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Comment by antisthenes | Hacker News Reader

As interesting as it may be, I can hardly accept the argument that it is in any way competitive. Playing against static mobs with a finite game-tree is inherently...not very competitive? And not particularly entertaining either. It's not like the game tree is infinite. The mobs and their attack patterns are all known in advance.

At some point during the win-streak, aren't you really just competing against the seed generator for a more favorable bunch of seeds that let you have the longest win-streak?

An achievement, yes, in the same sense that a speedrun is an achievement, and improving it is also technically an achievement.

But in my mind, the title of a competitive game are reserved strictly for games where the gameplay itself is performed against another player or a team.

Not to belittle his achievement, I'm sure it's very meaningful (to him).

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You just argued that running (100m, marathon, etc) is not competitive, that weightlifting is not competitive, that bowling is not competitive, that target shooting is not competitive. Just achievements.

That's fine, you can humpty-dumpty words all you like, but everyone else thinks that those things can be competitive.

However, note that literally the entire point of the author of the blog post is that he doesn't want to be competitive and does not see his own behaviour as competitive, but rather as collaborating on achievement, so it's super weird that you're snarking on him.

> You just argued that running (100m, marathon, etc) is not competitive, that weightlifting is not competitive, that bowling is not competitive, that target shooting is not competitive. Just achievements.

Absolutely not. You misread my argument (whether intentionally or unintentionally).

> That's fine, you can humpty-dumpty words all you like, but everyone else thinks that those things can be competitive.

You can humpty-dumpty words all you like, but "everyone" is just you.

If you controlled any of those sports with deterministic multiple choice actions then they wouldn't be competitive.

Is trying to beat the highest depth of stockfish in chess not competitive? It is a sequence of deterministic, open-information multiple-choice actions.

Chess is absolutely competitive!

It's not that deterministic, multiple choice games can't be competitive, it's that they need different things from your average solo sport to make them competitive.

Beating STS is a test of adaptability; the game is hard, and getting long winstreaks is not an easy feat (or winning at all).

The game has enough variety that getting a streak of "favorable" seeds is not going to happen. You might get a truly heinous seed that is basically unbeatable no matter what you do, but most seeds will be beatable exactly because you know the possible challenges so you can make decisions that give you the best chance of defeating them.

>An achievement, yes, in the same sense that a speedrun is an achievement, and improving it is also technically an achievement.

>But in my mind, the title of a competitive game are reserved strictly for games where the gameplay itself is performed against another player or a team.

Seems like a very arbitrary position to take. Competition is simply the exercise of comparison and raking against another human in any activity. Some games/activities are designed to foster and facilitate more competition than others.

Anything can become competitive, as it is a function of how people approach an activity, not what it is.

You can say that Slay the Spire is not a game designed for completion, but that doesn't negate the reality that some people clearly compete for records and leaderboards, and a competitive scene exists.

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