Are there any games that are a hybrid between race and high score?
For example, Mario 1-1 race. Once the first Mario touches the flagpole, everyone starts losing a coin a second. Highest number of coins at the end wins.
My expectation is that almost any game designed that way will heavily favor either the race or the high score. Only one of them will matter in effect.
Or, at best, one will end up being the tiebreaker.
It’s possible one ends up just being the button the person who is winning can push to end the game.
Aren’t most score-driven games with a player-driven end condition more or less this already?
Glory to Rome and Hansa Teutonica are both games that involve racing to an end state while simultaneously trying to have the highest score.
There are also games where being the first player to achieve a certain score grants you some kind of bonus.
In the end, as Rym says, they wind up being one type or another.
I feel like the ones I’ve played end simultaneously for everyone once the ending criteria are met. And then, it’s just score once the finish is reached, not some combination of score and how long it to you to get there.
I haven’t played either of those games, where do they fall on those?
They’re both definitely “when the game ends, it ends for everyone.” Asymmetrical endpoint is an interesting idea but I can’t think of any competition that does this.
Sounds like your score metric is basically…efficiency? Who has the best score:time ratio when reaching the end state?
On a game theory standpoint I concur that a race and high score based contest are nearly the same. In either case they are measures of player skill. A literal race is a points-based game where time is the metric.
that being said, the game Redout has a “speed” mode which is time attack that rewards you bonus time reductions if you can maintain a high speed.
There are plenty of games where the game ends for one player and other players carry on until they also finish. Deep Sea Adventure and Ra come to mind. There are also many many games that offer better rewards on a first-come first-serve basis. I can’t think of a specific example, but I’ve seen plenty of times where you’ll buy cards from a stack, and each card in the stack is lower in value from the previous card, but the card always has the same cost.
I don’t know of a game that is the full package of allow each player to finish independently and then dividing their final score by the number of turns they took. However, those mechanics above are combined often to effectively be the same thing. Rewarding high scores, but also rewarding players who score earlier.
Hansa Teutonica does something interesting with the scoring. There are few “during-game” points, but a huge number of “end game points.”
However, if any player scores enough points during the game, it just fucking ends.
It’s still a top-5 game for me:
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A very good article by Richard Garfield, uh, blogger?
You might say he’s arguing the game makes the community.
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Really good read.
I got really excited for Clash in League of Legends (LOL), tournaments on the weekends with fixed teams and play windows, because it would provide that tournament feel and excitement and sidestep all the toxicity of ladder play. Unfortunately it came along when my life was changing in a way that I could in no way commit to playing 3-5 1 hour games over a saturday and sunday. Eventually having a newborn meant I was too unreliable to even play a normal LOL game and with time away any pull the game had on me is gone. Still I am intrigued if it is working for Riot.
Richard Garfield saying what I have been saying for quite some time. Give me the game store tournament experience online. If such a game came to be, I might get dangerously hooked on it.
OMG, what he says about honers and innovators on ladders vs. tournaments. That’s some huge insight right there.
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I assume that already people who play any game at all “seriously” partake in tournament play. Or maybe that’s just fighting game players, which is the group I’m most familiar with. Also lots of games seem to have non-ranked modes alongside ranked ladders. That’s how I play Apex, or Valorant whenever I want to get few games in, I don’t need to see a number or rank telling me how much I suck at those. Though even those modes usually have some sort of matchmaking algorithm going on trying to make things even-ish. Which is good thing, actually. If you want challenge, go and search for it, manually, partake in the community, find the strong players and have them kick your ass. That’s fine and good, but it should not be a part of the default play experience of random casual player playing the game.
Tournament Play is also really engaging to watch even at low levels if you know the game or its shoutcasted relatively well explaining any mechanics an audience might not know and the relative values. I’ve barely played any Netrunner (I own 1 copy of the starter box I bought like 6 months before the game folded) and have dabbled online a little, but Netrunner Tournament is still really fun to watch because of the structure of the game itself.
I honestly don’t think this is true at all.
Garfield’s article is really good at discussing tournaments versus ladders, but by limiting his conversation to digital games only, Garfield is ignoring what I think is a large part of what makes a community and is vastly underrated by most heavy-tournament players in terms of creating/honing strategies.
