I take your point to a certain extent - if it models the real world - as you say - is real-world relevant - it wouldn't, strictly speaking, be a game. The ethical problem arises when something which is not, in this sense a 'game' is presented as if it is a game (i.e. a true competition where the user's/player's actions 'matter'). Perhaps we can think in terms of a larger category of aesthetic experiences within which simulators, models and games can all be located...i think, if the designer is honest about what it is that they have made - maybe they have just made something that is heaps of fun but isn't a game, that should be enough to address this ethical concern, no?

There is no 'unified theory' for game design. There are no rules. True game design is free of any rules or limitations.

I have a question about game balance. what if you have multiple classes with different power levels. the more powerful classes can defeat monsters faster, but have lower rewards, while the weaker classes kill monsters slower but each one yields higher rewards. if the two classes then can both obtain the same rate of rewards per hour, is that balancing the classes in terms of how fast they can obtain rewards? because then, rate of rewards is determined by strategy, not by choosing a better or worse class.

Pon? link to account?

1. Capture the Flag seems to favor one strategy over another (you can not win from defending.) 2. In your Customization of Strategy video, you said that The Legend of Zelda should have fleshed-out stealth mechanics. If you think that LoZ should have stealth, why shouldn't Street Fighter have a diplomatic victory? (I believe that LoZ with stealth mechanics would violate the flavor of a courageous Link, but alas) 3. Fighting games may seem to the uninitiated to rely on twitch reflexes, but the vast majority of "reflexes" you see in fighting game are actually just predictions. You literally can not react to (strong) mixups in the vast majority of fighting games. You MUST predict them. Saying that fighting games rely on twitch reflexes is akin to saying that Rock-Paper-Scissors relies on twitch reflexes to win. Reacting is beyond the physical capacity of humans. You still do need mechanical proficiency in Fighting Games, but literally any competition will either favor practice and knowledge or be random. 4. Full customization of strategy in Dragon Ball would directly conflict with the rule that games must not break the flavor. The flavor of Dragon Ball includes vast differences in power between characters like Raditz or Cui and characters like Adult Gohan or Frieza. It is virtually impossible to make a Dragon Ball game that is compliant with your theory.

wouldnt a better term for "immersion" be "thematically coherent"? covers more ground (also works for abstract games and excludes the implied subjectivity when it comes to "what can be considered immersive"?)

if "something" needs to be balanced to be considered a game but at the same time mustnt be solvable, doesnt that imply that the former condition cant be determined (cuz the "balancing" during the game creation requires being solvable)?

It's funny to listen to this point of view. I think if you approach it with criticism (reduction to the point of absurdity), then you can prove that from this point of view, not a single “game” is actually a game. Here it is still worth distinguishing between “game” and “game behavior”. The same separation of a player’s “skills” acquired in real life from the choice of strategy, it simply does not work. A stupid person will not be able to choose a winning strategy. And a smart person will be able to choose - even if physical abilities do not allow. Because a player can train and become better than 99% of the rest of the planet's population Games are a choice. And the consequences the player faces after making a choice. Consequences that do not affect real life (it is allowed to get tired and hungry) :) Or they don't influence much. Therefore, “gaming addiction” is not “games”. The main player in DND is the Dungeon Master, and not the players themselves - the DM is the one who makes the main choices - and if he does it wrong, the players will choose another master

Agency is important. I often wish I wasn't so attracted to randomness. These two things don't mix easily... Thanks for the video. It gives me something to think about while I am working on my games.

Hello! Thank you for uploading this video! Well, wouldn't it be nice if there was a "real" fighting "game" out there... I wonder why many people never questioned why things are the way they are... Are "we" not "intelligent" enough? How many people really want to create/design a "perfect" game... I'm convinced you are one of the few people that actually wants to improve things... I guess many people are too distracted with all these obligations they have like job(s), family, etc... etc...... I think many people are just tired... I guess you'll have to show all of us how a "real" game could be designed/created...and then some other intelligent humans will attempt to create their own "real" game... Have a nice day!

