Category: Games


On LeBron and the NBA

Filed Under: Games, Rants by timpaik — 1 Comment
July 9, 2010

By this point, even the most casual sports observer knows that LeBron going to the Heat is a big deal.  Consider: I have seen and read more about this one man’s decision than I have about the biggest sporting event in the world – which just so happens to be going on right now.  From an unofficial survey of my Facebook friends, it seems like you guys have also.

You don’t need me to tell you why it’s a big deal.  But I’m going to anyway:

1)

LeBron is a superstar.  In the NBA, there are All-Stars (people who make the All-Star game, supposedly the best 28 players in the league), there are franchise players (household names, people who can be the best player on a team that goes deeper into the playoffs…roughly 14 of them in the league), and there are superstars.  Superstars are the franchise players on teams that could potentially win championships.  It’s an elite list that maybe includes 5-6 people.

The thing about superstars is that they don’t change teams very often.  Sure, they make noise about it every now and then to scare more money out of their owners, but they never actually pull the trigger.  Shaq did it.  I can’t think of anyone else in the last two decades.

This completely changes the landscape of the NBA.  The Cavs were, by wins, the best team in the league last year.  They’ll have to fight for the eight-seed next year.  In the East.  That’s just sad.  On the other hand, the Heat are suddenly instant contenders for the crown.

2)

LeBron’s worth to the Cavs can’t be measured in dollars and cents.  But if we were to try, I think the price would probably be $150 million or more.  People are willing to buy LeBron jerseys and pay to watch LeBron play.  Mo Williams and Antawn Jamison?  Not so much.

There’s an open letter from Dan Gilbert (the Cavaliers’ owner) that got published today.  It is a nasty, NASTY letter.  One of those things that I would never post for fear that my kids would unearth it with whatever futuristic search engine exists then.  But can you blame him?  Dude probably lost $100 million yesterday.

Side note while we’re here: in the letter, Dan Gilbert accuses LeBron of being a narcissist today.  I think he has a point…these past few days have not been good for my LeBron > Kobe statement from before.  On the other hand, I read this:

Gilbert hired one of James’ friends and paid him more than some assistant coaches to hang out with the team so James would be comfortable. Gilbert allowed members of James’ management team to fly on the team jet. He spent $25 million to construct a practice facility that was located 20 minutes closer to James’ home than the old one. He rebuilt the locker room. He hired a masseur to travel on the road because James likes massages.

I don’t think you get to complain about someone’s narcissism if you’ve been bending over backwards for the last seven years for him.  It’s like a drug dealer accusing his client of being a junkie.  Sure, it’s the guy’s fault, but you’ve been supplying him with the pills.

…

So that’s that.  Huge ramifications in business and huge ramifications in basketball, huge ramifications for Cleveland’s economy.

So what do I think?  I think LeBron is chickening out, and that he has completely forfeited any tiny chance he ever had of being the greatest player ever.  Let’s take personal accolades: he’s never going to win another scoring title ever again.  Save for the chance that the team wins 73 games (they won’t, smart teams rest for the playoffs), LeBron will never win another MVP award again.  We don’t even know if he’ll ever be the MVP of his own team ever again; by all accounts, Dwyane Wade was the MVP of the 2008 Olympics.

I think what I feel can be summed up by an experience I had in VBS two weeks ago.  I was trying to divide up the kids during a soccer game, but it was getting frustrating.  Two of the better players wanted to be on the same team, but they were clearly two of the bigger and more athletic kids on the field.  No matter how I divided them up, I kept hearing the same thing: “They’ve got three of the best players on their team!”

I didn’t say anything at the time (how can you talk about fairness with fourth-graders?) but I really wanted to encourage them to spread out.  On a baser level, it’s just a smarter move for the ego.  After all, if you win, you don’t gain anything…you’ve only proved what we already knew, that you are better than everyone else.  If you lose, well, you’ve just lost with the best possible team.  It’s a lose-lose situation.

On a higher level, I think you can’t improve the level of your game unless you compete against better competition.  It’s a pattern that we see in real life all the time.  Track and field athletes set world-records when they compete against other world-class athletes, not when they are training alone.  Even horses race faster against other horses.  It’s simply the nature of competition.

