Action-adventure games

I want this game.

A lesson in incentives

Because I have far more important things to do, I've been spending a lot of time lately on iRacing, an online auto racing simulation with some 25,000 subscribers who can run practice sessions or race other members in any of two dozen cars on four dozen different tracks (each of which has been laser-scanned for accuracy to the nearest millimeter). It is, too understate the matter, addictive.

As I usually do when I start in with a new activity or a new system, I've been busy exploring the rules and culture by reading every manual they have and exploring the forums for information on how this all works. And the most interesting thing I have found so far is iRacing's approach to encouraging safe driving.

The problem is simple: you've attracted a bunch of people who aren't professional race drivers, but would like to drive as aggressively as professional race drivers, and you want to encourage them to keep a lid on it and stay within their limits. Somehow, you have to create a system of incentives that will discourage poor driving, reward safe driving, and be self-enforcing -- with 25,000 drivers, there's no way to have an impartial judge watching every race.

To that end, the system automatically monitors "incidents" and awards "incident points" based on the severity. Going off the track is 1 point. Spinning around or making contact with another car is 2 points. Especially hard contact is awarded 4 points. Based on a weighted moving average of "incidents per corner," a safety rating (SR) is awarded and continually updated. You need to maintain an adequate SR in order to advance your license, which you need if you want to race in advanced series with faster and more powerful cars. Don't take care of your SR and you'll be stuck racing the rookie series with the clueless noobs forever.

The controversial part is this: the SR is based on a no-fault system. If you and I make contact, we both accrue incident points. It makes no difference whether I hit you, you hit me, or we were both being too aggressive ... none of that matters. We both get points and, if we accumulate too many, our SR's suffer. That pisses people off. The forums at iRacing are filled with bitter complaints from drivers who've accumulated points and can't raise their SR's high enough to get our of the Rookie class, because all those other dolts keep crashing them out of races. Why does the service tolerate all those bad drivers who are holding me back?

And more experienced, wiser drivers will reply that the system is working exactly as it's supposed to work. When the complainer posts replays of the incident, as often as not they'll point out that the driver himself was often at fault, not holding his line as well as he thought, or getting impatient and trying a high-risk passing maneuver. Most of the time, you can examine the guy's record and discover that doesn't have nearly as much control of his car as he thinks he has. Usually he has some sort of expectation that he should be able to drive the same line in traffic that he does in practice and everyone else should just get out of his way.*

More importantly, though, they'll try to impress a driver with the necessity of thinking safety first. In real life, if your race car gets crashed, you suffer the injuries and you pay for the repairs, no matter how it happened. You don't rush into a dicey situation thinking, "If there's a crash, at least it won't be my fault." You suffer the same as if it had been your fault. And that makes you more cautious. In a no-fault system -- and God himself runs a no-fault universe -- it's always your responsibility to avoid trouble. You do that by being patient, by watching to see if your opponent is driving steadily or erratically, and by taking the approach that it's more important to finish the race than it is to get to the front.

This seems to be a hard lesson for some to learn. If you're constantly getting involved incidents that don't seem to be your fault, the first step is to examine replays and see if you aren't really more at fault than you thought (often you are). But the next step is to ask yourself, "Am I putting myself in dangerous situations too often? Am I taking risks that, even if I keep it together myself, have a high chance of ending badly?" 'Cause if you are, then you're not a safe driver, regardless of whose fault the final incident turns out to be.

That's the beauty of the no-fault system: you can never avoid the consequences and so you can never shirk responsibility. If you want to advance very far in iRacing, you have to temper your aggression and learn at least a modicum** of good judgment. It's all about the incentives.*** The drivers who complain about the system would generally like to do what they do and make everyone else responsible for the outcome. The no-fault system does exactly the opposite by making it always your responsibility, no matter how bad the drivers are around you. Just like it is out on the street.



____________________________________________
* I came across this attitude back in my undergrad days playing pickup basketball. Quite a few guys were of the opinion that once they had begun a drive to the basket, it was some sort of violation if the other team still tried to defend it. In fact, I find a lot of the same attitudes at iRacing that I did on the basketball court -- the inflated egos and sense of entitlement, the win-at-all-cost attitudes conflicting with the let's-just-have-fun approach, and the mildly inverse relationship between whining and talent.

** You don't necessarily need much more than a modicum. The SR system is pretty generous and drivers who are conscientious, but unskilled, can still do pretty well. And even the upper level series contain a pretty fair amount of trouble. But then, have you watched a NASCAR race lately?

*** When the developers put the system together, they actually considered charging small amounts of money for excessive incidents. They decided against it, probably wisely.

UM gaming frenzy

A fun story of the great Sega Genesis Hockey tournament of 1992

Stumbled upon

The motion here is so funny, I think I'd laugh even if they'd portrayed someone I admired:


Try it!

http://www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/georgerag.swf

Mock Dragon's Tail

I never took D&D this seriously:


That was a cake.

My take on Obama's infomercial

I'm no great chess player, but one of the lessons I've been taught is that when you have a winning position, you take the time to "eliminate counterplay." Since things are going your way, your opponent would like to launch a counterattack, make some threats that distract you from your own plans, hope you make a mistake - anything to cause chaos, 'cause things are going your way; unless he changes something, he's gonna lose. The good player isn't in a hurry; he pauses to make sure there'll be no effective counterattacking and then proceeds to crush the helpless foe.