I’m curious why you define requiring memorization and twitch reflexes as real world relevance and not requiring the mental capacity to create and execute strategies. In general, I’d like to see you expand on definitions like this in more detail. For example, is there a specific required reaction time which is theory compliant, and if not, would limiting turn length be noncompliant? Is there an amount of required memorization which is acceptable? I’m particularly interested in your upcoming videos on solvability and simulation. I hope you will provide complete definitions for those two terms, especially solvability. I’d also like to request that you outline a test or set of tests that can conclusively determine whether or not a game is solvable.

Is chess a sport? If so, why?

Why isn't Quake 3 Arena a real game?

I think your thoughts are interesting, but I'm confused to a couple of points that you bring up. I think you might be misunderstanding the role that reactions play in fighting games. I'm going to watch some more of your videos to see if I can get a better idea of your philosophy about games. Would you be willing to have a conversation about your ideas?

I like having fun with my touys, personally

You just disowned each and every game that exists because every game has real world relevance. It us the very point of "competitiveness".

What is a skill?

Oh hai mark

I want so badly to believe in a theory like this. But I don't see how it makes sense that if we took a real game, and added a legend of Zelda style chest opening sequence that removed player control temporarily, that that inherently makes it no longer a game. If the chest opening does not cause the player to incur some mechanical penalty, as it doesn't in Zelda since the game world around you is paused, then it does not impact the legitimacy of the game system. I am totally in agreement that I dont like these things. I don't like when you press Action and wait while your player does things autonomously. But I don't see how an otherwise (theoretically, not talking about Zelda itself) incredible game suddenly is no longer a game at all. That just doesn't seem like a logical step to me.

You mentioned you've got a simulation video coming, and so you're probably going to go into this in more depth then, but I'm curious about where you draw the line between simulation for simulation's sake and a gameplay mechanic that might derive from a real world action. Sticking with the reloading example it seems to me that you are managing ammunition as a resource and so the decision of when to reload, or how to reload as I saw another commenter suggesting, is a lever given to the player to guide and incorporate into their strategies as opposed to just the arbitrary denial of agency in service of "realism". Apologies if you've covered this elsewhere, but this is the first of your videos I've seen, so feel free to tell me to just watch your other videos if that's the case!

I am starting to like the theory, specially this one, a really coherent way to frame these business malpractice issues.

What are some examples of "real games"? Is that another video?

I would love to know how you see games like Nethack and MudNBlood 2 from this lens. MnB, in particular, leans hard into the idea of unfair, random brutality...sometimes, unfairness and brute chance can be fun 😅 Another game that seems to skirt the boundaries of what you call solvability is N - predictable and solvable in theory but still fun...

I’ve watched a few of your videos now, I can’t tell if you’re just trying to rage bait or if this is serious. Your own game, mage wars, has turns/priority, which limits player agency. I simply have to watch a cutscene of my opponent’s turn that I cannot skip unless I wish to just stop playing. Any mechanic is a design choice that limits player agency and customization. So all games are not games by your definition. However I do think your game is very interesting and I think such a highly customizable card game is really fascinating. But it doesn’t pass your own theory, unless I’m misunderstanding something.

18:15 For reloading specifically there’s definitely room for improvement and some more tactical games might have it best. Staged reloads not just dropping the magazine but allowing the player to shoot a bullet that’s in the chamber if it was a partial reload. The trade off and choice of emptying the gun fully then reloading, doing a partial reload with one bullet still in the chamber, or topping off an internal magazine like on a bolt action rifle

Forgive me if you covered this, but what is a 'real game' to you that doesn't have real world relevance? I feel like you've disqualified literally everything

Customisable fighters - whether in terms of strategy or gear is a really sweet idea. The reflex based paradigm is, in general, bad for humanity

physicality is true of any game played by a human though. If you're playing a card game -> muscle memory is not too different from learning and memorizing heuristics for certain scenarios. my performance thinking and strategizing can be enhanced by caffeine for another example.