In other words, I think you’re cheating yourself if you always side with the best people all the time.  And I think that’s what LeBron is doing: cheating himself of his potential greatness.  I can’t blame him for wanting to win when we have all produced this “winning-is-everything” culture, but I think raising himself to greater heights of pure basketball would be better than winning with all the best people.  But that’s just me.

The second problem with being on a great team is that everyone starts gunning for you.  Like I said, when I’m one of the better people in the game (this does not happen often), I don’t like being on an overpowering team.  But I’m totally cool with being the worse team.  Just know that I’m going to be trying a lot harder than usual…just because I know that I have to.  I think the Heat are setting themselves up for a few years of pain.

Anyway, that’s about 1000 words.  Gonna wrap this up.  Final word: to all the Lakers fans out there…Miami stacked their team, and I’d STILL bet on the Lakers if Bynum’s healthy.  What I’m trying to say is…I kinda hate your team and I hope Kobe chokes next year.

-Tim

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On Mafia (Really) (Part II)

Filed Under: Games, God by timpaik — 1 Comment
June 7, 2010

In my last post, I was trying to write a post on Mafia but ended up writing a treatise on game design.  (I don’t really plan out or proofread these posts since they take long enough just to write.  I’m sure you can tell.)  Anywho, at the end of it, a guy named Wilson (I’m sorry, I don’t think I know you…) asked me why I didn’t design a game based upon my principles.

Short answer: because it’s really hard.  If I could, I would.  But it takes a certain amount of genius (read: creativity) to come up with a game that truly is interesting.

But since I’m too lazy to actually sit down and come up with a new game, I’m going to take the easy way out and take existing games and tweak them a bit to better fit those principles.  For example, I think Mafia is a good game, but I think there are a few problems with it.  So in this post, I’m going to propose a few changes that might address them.  Will they work?  I have no idea.  But I’m willing to find out.

First, the pros of Mafia: Mafia is a legitimately fun game that can be played with more than six people with no more equipment than a deck of cards.  It’s hard to find a game that is fun, is cheap, and works in a large group.  Throw in the fact that it’s easy to learn, and it’s a winner.

It's harder to fill this out than you might think. Also, I had to put golf there.

The problems:

  • The morality issue: Basically, you need to be able to lie to play Mafia.  And that puts us on shaky moral ground.  Let’s analyze this, since it needs to be done before anything else.

    I’ve talked about this before, but I believe that misdirection is key to winning most games.  It can be somewhat benign: in basketball, I might lead you to think that I’m going to drive left instead of right.  I don’t think there’s anyone who believes that there’s something wrong with this.

    Let’s talk about the next level, where each player has some amount of concealed information.  For example, in poker or Settlers, this is my hand.  Obviously, if I can get you to believe something about my hand that is not true (i.e. I have the nuts in poker), I will have the upper hand, since you will be operating off of incorrect information.

    I place a game in this second level when lying CAN help you win, but is not strictly necessary.  In poker, if someone asks me what I have, I can simply choose to refuse to answer.  If I don’t show a tell when refusing, I am neither losing nor gaining ground by my refusal.  The same goes for Settlers, or Battleship, or Stratego.

    (Side note: I don’t believe that betting large amounts on poor hands or small amounts on good hands to be lying.  It’s akin to showing right when you want to go left.)

    The last level is games like Mafia or BS (or to a lesser extent, Bang!), where you need to lie to win.  I suppose everyone could refuse to answer any questions, but it certainly puts you at a considerable disadvantage.  I imagine that someone could choose the clam strategy (refuse to answer anything whether Mafia or not), but I don’t think it would be very successful.  Besides, what if EVERYONE chose that strategy?  It’d be a pretty boring game.  No, lying is necessary for Mafia to work.

    So what do we do?  Honestly, I’m not really sure.  I was going to argue that many of the arguments in the Bible warn against certain types of lies: lies to acquire treasure (Proverbs 21:6), slander (Proverbs 10:18), false witness (Exodus 20:16)…but there’s enough in the Bible to warn against lying in general (Proverbs 6:17, Proverbs 12:22, etc.).  It seems from that, I need to argue that the lies in Mafia aren’t really “lies”.

