The New York Times has a superb article on basketball’s “Triangle offense.” It’s interesting for its exploration of basketball strategy and personalities. What I really found gripping as a designer, though, is its discussion of how much people who understand the Triangle enjoy watching it used.

Other articles have pointed toward the idea that the way to have the most fun as a spectator of a game is to really get its inner workings. The classic example, in my mind, is an article written years ago about a Street Fighter match between Justin Wong and Umehara Daigo. Unfortunately the original seems to have been lost to time, but in brief summary, Umehara knows that Wong wants to win with chip damage. He therefore puts himself at the precise distance to get Wong to use a specific move–and then counters all the parts of that move, one after another in rapid succession, before counter-attacking for the win. As the article pointed out, without an understanding of Umehara’s strategy the match video (found in the summary above) looks like a feat of dexterity, neat but something anyone who’s spent time in practice mode could do; with the necessary understanding, it becomes a one-in-a-million combination of physical and mental achievement that marks out a true master.

Both basketball and Street Fighter are complex games whose strategy is not obvious to the casual observer. Announcers and commentators help bridge that gap, but they can only go as far as they themselves understand; the New York Times article notes that even most basketball professionals can’t explain how the Triangle works, much less pass the knowledge along. I’m left to wonder: what can we do, in-game, to help spectators see what great players know?

What is a tournament about?

I don’t generally follow professional golf, but it’s just provided a case study that encapsulates a larger debate regarding what tournaments should be used for. The U.S. Open played over the weekend was–at least according to some–a weak measure of overall golf skill. Yet, it was an excellent test of who was tops at solving unique problems on a specific day. Views of the event thus depend on the purpose one thinks tournaments should serve, making it a great vehicle for discussing the issue.

A bit of background is in order. The U.S. Open is a major golf tournament held each summer. It moves from course to course, and this year was held at Chambers Bay in Washington state. Chambers Bay proved controversial. The drought afflicting the West Coast hit the already-difficult course, substantially impacting how it played. One player memorably “said that Chambers Bay Golf Course’s dry, bumpy greens were ‘pretty much like putting on broccoli;’” another replied that the greens didn’t have broccoli’s color, and were more like cauliflower. All of this led some to complain that the results were not a proper measure of skill, including one player who went off on network television about good putts being derailed and bad putts being knocked in.

For all the problems, though, the fact remains that the U.S. Open was extremely interesting to watch. Gut checks were constant. Can this guy get out of a giant maw of a sand trap, ten feet deep? One player was ill; could he make it through the last few hours? The course is extremely hilly, and the golfers had to keep it together when they hit a ball up toward the hole . . . and it rolled all the way back down to where it had started. (That happened more than once!) I can’t say whether Jordan Spieth, the ultimate winner, was the best overall golfer—but he was certainly the best at adapting to a crazy, challenging situation.

Is that enough to deserve to win? There are two camps, and it’s good practice as a lawyer to think about both sides’ arguments. Here they are, presented for your consideration.

The prosecution: this isn’t why we have tournaments.

We call the U.S. Open a championship event. That’s because it’s intended to determine who is the champion—the best. Chambers Bay, and by extension this U.S. Open, didn’t accomplish that.

Tournaments are, fundamentally, measures of skill. That’s why we have tournaments, with all their formal rules: to strip away everything that isn’t skill, and to ensure to the greatest extent possible that the most skilled player wins out. At a fundamental level, the difference between a tournament and playing casually with friends is that tournaments have as their purpose showcasing skill, with fun as a secondary goal, whereas most “play” is the other way around.

Being the best golfer means performing difficult tasks reliably. First one must hit a tiny ball with a stick so that it travels accurately to a location hundreds of yards away. Then one must hit the ball, again using a lengthy stick, so that it drops into a hole barely larger than the ball itself. We make tournament golfers do these things again and again, seeing who most consistently chooses the precise angles and forces necessary to get the ball where it is meant to go. Those choices are the essence of skill in golf, and we gather lots of data about how golfers make them so that we can make fine judgments between who is good at these decisions and who is the best.

Chambers Bay’s ragged greens undermined that analysis. We can’t say who was most reliably able to pick the correct angles and forces, because good decisions were undone by flaws in the playing surface. A random element crept in which made it impossible to say whether scores were based on skill or luck.

The 15^th U.S. Open might have been won by the best golfer . . . or it might not have. We don’t know, and a tournament that leaves us uncertain on that point is a tournament that hasn’t done its job.

The defense: the event did everything an event can do.

It’s absolutely true that tournaments are meant to measure who’s the best. However, no single event can determine who’s the best in some cosmic sense. Chambers Bay did a fine job of establishing who was the best on the day, and that’s all we can ever ask of a tournament.

There’s never been a game where all involved played completely perfectly, to the outermost limit of their skill, so that we can say the winner was absolutely supreme. We have to accept that everyone involved in a tournament is merely mortal, and that every individual data point about player skill is therefore flawed and approximate. Overall best-ness can only be determined in hindsight, when more such points have accumulated than any single tournament can offer.