You are tearing me apart Lisa (oops, I meant WotC) A reference to "The Room"? Well, I have already talked a lot about MtG! I'll just focus on other things regarding this topic now... Yes, what about "fighting games"... I used to play games such as Soul Calibur 2...tbh never really was a fan of Tekken, Street Fighter etc...? But how could it be possible for a fighting game to lack real world relevance? Isn't the controller or the controls in general the problem? As soon as you have a controller in your hands, isn't there automatically some real world relevance included...humans are not all equals...some have better hands than other humans... Regarding competitiveness/competition: Personally I never really cared about how "competitive" a game should be be...but yes, games should be "competitive" to a certain extent so that the more "competitive" players can actually enjoy the game... How could a fighting game lack real world reference? By implanting chips into our brains that are connected to the game so our brains control the characters? Well, not all brains are equal! It is a dilemma! Controllers, brain chips? I don't think "leveling up" should be a thing with fighting games... Perhaps there could be stats for (physical) strength, speed, (natural defense) resilience, special attack, special defense, special reload speed etc... And a player could "upgrade" a character by practicing a lot with that character...but there shouldn't be a limit...like e.g. resilience 100 max Resilience could/should theoretically be upgraded to 300+ but wouldn't that also imply that a person who has upgraded his character for a very long time has an unfair advantage compared to new players? Even that wouldn't really lack real world relevance! There are always people who will spend much more time playing a certain game than most other individuals! It is a dilemma! Imagine playing a fighting game (you are a beginner) against an experienced player that holds back a lot but he still wins because the stats of his character are much higher...

Seriously, forget those people You're doing god's work Keep it up man

I misremembered again. It was the beam struggle.

I don't agree with this list (I'm a big fan of customization of strategy) A game is not necessarily competitive and can still be a game. What you're describing is a contest of wits; or of luck (depending on variance of the game).

I don't really understand the point you're trying to make here, isn't a good strategy just memorization? Just memorize the winning strategy

First: I think calling it “real game” is just a bad name. Imagine Portal, great game, by your definition is not a real game. I can give many examples but a better name would be a competitive game? Or skill based game? Second: A theory should explain more than anything, what you probably mean is an ideal, games can break the rules in your ideals and become better, create new ideals that are fun in their own way. A theory would explain why these two ideals are fun and in what way.

Failure states are extremely important in for example bullet hell shmups, since those games are all about risk/reward, and are designed around a 1 credit clear framework. These games require a lot of problem solving, practice, quick thinking and skilled play. The fact that there is no saving in these games means that every mistake you make has momentous consequences, and the game must be well designed enough that a sufficiently skilled player will never lose to something that was out of their control. I highly recommend The Electric Underground's video "Why Permadeath Matters" from last September, which was the best video on game design I've seen in a long time. It explains the difference between progression-based design (which can often be determined by "How valuable is a fully completed save file in this game?") and performance-based design (which often applies to arcade games that have no saving). Many modern games would hugely benefit from adopting a permadeath system similar to the 1CC-framework of shmups.

I don't understand how you can disqualify poker but not disqualify pokemon, you say that 'board games' like poker are disqualified because they violate formal game theory, what does this mean? Based on my (incredibly) breif reading on game theory, poker, a zero-sum game is under the preview of game theory. Furthermore you say that both chess and poker 'fundamentally violate formal game theory' but chess and poker are markedly different games. I haven't played much pokemon but from what I've seen of competitive play its very reminisant of e.g. poker where you use your understanding of the probabilities involved in each interaction to maximise profit. By violates formal game theory do you mean that for any strategy your opponent picks you always have a counter-stratagy ala rock-paper-scissors? And in liu of that would rock-paper-scissors be considered a game by your standards? (albeit a rudamentary one?) Finally, is there really a need to consider these games 'real games'? Is there really a need to exclude other kinds of 'games' or 'sports' as you would call them? or is this just a matter of strong preference?

ur definition says specifically victory conditionS (plural) so "games" that have only 1 victory conditions cant be actual games? and also: why do they need to be immersive at all, i dont understand 🤔what u mean is the concept of the "magic circle" i think, abstract games should be possible "games" im sure (even if we dont consider chess go and these other traditional games as non games) - i dont think immersion (as in actual immersion, not as in magic circle) can be considered a fundamental requirement

hm, u gave lots of examples of (surprising) non-games (in the vid and in the description) so now, can u maybe give examples of "actual" games?

