Comment by jdmichal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdmichal | Hacker News Reader

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If you've never read it before, I highly recommend reading David Sirlin's Playing to Win.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/

Specifically the chapter "Introducing... the Scrub" discusses exactly this sentiment.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub

> In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely.

I'm afraid you've deeply misunderstood Playing to Win. This is quite common. Sirlin assumed a sort of community knowledge as to the context that people who came across the series later tend to lack.

Playing To Win is about people who refuse to learn the rules of a game. That's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that people who understand the rules very well are pointing out that they have holes in them.

Scrub statement: "throws are cheap". Informed statement: "the way SF2 tick throw setups work biases the gameplay too far in favor of the player with offensive agency." You'll note that the latter makes no mistake about the purpose of the rules and makes no judgments about players using the tools provided. Instead it focuses on system interactions and their net result. You'll note that almost every big fighting game in the 20 years since the end of the SF2 series has reduced the power of tick throws by means of frame data or broader system changes. Players generally decided that getting the first knockdown should not have that much influence over a match.

Scrub statement: "I hate people who get upset at review purchasing." Informed statement: "Review purchasing makes the buying process worse for everyone by creating incentives to deceive buyers, increasing costs for sellers that purchase reviews and reducing sales to sellers who do not. It shifts the Nash equilibrium towards paying more for lower-quality products." Again, the latter examines the system interactions and emergent behavior rather than making moral judgments about the participants.

First, I find it hard to believe that you inferred that I deeply misunderstood an entire book due to posting a single quote with almost no other context given within my response. Please be more charitable in the future.

Second, I have the same disagreement with you as I do with the other chains. Which is that, de facto paying for reviews is currently a rule in the system. I can tell it's a rule because it's happening, and there's no rules or punishment appearing stop it. In video games, the rules are explicitly coded and nothing beyond that code is permitted. This is why bugs vs intended behaviour becomes a conversation of intent, because the code is obviously allowing it and the code is the ruleset.

But that's not true in real life. And that's the part that all responses like yours are missing. There's a game being played at Amazon, where boosting your review stats correlated with boosting your sales stats. Except the permitted ruleset is everything not explicitly prohibited and punished by Amazon. Complaining about people buying reviews is just being a scrub not understanding the rules. The correct conversation to be having is the same as when an apparent bug is found in a game: Is this intended behaviour from Amazon's perspective, and if not what active action are they going to do about it?

And this is more akin to a situation where someone finds a glitch that allows them to throw someone from across the screen, never having to actually get close and risk attack. At that point, there's two options from the game designers.

They can patch the glitch to restore what people considered the normal, designed, and balanced gameplay, or they can state that's just how the system works now and people need to choose whether to accept that or not and play something else.

Amazon can fix (or attempt to at least) the problem and make it harder for sellers to get 5 star reviews and lower reviews averages for some big selling items, or they can choose to do nothing, and some people will decide to leave and shop elsewhere because they can't trust the site and reviews.

Actually, there's a third option, which is that they can say they are doing everything they can to fix the problem while not doing much, therefore maximizing both reviews/profit as well as customer satisfaction in the short term. If they actually start fixing the problem before too long, it might be the maximal solution for them, but if they take too long their reputation will suffer even more (and it may give competitors a toe-hold). I suspect Amazon is doing this. I have no idea if they can go longer, are at the point they need to change, or are too late, but as a customer it sucks right now.

If you are applying this to computer games, I see your point. If you are applying it to 5-star reviews for $20, then I disagree.

(Luigi Barzini mentions an Italian book on card-playing--written, I think, by a clergyman--that begins "Always try to see your opponents' cards." He was trying to point out the light value to that Italians assign to official rules.)

But this is life, and there's not really a difference between "arbitrary rule system designed for a game" and "arbitrary rule system designed for 5-star reviews". They're both just "arbitrary rules", and some people are going to Play to Win. So what are you going to do about them?

I think you and the parent comment are both missing the point of the example with the videogame (not in the least part, because the analogy was not really applicable at all).

Having that "arbitrary" throw mechanic in the game was done intentionally to make the game more balanced and enjoyable for the customer. The only people complaining about it are very very early beginners, who don't realize that removing that mechanic would completely break the game balance and make it unplayable. It is an advertised feature, not a bug, in this specific scenario.