    Hmm…and how would one do that?  Lies still are lies even if “no one gets hurt”.  Lies are still lies even if I am not gaining anything from the lie.  (Technically, I am: I’m winning a game.)  I think the argument “It’s just a game” rings hollow…

    What about if everyone already understands from the beginning of the game that I might be lying throughout the game?  If other people KNOW that I am lying, does that absolve my responsibility in lying?  Sounds a bit better to me, but I dunno.

This kinda stinks.  My conscience was more clear at the beginning of the post than it is now.  And I’m pushing 800 words.  I’ll put off the fixes to another post.

-Tim

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On Mafia/Games in General

Filed Under: Games, Random by timpaik — 3 Comments
June 4, 2010

I was looking at my blog “to-do list”, and I see a topic called “Mafia” written on September 1st of last year.  I can’t remember if I was considering writing about Italian mobsters or the party/card game.  The odds lie highly in favor of the latter, so I’ll go ahead and do that.

If you know me and/or read this blog, you know that I enjoy playing games.  Once you play a certain number of games, you start to get a sense of what makes a good game or not.  The ideal game has three qualities: novelty, balance, and challenge.

First, novelty.  I wanted to put “interestingness”, but it doesn’t feel like a word.  A game has to capture the interest of the players.  By and large, this is done by presenting the players with something new: humans in general are drawn to novelty.  To illustrate this, say I invent a game called “Lizardopoly”, where players roll dice to move small dinosaur figurines around a square board in order to buy other reptiles.  I imagine that it would be difficult for me to get people to play this game because they would have already exhausted their interest in such a game.

In order to increase the novelty of a game, you can create different roles in a game, thus increasing the number of times a player can play the same game without getting bored.  We’ll call this the diversity principle: as the diversity of roles increases, the novelty/interestingness of a game increases.  For example, Axis and Allies has five different starting countries, allowing players to have five different gaming experiences.  Many games use the diversity principle to increase the replayability of a game: Street Fighter has multiple fighters that players can learn to use and fight against, Bang! has multiple role/ability cards, Starcraft has different races, etc.

The problem with increasing diversity is that games can easily become unbalanced.  Let’s take Puzzle Fighter for example.  Puzzle Fighter tried to increase the diversity of the game by allowing players to choose from one of ten characters.  Without going into details, (they’re here if you want them), only two of the players are actually used in competitive play.  The rest are simply far worse than those two.  I’m not saying that the other players are unplayable, but playing as anybody else does leave you at a disadvantage.  The end result is that only the best options end up getting chosen, and the benefit of having the diversity in the first place has disappeared.

The easiest way to make things balanced is to remove diversity in the game, but this reduces the replayability.  If you have a sufficiently interesting game, that’s fine.  Take chess, or Go.  Both sides are almost perfectly balanced (each player has exactly the same moves available), and yet those games have withstood the test of time.  (Note, of course, that in those games, there still is unbalance in deciding who goes first.)

The final quality is challenge.  The ideal game is quick to learn, impossible to master.  The first part, ease of learning, is somewhat important, since no one will learn to play your game if it is too difficult.  I think Puerto Rico is a fun game, but people’s eyes start to glaze over when you teach them how to play.  Settlers of Catan is pretty difficult as well, but I think it’s getting popular enough where people are willing to put in the time.

The second part is more important.  If the game is too simple, people will stop playing it after they become as good as they can possibly be at the game.  Take Tic-Tac-Toe.  After playing the game a few times, you should always be able to get a cat’s game.  There’s other games like Nim where if the 1st player  (or 2nd, depending on the rules you’re using) should always be able to win no matter what the other player does.  You might not think it, but checkers and Connect Four also fall into this category.

(On a side note: one guy’s Master’s Thesis was to prove that the first player can always win in Connect Four.  I’m simultaneously jealous and disgusted.)

So why am I writing about all of this?  Well…I was going to analyze the game of Mafia, but I felt like I needed to establish some groundwork before I started.  But now my word count is pushing 700, and I don’t think anybody has made it this far.  So in conclusion, I am a nerd.

-Tim

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