"Gameplay cannot favor any strategy over another" That's just absurd, if every strategy is good, none of them are. You probably shouldn't know what the best strategy is, but their is going to be one and if all strategies were equal, you may as well not play the game at all.

Dnd 4e flopped compared to other editions because it went too far down the road of giving everyone access to everything with slightly different flavor. Yes it's good to give players choices, but sometimes the choices need to restrict later available options. Players should still be able to pick or build their own strategy, but there needs to be tradeoffs in that process.

CORRECTION: I'm pretty sure Vegeta's 'back+energy" attack is the "big bang attack"; not "final flash". Apologies

How does a desire to face challenges and improve oneself, fit into your ontology?

" @GamesbyMarcWolff 1 day ago (edited) No, Metroid and WoW are not games." says all you need to know about this guy.

Players use agency tends to be awful I find. Wanting to skim the rules, bend the rules, break the rules, break the balance, asking for magic items immediately because someone else got one, and its gone down to refusing to adventure because its "scary" and even threatening the poor quest givers on things like the mans daughter being stolen... Im not gonna say its bad they have it but their uses of it makes me wanna just retort "go play a video game and mod it"

Why gatekeep? Instead of "a real game is ..." why not just create a term for the subset of games you want to talk about? For example, you could call it a MW game or just MW. MW is the initials of your name. Obviously, all these things you dismiss as "not a real game" are games. And they are real. And thats confusing. So stop. The delivery of your ideas could be improved massively. The examples you chose are alien to me as I have not played those games.

So what, metroid is not a game? wow is not a game? You are completely missing out on the execution challenge being a viable "gameplay", the same is with exploration. How much choice is there in darts? You don't interact with other people playing, just score-comparing for the most part. What you say more or less makes sense, but it's just describing something like "pure distilled game", and not a real game. When children play in the yard it's not about strategy, sometimes it's not even about rules. Still a game ;)

Was recommended this vid at random so I know nothing else about the topic so please excuse my ignorance. If I'd tell you to guess the color of my roof, and if you'd guess right you'd get a reward, wouldn't that be a type of game? Second probably dumb question: If Ocarina of Time which is often ranked as one of the best game ever made isn't a game, does this mean most people don't actually want to play real games? If so, what would you call the thing it's tapping into that so many people seem to want, some kind of simulation of a game?

Im confused why you think it is so easy to solve each game. The strategy part is the exploration of trying to be optimal. It is the part where you come up with different combinations, because you dont know what the optimal solution is. Why do you insist that part is so easy?