By that, I mean that casual, non-tournament play is probably just as important in developing new deck strategies and fostering a healthy community as actual tournaments. A lot of players simply don’t want to play in tournaments. If we’re talking strictly about a digital environment, then it’s hard to organize a non-tournament casual experience. But in a non-digital landscape, tournaments are only half of the equation. Informal meetups where there isn’t a prize of any kind and there’s no win/loss record are just as important as actual tournaments to the health and longevity of a game.
For a lot of players, tournaments are just intimidating and lead to negative experiences. For new players especially, tournaments are probably the worst way possible to get into a new game. In a tournament, your opponent is trying to win, not help you become better. In a tournament, your opponent is trying to win, not help you innovate or hone your deck. In a tournament, your opponent is trying to win, not help you have a good time. That’s where casual play comes in, which is completely absent from the online/digital landscape.
In a casual setting, none of that pressure is there. You can play against better players and not feel intimidated because the games don’t mean anything. In terms of Garfield’s categories of “innovaters” and “honers,” there is no better environment to innovate a new strategy or hone an already existing one than a non-tournament casual setting. There are no stakes, which removes the pressure, allowing for absolute creative freedom.
I know I don’t speak for everyone, I’m a decidedly anti-competitive player, but when I have gone to tournaments, the best and most enjoyable moments for me weren’t the matches themselves, it was the time between matches or after the matches when I could meet up with people over a snack or dinner or a drink, and we could talk about our day and our matches. Meeting new people, reconnecting with people I haven’t seen since the last tournament, that’s what I enjoyed the most. The camaraderie, the the social gatherings, is what made the community stronger, not the actual playing the game.
I’ve been to fighting game tournaments as both a competitor and a spectator. I’m lucky enough to have friends who are friends with some of the biggest names in the Fighting Game Community. And let me tell you, after hours and hours of playing Street Fighter in some arcade or at EVO, even the best players in the world love to relax and grab a burger and a beer together and talk about matches and strategies and whatnot. For me, that’s always been the best part. That’s what really makes the community.
Overall, while Garfield didn’t discuss it, because he was strictly referring to online/digital games, to foster a community, especially in person, you need a healthy mix of tournament and non-tournament options that cater to different types of players. To overlook casual gamers, in favor of strictly tournament-only, is to limit both the players who will be interested in the game, and the community that makes up the game itself.
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Tweak the parameters of a platformer, while you’re playing it:
Spoiler alert: it’s really hard to get something that feels good.
3D printing as a requirement
Apparently Kojima made a GBA game that measures light in your physical space.
The game’s cartridge has a photometric light sensor which measures light exposure. In order to charge the in-game solar weapons, the player must take their Game Boy Advance (GBA) outside in the daytime (as verified by the light sensor). If the player’s gun battery runs out of light reserves and there is no sunlight available, then the player must avoid conflicts with enemies or find an in-game “Solar Station” to recharge.
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Yep. I remember when this game came out. There’s a few other GB/GBC/GBA games that put input hardware into the cartridge such as Kirby Tilt 'n Tumble, WarioWare: Twisted!, Yoshi: Topsy Turvy, etc. They are notable because you can’t perfectly emulate them. Sure, you can tell your emulator to use the accelerometers in your contemporary controller for most of them, but it’s not the same. The cartridge is the only authentic way.
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Chess has an interesting way of determining the world champion. There’s an 8-player candidates tournament, and the winner of that fights the defending champ as the final boss.
You qualify for the candidates tournament one of a bunch of ways: the previous challenger gets an automatic bid. Top n in one of a couple tournaments. Win the “regular season”. Highest rated player.
Is there anything else with such a complex playoffs setup?
I’m pretty sure this has to do with all the varied and weird national/regional chess federations
I was trying to think about if the Go/Baduk world had a “world” championship what that would look like given the differences between China, Korea, Japan, US, and EU Go federations/associations. I’m pretty sure it’d be weird and wild. IIRC the US federation technically falls under the Korean federation (it did when the US first started certifying professionals, it may be a bit different now) and Japan has it’s own weird world of titles that have their own tourney structures under that.
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