I don't think that we can say the same about paid reviews on Amazon. It isn't a rule (i.e., Amazon doesn't require every seller to offer gift cards in exchange for 5-star reviews), and it doesn't exist to increase the value that Amazon marketplace provides to their customers, it does the opposite.

P.S. I actually agree with what you said completely. It just that the comment that brought up the videogame analogy didn't realize how completely different the situation there was, so it ended up derailing the further chain of arguments.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

If you have two actors within a system that are at odds, using the term "purpose" to refer to the system is either mostly incoherent, or (in most cases) trying to import the connotation of "purpose" into a conversation.

A charitable view would be that Amazon is trying to create a system that rewards fair sellers and provides unbiased reviews to consumers, while unscrupulous actors attempt to defeat that by engaging in new forms of grift. If the unscrupulous actors are 10% less effective because of Amazon's efforts, does that mean the "purpose" of the system has shifted 10% away from honest dealing? If Amazon all but eliminates dishonesty, does that mean the "purpose" of the system is to have an ever present, tiny baseline of fraud? At that point, better to use a different word.

It's because of strategic equivocation between the "actor" being implied in the "purpose." The implication is that Amazon creates the system and this is their purpose, but the cybernetician's definition of purpose is more like "the role this system plays in the overall society in light of all the infinite restrictions on everyone's behavior."

> A charitable view would be that Amazon is trying to create a system that rewards fair sellers and provides unbiased reviews to consumers, while unscrupulous actors attempt to defeat that by engaging in new forms of grift.

I would agree with that until something like this happens, where Amazon prevents people from letting other people know that the reviews are paid.

> If the unscrupulous actors are 10% less effective because of Amazon's efforts, does that mean the "purpose" of the system has shifted 10% away from honest dealing? If Amazon all but eliminates dishonesty, does that mean the "purpose" of the system is to have an ever present, tiny baseline of fraud? At that point, better to use a different word.

I'll think on your point. I'm not sure how to quantify purposefulness.

> It's because of strategic equivocation between the "actor" being implied in the "purpose." The implication is that Amazon creates the system and this is their purpose, but the cybernetician's definition of purpose is more like "the role this system plays in the overall society in light of all the infinite restrictions on everyone's behavior."

Point taken.

> If you have two actors within a system that are at odds, using the term "purpose" to refer to the system is either mostly incoherent, or (in most cases) trying to import the connotation of "purpose" into a conversation.

I think that one can still imagine that the point of a competitive endeavor is separate from the purpose of the competitors involved in the system.

Thanks for the reply, I'll consider your ideas.

I think we're mostly in agreement. The only thing I disagree with is that, based on the article, we are de facto in a system where paying $20 for a 5 star review is one of the rules. I base this on the fact that it's happening.

Since most of the players are going to be early beginners, it is a problem.

It's very hard to balance a game to be fun both for most players and for the e-sports players.

Note also that the "average" player, the one that is average in the sense of being randomly picked among the players playing at any specific time, is likely to spend a lot of time in the game, and therefore is also likely to be exceptionally good - for instance the "most played" games have a median gameplay time of only ~30 hours!

>If you are applying this to computer games, I see your point. If you are applying it to 5-star reviews for $20, then I disagree.

I am with you on this one. Not in the least part, because I don't think that the analogy the parent comment brought up is valid here at all (and I am saying that as someone who actually read that book they mentioned).

In the example the parent comment brought up, it even says "[...]throwing is an integral part of the design - it's meant to be there[...]". That throwing mechanic was an intentional addition to the game, to counter-balance people who constantly block. The only people complaining about it are those who don't understand the game well or early beginners (we are talking someone who never played any fighting games before at all). Every single person playing competitively understands that without throws, the balance would be completely off, and the game would become unplayable competitively. In fact, it would become a completely different kind of game altogether. And throws aren't some hidden feature, it is featured prominently in tutorials and all.

While with gift cards in exchange for amazon reviews, it isn't an intentional mechanic advertised as a feature of the service. Amazon doesn't come out and say "this is one of our core features, without it our service would go down the drain and become unusable." It is still against the rules, and I cannot think of any logical reason it is helpful for buyers in terms of making Amazon.com a better marketplace (aside from the cash gain to the customer writing the paid review, but that's just a personal gain and doesn't make the marketplace better).

In different terms, that is a passage that could be taken directly out of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals

Yes! That's exactly what I was thinking of.

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