Hacker News Reader

Comment by echan00 | Hacker News Reader

Completely agree. Games are typically only "fun" when you feel challenged. Most people do not find "fun" in losing.

The thing is most simple game AI isn't challenging. Or it's challenging in boring ways. Like having 100% perfect aim or long health bars. It's awesome to have an AI that is challenging by actually being good at the game. Having some actual strategy and intelligence.

It's a complete misconception that "real AI" needs to be super hard. Give it realistic constraints like slow reaction times or noisy input. You can handicap it in many ways to control the difficulty. Modern chess engines can easily beat even the best players in the world. But by limiting the number of moves they search, you can set one up that new players can beat.

My favorite game AI is from age of empires 2. All other RTSes just let the AI cheat like crazy to provide challenge. For AoE2 they went to a lot of work to design an expert system and a custom scripting language for it. Tons of features were implemented to make it easy to write relatively sophisticated AI strategies. And they documented it well and made it easy for modders to write even better AI scripts.

As a result the AI on hardest can beat all but skilled competitive players without cheating at all (at least the current AI shipped with the steam version.) It's actually fun to play against and isn't a terrible substitute for a real human player.

Similarly to that, there exist AIs for Starcraft Broodwar that are capable of providing a decent challenge to novice and intermediate level human players. You could check some examples at play on: http://sscaitournament.com/ and also develop your own AI in one of the more popular programming languages (C++, Java, etc). Disclaimer: I am the author of one of those Starcraft Broodwar AIs

> Most people do not find "fun" in losing.

Allow me to introduce you to a developer named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FromSoftware ...

And if that's not good enough, there's the one whose game basically opens with 'Losing is fun!': http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Losing

Both of which were influenced in their attitude towards losing by a little game known as Nethack [1].

Although I understand Souls doesn't have permadeath, therefore it's probably only half the fun of Nethack.

__________

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetHack

Which in turn took from rogue. Which in turn came from DnD first edition / advanced edition, when DnD was more about navigating dungeon traps than fighting monsters (and not at all similar to modern DnD, which resembles Besthesda RPGs much more than roguelikes)

But Original DnD is where my inspiration-knowledge stops

D&D is descended from wargaming.

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_(wargame) is a pretty old one.

https://alt.org/nethack/ is probably the best way to play it (or watch others do so, which is a pretty cool feature)

Kind of off topic, but the thing I like about the "Losing is fun!" mantra of DF is that "losing" is not the end of the game. It's just another point in history. So "losing" really just advances the story plot -- which is why it's fun. Conversely, "winning" means that you don't have anything left to do and it's "boring". I don't know any other game with this point of view.

Thia is just the general rule for simulation games, in free play mode.

Reach a point where all core problems are solved, and then create your own problems (and try to solve them).

Its just DF community that claimed it as their mantra, and their primary marketing of the game. But all sim games (d)evolve to this.

Kinda like Lucky Strike's "it's toasted!" slogan

It depends. With a well balanced fighting game I don't mind losing to a good human opponent because it means that my game improves. Playing against someone who's good is a great way to find out what moves/patterns you thought might be safe aren't.

I agree that if you have no way to measure that progress/improvement then the fun is lost.

That actually would be an interesting game mechanic; make sure you lose, but you get more points for how spectacularly you lose...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com