This is an interesting approach to think of it, and I had quite some thought on the matter myself. I asked myself - what makes a game "fun" from a mechanics perspective. And the term strategy is an important cornerstone of that, but not the only one. I would like to introduce the concept of "rate of change" because I think it is one of those things that makes humans enjoy games. Some games like "Clicker Heros" or similar idle games took the entire idea of exponential number increases and made a fun experience from just that, without even having any strategy at all - which ties into this videos topic, since there also is no way to win these "games". So how would strategies and rates of change intertwine? We should define a victory condition (Think of CIV V, which has multiple of those for example) and you have actions that you can take, that will generate a rate of change of a parameter you have control over (money, coins, mana, power, whatever it might be in your game) which will generally get you closer to your goal. If the rate of change of your games important parameters are constants, or even 0, you get yourself a boring game with a singular solution. None of the actions you take can speed up your path to the win condition, and none of them can slow it down. "You get 100 XP every hour, and you can't change that. You win at level 30" makes for a game with no fun in progressing. So most games give you options on how to change the rate of change that leads you to the win condition. You can gain XP from slaying monsters, and with certain upgrades or certain Weapons, you can slay stronger monsters and get a higher reward - you just increased the rate of change of your current game state by choosing to leave the tutorial area. The interesting part of game design comes down to extrapolating this 1 dimensional concept to multiple dimensions. A win condition usually is multidimensional (reach X amount of XP is usually not that interesting) and the rate of changes for all these may affect each other. On a very pure, mathmatical breakdown, you could say that the player has a set of inputs at time T (a vector of length N), which changes the state of the game world (a vector of length M), which is simultaneously affected by deviations, such a noise, other players, RNG, events etc., resulting in a new state at the time T+1. This previous example is a time discrete model, but you can also build a time continous model containing effect regarding the rate of change in the state of the game world. Why is this important? Because the dynamics between rates of changes and the world state allow for different strategies to work at the same time. Whenever a crossover point between two strategies happens, you get a viable strategy before that point in time, and another viable strategy past that point in time. When your rate of change functions have many crossover points, it can make for very interesting and very dynamic gameplay. Let me give you an example. We play a 1v1 strategy game. We start out with a resource pool (1000 gold) and both build our first units. I build defensive units for half my 1000 gold, and invest 500 gold into auxiliary buildings that give me a faster income of gold. You just buy offensive units and work with the gold the game gives you per turn naturally. In the beginning, your army is stronger. If you can manage to crush mine before my investment allows to pay back interest, you will win and your strategy is successful. If you cannot crush my army by then, I have the upper hand and am likely to win. Now, this is an example where there is only one crossover point, but good game design can have many, many different ones. Like a fighter going into a fit of rage, that will strengthen them temporarily (giving them the upper hand) but weaken them after a certain period of time due to exhaustion. The more dimensions these crossover points occur in, and the more of them there are, the more viable strategies exist, and the more options you as a player get to react to disadvantegeous situations. The ability to "Turn the ship around" is very crucial for interesting games, so extreme snowballing should be avoided as much as possible. However you don't want to punish someone who is ahead for using a working strategy. The only punishment should come from not adapting to new emerging situations. Don't put in "a disease killed half your army" when one player gets significantly ahead of the other, or a rubber band in a racing game. You should present the disadvanteged player with options such as "recruit all peasants as a last stand" and suddenly give them a huge army, but no economy anymore - that might get them to win a desperately needed battle of relieve, to which the other player needed to adapt by retreating and waiting out the economy to collapse. This is, to me, as a player, a sign of great game design. I hope this wasn't too confusing. Cheers!

I arrived roughly the same conclusion. I think the easiest way to prove this is by looking at the extreme case: if every strategy is always equally successful, then you are practically no different from a kid who was handed an unplugged controller. The converse truth is that if only one strategy is viable, then it's more of a fun exercise than a game. EDIT: I watched the rest of video, you went down a different route lol, I kind of see your point, but I think as long as there is uncertainty within the game, there is room for expression, and thus, room for strategy. Either through imperfect information, randomness of some kind, or simply the fact that neither player has access to the choices their opponent will make, you can have two strategies be seemingly equally viable. In magic, you don't know the order of your deck, and neither player knows the hand of the other, that is a layer of uncertainty that allows for planning, reading, and strategy. Then, you also have the possibility of an unstable equilibrium in the meta, where a deck can in itself popularize a counter deck, which in itself would popularize its own counter deck, and so on (no idea if this happens in magic lol), which also allows for a layer of meta strategy (you have to speculate what will be played in order to prepare for it). Then, of course, you have the players' imperfect play, and your inability to know for sure what your opponent's next play will be, even if there is perfect information, which allows for expression whenever there is doubt. Chess, for example, has perfect information, and while unsolved, can technically be memorized to a non trivial degree for the first n moves, but you still need strategy to compensate for your own (and your opponent's) inability to see so far down into the future. That allows you to provoke, taunt, confuse, intimidate or mislead your opponent, solely through play.