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Comment by lifeformed | Hacker News Reader

This is like watching game speedrunners exploit glitches in the game to get a better time, and then hearing laypeople complain about it not being a "real" run. If it's all done within the context of the system, then it's fair.

In game speedruns, the context is: "Beat this game as fast as possible with the following restrictions (no cheats, 100% completion not necessary, etc) using the provided input system."

If I go to a casino, the context of playing a slot machine is: "Put real money into this machine and press buttons on it until you run out of money or leave." There aren't any implicit rules like, "some combination of button presses are not allowed".

Let the player have his money, patch the bug and move on.

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In complete agreement. This is no different than me just coming up with a crummy game to begin with. Let's say I run a casino and accidentally set up a modified game of blackjack where the odds favor the customers instead of the house. Customers merely playing this game is "exploiting" a bug. Should I be able to sue them? (BTW a couple of months ago this happened with mis-shuffled decks) The premise of this game is to get people to risk their money, I can't whine when it backfires on me and I lose instead of them! I certainly don't get to sue the casino for exploiting my gambling addiction or the fact that I had a little too much to drink before my last bet.

Look, let's be honest here: casinos are nothing more than legal (and sure, transparent) scams, plain and simple (at least when its house vs. customer and not customer vs. customer). The rules are systematically designed to drain you of your money while tricking you into thinking you might win. And I have absolutely no problem with that. I am a free market guy, and as far as I'm concerned gambling is voluntary. HOWEVER, if you are going to dedicate your business to literally ruining people's lives and profiting from their losses, then suck it up when you are too stupid and your con backfires on you. Don't get the law involved, and thus my taxpayer dollars, to save you from your unsuccessful grift. This is as absurd as an idiot running a faulty ponzi scheme and then suing his marks because they made money and he didn't.

> Let's say I run a casino and accidentally set up a modified game of blackjack where the odds favor the customers instead of the house.

There's a rather interesting story about this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/04/the-man-...

By the same argument, the context of using the internet is "send packets, receive replies". There aren't any implicit rules like "sending a specific field that is larger than expected (as to overrun a fixed-size buffer) is not allowed".

(FWIW, I agree with you. It is impossible to forcibly break into a computer over the network.)

The internet isn't a game though, so restrictions based on intentions is fair. I think games, especially those which elicit feelings of competition or a strong desire to win, are all about finding the discrepancies between the rules as they are intended and the rules as they are implemented. When you push those boundaries, you get the advanced techniques and high level play which makes competitive gaming so interesting.

> The internet isn't a game though, so restrictions based on intentions is fair.

It is massively unfair to impose criminal liability upon people because they refuse to make assumptions about the intent of a programmer or sysadmin that they have never met or communicated with.

The catch with this case is that the game involved is overtly a simulation of a physical game, and the only purpose of the simulation is to increase the efficiency for the casino to let more players play a known physical game more quickly, not to change the nature of the game itself. You can make the case that places where the simulation diverges from the physical game were clearly unintended and should be obvious to players to be bugs, not part of the rules of the game, and hence unfair for gamers (or, likewise, casinos) to exploit since they were stepping beyond the bounds of fair play.

I'm not sure how strong this argument is but it's clearly different than just saying it's like a speedrun. Just because the medium is virtual doesn't mean you aren't entering into a implicit contract to play by the rules of poker.

This kind of single player "video poker" has nothing to do with the rules of actual poker.

Can you elaborate what you mean by "nothing?" Why do they call it video poker?

The point is that insofar as the game replicates poker one can basically use that as a way to identify the difference between a "bug" and a "odd game rule."

Well, for one thing the "double up" option is not a part of standard poker. More conspicuously, physical poker involves a high degree of observation/manipulation/etc of human opponents and that is not a part of video poker.

I understand but this is less than "nothing."

Yes you remove the human element and change some betting rules but at its core video poker is a simulation of physical poker. The parent doesn't have much of a point other than being overly hyperbolic to discount the reality that there is certainly an argument that this was a bug and hack since the exploit sits clearly outside the realm of the game of poker.

In poker you do not win by having a good hand - you win by either having the best hand of those remaining at showdown, or being the only hand left. There is no "house" - all the players are equivalent, and playing alone is meaningless. When you play real poker in a casino, the casino isn't taking either side of any of the bets - the players are just paying the casino to play (real poker isn't generally very profitable for the casino - where it's offered its generally for "prestige" reasons, to bring in players who will hopefully play other casino game while they're here).

The only thing that these played-against-the-house games take from real poker is similar hand rankings.

But as far as I have read the article the glitch is not about the simulation of cards but rather about game mode flags you can carry unintendedly between different game modes.

The quoted example makes him pause game one at a high win, switch to game type two to achieve a 'tenfold win' token and then combine this with the paused game.

These are arbitrary rules put in place just for the simulated card games in the first place.

And of course for him it hugely increases the probability to achieve this scenario intended to be very rare.

That's interesting, because in most games the people who exploit bugs in a game are banned/removed/punished. It's standard practice in online games to punish those who use the game in an unintended but presented way (exploit bugs).

David Sirlin has a chapter in his book "Playing To Win" entitled, "What Should be Banned?" It's about tounaments, but it may apply here as well: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/what-should-be-banned.html

For speedruns, there's a philosophical divide- some people consider exploits to be cheating, thus it falls under the "no cheating" rule.

I don't know any serious speedrunners who consider most exploits to be cheating. Something as simple as bunnyhopping is an exploit, yet you'd be laughed at if you tried to run Quake without doing so.

True, there are some exploits which are truly degenerate, but they are specifically handled. Exploits in general are highly encouraged. Speedruns are listed in terms of the restrictions given: a specific difficulty, 100% vs any%, rules governing the timing, etc.

Skiing in Tribes was originally a bug, and it became an essential feature and set the franchise apart from other shooters.

Exploits in speedrunning aren't often easy to do, and finding new applications for them are part of the challenge and can set one speedrunner ahead of another.

I remember seeing a speedrun of Half-Life where the player went through a wall (that you weren't supposed to go through), kept going (past all of the weird clipping visual nonesense), and finally came out in a different level (which IIRC wasn't even populated with enemies), and kept going through the game.

That seems like cheating to me. Little glitches in the game mechanics are a little bit different.

The problem is that there's no bright line to be drawn between bunny hopping and glitching through a wall. It's a continuous spectrum of larger and larger glitches.

Just out of curiosity, I assume you'd also consider abusing the "minus world" glitch in Super Mario Bros to be cheating, assuming it happened to let you finish the game faster? That glitch is nearly identical to the Half-Life case you described.

Bunnyhopping is allowed, but the problem was that for one Half Life run macros and authotkey was used to sequence things. Bunnyhopping using only mouse, keyboard or gamepad is okay

I believe that the philosophical divide in the speedrunning community is actually between tool-assisted speedruns[1], and unassisted speedruns.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool-assisted_speedrun

Most TAS communities have different categories for glitchy and non-glitchy runs. Take a look at http://tasvideos.org/ for examples.

There doesn't have to be only one divide.

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