Obama's infomercial was an unspectacular, yet brilliant move that I'm betting has eliminated McCain's counterplay. A half hour of calmness, reassurance, gravitas - dare I say it? Class - is going to stonewall McCain's attempts to make people nervous about Obama. He can only look petty, mean, and small in comparison if he continues his attacks. And yet he has no other play - Obama has the better position and if McCain doesn't attack, he simply loses in the obvious way. So McCain has two ways to lose, but if I read this right - that those wavering people who just might have gone over to McCain at the last minute are now, in fact, safely in Obama's camp - then he has no way to win. A chess master at work.

Scientific gaming

From the Shifted Librarian:

“A few years ago, Constance Steinkuehler — a game academic at the University of Wisconsin — was spending 12 hours a day playing Lineage, the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a ’siege princess,’ running 150-person raids on hellishly difficult bosses. Most of her guild members were teenage boys.

But they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they’d dump all the information they’d gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they’d develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked — and to predict how to beat it.

Often, the first model wouldn’t work very well, so the group would argue about how to strengthen it. Some would offer up new data they’d collected, and suggest tweaks to the model. ‘They’d be sitting around arguing about what model was the best, which was most predictive,’ Steinkuehler recalls.

That’s when it hit her: The kids were practicing science.

(more)

Apropos of nothing at all

So I'm reading blogs, especially takedowns of WorldnetDaily, and my mind suddenly takes me back to the ol' D&D days, when I actually subscribed to The Dragon magazine, read it cover to cover, and tried out most of their suggestions (not IRL, though). And I remember an issue that included a game, complete with cut-out board and components, called "Food Fight." You moved your player around a school cafeteria, throwing different foods at your rivals. Some foods caused more "damage" than others and you tried to use up your opponents' hit points before your own were exhausted and you had to retire from the fight in disgust.

Here's what I remember: the cheerleader character had, oh, five hit points or something like that. The first Boston cream pie that landed in her hair, she was fleeing the room. The nerd, on the other hand - he had 100 hit points. He could be one sticky, gooey mass of butterscotch pudding, with soybean porkchops sticking out both ears and keep going with no sense of embarrassment. Not a fair fight at all.

Just a random memory while reading people trying to criticize idiots on the web. I have no idea why I remembered that just now.



PS. You can find anything on the web! Especially if it appeals to nerds.

Mechanical computers

I've been spending a bit more time than I can justify playing Silent Hunter III, a PC game that simulates WWII U-boat warfare. I'm enjoying a chance to relearn some of the trigonometry that I know, but forget I know. For example, "Ship sighted!" I'm headed due east, the target's on bearing 330 from me (ahead left), but I'm viewing them from an angle of 135 degrees on the starboard side (behind right, from their perspective). I need to get ahead of them, so what course do I command in order to run parallel to the ship while I overtake her? "Jawohl, Herr Kaleun! New course einz - null - fuenf!" Once I reach attack position, I need to be able to calculate an interception course of about 90 degrees for optimum firing position.

But you don't have to be lined up perfectly, although it's easier that way. You just have to make the torpedo travel on an angle that will intercept a moving target. What I never appreciated from watching Das Boot is that the submarine carried a sophisticated mechanical computer for aiming the computers. Remember how the commander always calls out the target's course, speed, and range? One of his crew is setting those numbers into the TDC - Torpedo Data Computer. But that's not quite enough information. We know what the target is doing now, but we haven't told the crewman whether the target is to the left, the right, dead ahead, or just where. Ah, we don't have to! The TDC knows because it has a connection to the periscope and knows which way it's turned (relative to the sub's bow). So once you've entered the target's range, course, and speed, the TDC will recalculate the firing solution as it detects the periscope's angle changing; the commander can now aim just by pointing the periscope at his target, regardless of which way his submarine is pointing. The TDC has been updating the setting of a gyroscope in the torpedo itself. Once the torpedo is launched, the gyroscope will keep the torpedo turning until it feels itself lined up with the angle the TDC wanted for it.

The fascinating part of this is that it was all done mechanically; this is years before ENIAC, let alone Commodore. For a sense of what it took to create a mechanical calculator like this, take a look at the American Mark 3 from the same era:



Pretty complicated, huh? All analog and, needless to say, highly classified. No doubt it was extremely expensive, too. This one could even track the target's movements (and compensate for the submarine's motion) in real time, which made it even more advanced than the German computer. And those poor guys in WWI had to do the same thing with a slide rule.

Speaking of which, there are some really hard core sub gamers out there who love doing things the hard way. They want to calculate the target's course manually, measure the angle to the mast to determine the range (have to know what ship you're looking at, so you know how tall the mast actually is), and use a stopwatch to determine the ship's speed. And they just love trying to recreate old targeting aids like this:

It's kind of like a WWII version of SCA - where else do you find guys eager to learn how a slide rule is used?

Living in a puzzle

An architectural designer builds a mystery into a Manhattan apartment