. Along with this I've also recognized now that randomness factors do promote play in the high skill ceiling because the difficult unpredictability of the outcome means there's more itemization in the long run. That discussion on 4MS makes sense in this regard.
After speaking it over with a few people I realized that what I want is more emphasis on input randomness (as I understand it, decisions you make ahead of time with unpredictable outcomes) and not output randomness (crits, high damage numbers, random curse events midmatch). In slay the spire for instance you have plenty of intel in terms of pathing decisions so you have a lot of slack to play with decision making. Emphasis of randomness is not in the fights themselves, the fights are almost entirely deterministic, the randomness is in the card pools, relics, event choices, etc.
You are right that unpredictability is a large part of the thrill of play, and it can be done well. For instance the bluff mechanic of Poker is obviously sound, as an inversion on probabilities from the macro into the uncertainty of an individual hand situation. I think I just dislike when random elements feel less like the fog of war unpredictability and more like an automatic win or loss over a single die roll or uncontrollable element. This doesn't just have to be losing to a crit in pokemon. Say I create 2 different bosses in a game and you dont know which it will be until you enter the fight, if 1 of them is a DPS race and the other is an attrition war, then I can only ever build a strong reply to one of the two situations. Perhaps instead of heralding chess, I should have more aptly put emphasis on the charm of something like Stratego then, where the unpredictable element is only applied at the set up of the game rather than being decided by a die roll in the middle of it. I'm generally ignorant on how Pokemon itself functions so I appreciate the specificity there ^-^
Feel free to reply if you wish but otherwise, have a nice day.
I didnt consider that the chess playing ability of your average 1100 (me) is far away from the 'automated' high skill ceiling of deterministic chess so while theres still plenty of room for me to enjoy and learn forks, at high play it would run dry since the decision making would be automated. Along with this I've also recognized now that randomness factors do promote play in the high skill ceiling because the difficult unpredictability of the outcome means there's more itemization in the long run. That discussion on 4MS makes sense in this regard.
After speaking it over with a few people I realized that what I want is more emphasis on input randomness (as I understand it, decisions you make ahead of time with unpredictable outcomes) and not output randomness (crits, high damage numbers, random curse events midmatch). In slay the spire for instance you have plenty of intel in terms of pathing decisions so you have a lot of slack to play with decision making. Emphasis of randomness is not in the fights themselves, the fights are almost entirely deterministic, the randomness is in the card pools, relics, event choices, etc.
You are right that unpredictability is a large part of the thrill of play, and it can be done well. For instance the bluff mechanic of Poker is obviously sound, as an inversion on probabilities from the macro into the uncertainty of an individual hand situation. I think I just dislike when random elements feel less like the fog of war unpredictability and more like an automatic win or loss over a single die roll or uncontrollable element. This doesn't just have to be losing to a crit in pokemon. Say I create 2 different bosses in a game and you dont know which it will be until you enter the fight, if 1 of them is a DPS race and the other is an attrition war, then I can only ever build a strong reply to one of the two situations. Perhaps instead of heralding chess, I should have more aptly put emphasis on the charm of something like Stratego then, where the unpredictable element is only applied at the set up of the game rather than being decided by a die roll in the middle of it. I'm generally ignorant on how Pokemon itself functions so I appreciate the specificity there ^-^
Feel free to reply if you wish but otherwise, have a nice day.
Correction:
then you* can only ever build a strong reply to one of the two situations, that isn't fun because you'll implicitly know your build would have almost automatically lost if you encountered the other boss instead.
then you* can only ever build a strong reply to one of the two situations, that isn't fun because you'll implicitly know your build would have almost automatically lost if you encountered the other boss instead.
Erato_Heti
11 months ago
That being said, a lot of the randomness variables (for instance, missing and crit chance differential stats going into a fight) could be removed. A larger pool of options can be giving to the play by also quadrupling the number of combat moves a pokemon can choose, from 4 to 16. I would wonder if this would make pokemon a more fun system of play or not for players interested in high agency decision making. This experiment makes me think 'yes' but I'm not totally sure.