Tilt Warning » game theory

How Superstitions Improve Performance

mgk — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:01:12 +0000

Experiments reveal that simple superstitions like lucky charms can improve motor and cognitive performance.

Professional athletes are particularly prone to superstitions, perhaps because so much rides on split-second timing, or what seems like luck.

Two dominant US sportsmen with superstitious behaviour are golfer Tiger Woods who always wears a red shirt on Tournament Sundays and basketball player Michael Jordan who wore the same blue undershorts throughout his career.

We tend to think of this behaviour as irrational, despite feeling the pull of superstition ourselves. New research published in Psychological Science, however, asks whether these superstitions are irrational if they work.

Roger Ebert, “Video games can never be art.”

mgk — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 01:21:33 +0000

illustration via

Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.

Plato, via Aristotle, believed art should be defined as the imitation of nature. Seneca and Cicero essentially agreed. Wikipedia believes “Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas…Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction.”

But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? One could think of it as countless individual works of art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community? Yes, but it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn’t start dancing all at once.

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Some might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?

Read more on Ebert’s Journal, home to surprisingly robust conversation in its comments section.

Epic Wins, and the Science Behind Them

mgk — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 04:49:25 +0000

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

Link

Thing

mgk — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:45:59 +0000

Dig this. The tune directly inspires the pinball machine. And what comes of it? A game in which the gag is you hit a mystery scoop under the box there, reward is a random point value.(that’s pinball, right there.) Oh, and you’re on your own for figuring out what activates the ballsaver post ‘tween the flippers… got it?

Good.

CLASSIC, KEEPER
Chicago Coin’s 1951 Thing

Additionally, on the subject of things…

Anyone else ever consider Thing from the Addams Family as being their pet? Makes enough sense.

The ball doesn’t move ’til you.

Discrimination, the Good Kind

sigma — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:10:44 +0000

I’ve been searching for a good reference article on testing methodologies and how to ensure a test is a good discriminator. I haven’t had much luck. I know that this discipline exists but I’m not sure what it’s called – “testing theory” perhaps?

Let me start by sucking the fun right out of pinball and describing each game as a test. It’s a really enjoyable test, most of the time, but it’s testing your skills and giving you a score, which you can then compare against others on the same machine under the same conditions. A machine is a good discriminator of skill if it rewards a variety of approaches to play, has balanced scoring, and is neither too hard nor too easy.

It’s fairly obvious that if a machine has one easy shot that is worth more than anything else, then play on that machine becomes an exercise in repeating that shot – more a test of endurance than skill. At PAPA 6, the Video Mode on Junkyard comes to mind, as does Riverboat Gambler at Pinball Expo. But what’s less obvious is the “too hard / too easy” requirements.

Imagine that the entrance exam to the world’s most prestigious college is insanely difficult, and for the purposes of discussion, imagine that it’s all multiple-choice questions. If the test is so difficult that a bright, qualified applicant might only know 5% of the answers, but there are 5 choices for each question, then simple guessing will tend to yield a score of 20%, making the 5% of actual knowledge much harder to discern in the results. In fact, you’ll be admitting a lot of lucky people who may actually be morons.

In pinball, the issue is luck versus skill. If the game is so hard that nobody can keep the ball in play, then the skill factor is replaced by luck – whoever gets the lucky bounce will get the most points. Conversely, if a game is too easy, you’re back to the endurance issue (and your tournament – oh, that’s right, we run a tournament and that’s why I’m talking here – won’t run very efficiently).

Obviously, this is some of the reasoning behind game selection and setup in each division at PAPA. Sometimes we might make a game a little too hard in A, but that doesn’t hurt too much – players can pick their machines, and decide if they want to take a chance (higher luck factor) on an unusually difficult machine.

Why play is vital — no matter your age

mgk — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 07:42:53 +0000

A pioneer in research on play, Stuart Brown says humor, games, roughhousing, flirtation and fantasy are more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults — and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age.

Link

Are you game?

mgk — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:15:09 +0000

Maze, by James Jean