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Comment by 22c | Hacker News Reader

I haven't had the time to watch this video but I may check it out later. I would argue that most games when played at the extreme level are not being played the way they were meant to be played.

In a sort of "surivorship bias" way, the games which can be played to an extreme level often end up in that position. Some of the craziest speedruns of games are being played in ways the game designer never intended.

How game designers choose to react (or not react) to those unintended strategies/techniques and what effect that has on the longevity of the game is a topic I'd find interesting to discuss.

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High school debate is sort of this way. The judges are former debaters, and so the rules/tactics evolve until it wouldn't be recognizable to outsiders, or likely the originators of the format/activity. For example, extreme speed reading is table stakes.

It's interesting how this happens. You don't need a judge to suddenly prefer extreme speed. You just need one person to win because being slightly faster earned an extra point from a judge (and the might hate super speedy speakers), and that person gives an extra point to someone slightly faster, and the slippery slope slides.

I always found this interesting because I grew up in a rural area and the debate judges were frequently not familiar with the metagame of debate, or could be aware but were downright hostile to it. Among my friends it became its own metagame: who could get away with the most egregious perversions of the form (including intentionally sneaking in logical fallacies into our arguments) in order to win in an atmosphere where point-keeping was highly contingent on the judge’s preconceived beliefs. While there was no substitute for a very strong positive or negative case, there were little rhetorical levers you can pull: calling the opponent a smooth-talking shuck-and-jiver in a political debate or appealing to your own family history that could win big with the right audience if you could guess correctly on what type of person they were.

My favorites were the ones that intentionally defined terms in the most outrageous ways.

One time the topic was something about allowing pilots to be armed in the cockpit.

After the first couple rounds we realized our jokers were scheduled to face an equal opponent for what promised to be an epic showdown:

Pro: Yes pilots should armed, because it is hard to fly a plane with only their feet.

Con: Pilots have no business in a cock-pit. Cock fighting is a horrible sport, not to mention being illegal in many states.

Sadly the opposing coach pulled their team before the round started.

This is true of more than video games; "board games at the extreme" are not really comparable to how the designers played - and that is often not how it's even played by most people. Monopoly, of course, is an extreme case of this, but there are others.

The signs of this are in features/functions in the game that are just ignored; sometimes you can figure out what the designers intended them to be used for - and with modern games being patched (even board games get rule clarifications and changes, and add-ons and expansions almost always changed some rules) you can see it live.

Heroes III is a perfect example; watch some online videos of pro players and it's nothing like the compstomps we did back in the day.

Monopoly is different because players ignorantly change the rules.

Scrabble is an example of Ayers following the rules while distorting the game.

Players at Monopoly tournaments are changing the rules?

Home players add the free parking rules because otherwise the game is a brutal winner’s snowball that is unfun for the losers, especially kids.

Gamers are gonna game. Rule lawyers too. It’s the nature of complex games with large rule sets.

What is nice is if you have an active publisher reacting in a timely fashion. But then, if that’s the case, you as a participant need to keep up.

Mind this only happens in competitive tournaments. While at home and in clubs folks tend to favor fun, gameplay, and goodwill over pedantic rule making. It can lead to interesting discussions at high volume however.

That said, I’ve seen tournament games lost because someone whipped out an obscure ruling from an official source. In a “Sorry you can’t do that.” “What do you mean?” Kind of way.

But it was good to participate in games with an active publisher, doing things like gathering after action reports across local tournaments nationwide, looking for unbalanced components or techniques and, rather than tweaking the game directly, just applying changes to the tournament rules set.

One of my favourite examples of this was the skiing mechanic in the Tribes series.

Which made the game arguably better. Because rounds got faster and CTF was more fun.

Super Smash Bros and the Nintendo response to things like wave dashing (giving characters a chance to stumble in the latest game, iirc) comes to mind.

Basically, they saw a hardcore community form around their family friendly fighting game, and tried to axe it.

Random tripping was a mechanic added in Brawl. In Ultimate, they dialed it back and now it's only a triggered action (and, at a lower rate than Brawl).

If anything, it sounds like they took in some feedback from the community.

Tripping in Brawl was clearly introduced to punish dash dancing, not wave-dashing.

https://www.ssbwiki.com/Dash-dance#/media/File:Dashdance.gif

If you did this sequence in Brawl, you'd certainly trip.

Dash-dancing kept your momentum, allowing you to instantly move at full dash speed at a moment's notice. But it took great amounts of finger-dexterity to alternate left-right-left-right at this speed and keep the character's momentum at maximum.

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