Once we acknowledge the limits on all tournaments, it’s clear that the U.S. Open was great. The event made players stretch beyond their normal boundaries, and allowed those who could do so to shine. Perhaps it tested whether a golfer was determined and even-keeled more than the golfer’s putting stroke; if so, that’s not a bad thing. Focus and steadiness are traits of good golfers, too.

Twenty years from now we’ll be able to look back and say whether Jordan Spieth was the best, or whether he triumphed over some other best to take this particular event. We need that extra time, with all the information it will bring, to make that evaluation. In the interim, the U.S. Open was a demanding challenge that tested the limits even of top people. An interesting game resulted. That’s what it’s reasonable to want from a tournament, and that’s exactly what the Open and Chambers Bay gave us.

Jurors, the matter is now in your hands

I have a personal sympathy for the second position–but the first has its merits. So: was this a good U.S. Open? More generally, are somewhat offbeat tournaments acceptable?

First, I wanted to follow up on last time’s post regarding Twitter by noting Eric Lang’s “TCG Design 101” tweets. Each one is a superb distillation of years of design experience. They’re the kind of content that makes Twitter so valuable to designers, and are well worth checking out.

Unfortunately, sometimes one isn’t inspired to create the next great TCG—or much of anything else, for that matter. When that happens to me, I often check out game design contests. They’re very useful for breaking through mental blocks, getting out of comfort zones, and generally putting the creative engine into gear.

Contests provide two invaluable things to designers searching for inspiration: a seed (e.g., “a game involving kings and queens” or “dexterity game”) and a deadline. The value of the former is plain. In game design as in writing, one of the most challenging parts is facing a blank page and having to narrow down the universe of ideas. Having a requirement to work from makes things a lot easier.

Imposing a deadline, too, ought not be underestimated. There’s nothing better for forcing movement, for getting past speculation and starting to design. When you’re in a rut an impetus to do something now can actually be very helpful.

There’s a range of contests out there, formal and informal, some with long histories. I’d encourage anyone looking to get past a roadblock, or improve their skills, or get some feedback, or just to try their hand at the art of design to give one a try.

Sometimes game design is about filing down rough edges, implementing things in ways that remove small but irksome play issues. I’ve run into one opportunity to do that recently: it’s often better to add than to subtract.

This might seem pretty trivial; after all, addition and subtraction are basic skills everyone learns in elementary school. However, it turns out that subtracting can lead to weird rules issues. Rather than have to deal with them, it’s often better to see if the same effect can be achieved through addition.

By way of example, consider a game where players roll dice and try to get above a certain number. (In other words, the vast majority of games with dice in them!) As the designer, you’ve decided that in certain situations the player should be less likely to succeed. Should you subtract from the player’s roll, or add to the total needed?

From a mathematical perspective, the two might be exactly the same. Subtracting, however, can create problems in extreme circumstances. What if the total of (roll – penalty) is less than zero? Does that have meaning?

Don’t laugh—it’s possible that a negative result could. In an economic game, for example, negative cost might serve as a way to reflect economies of scale. In a wargame based on ancient Greece, where morale was the most important factor for a defending army, a negative attack value might represent an attack so weak that it actually reinforces the defenders’ confidence in themselves.

If a roll of less than zero doesn’t have meaning, how exactly will it be handled? The value could just stop at zero, with a rule that it’s impossible to go lower. In that case it becomes necessary to address order-of-operations issues; if there are both penalties and bonuses to a roll, canny players might apply them so that some of the penalties are “wasted” by the not-below-zero rule.

At least one game I’ve played tried to avoid that problem by tracking negative values, but treating them as zero; the negatives only came into effect when a bonus tried to bring the total back up. The resulting system was mathematically workable, but somewhat hard to explain to new players. “You’re actually at -2, but we play like it’s 0, unless you try to increase it, in which case it’s -2.” Wrapping one’s brain around that while also trying to keep track of the basic game rules was not trivial.

Compare all of that to what happens if we just add to the total needed. In the abstract, that raises absolutely no rules questions. Nor can I think, offhand, of any specific game where it would.

Sometimes a game has to have subtraction. Keep in mind, though, that subtraction has a certain measure of built-in complexity. Where possible, use the mirror-image addition instead; it’s probably equally intuitive, and it will usually avoid creating FAQ entries.

Being a good game designer involves having a reasonable familiarity with existing games. Every kind of artist learns by studying the works of others, after all. It’s important to recognize, however, that playing other designers’ games is not the same as doing design work. To make real progress, design time needs to be spent hammering away at one’s own games.

One of the perils of game design, I’ve found, is that research can be an awful lot of fun. Part of how I learn about fighting games is by playing them–and I really like fighting games. So too for wargames, worker-placement games, co-ops, semi co-ops, deckbuilders, and on and on. Learning is fun, because “have fun with this” is the default way to interact with the medium.

So far, so good. The danger is that it can feel natural to flip the equation around, turning “learning is fun” into “fun is learning.” From the latter statement, it’s easy to arrive at “having fun is also doing work.”

Unfortunately, that last position is wrong. Playing other people’s games might help one refine ideas for one’s own games, or be a source of inspiration, or demonstrate a useful technique. It will never, however, bring one’s own games into actual physical existence. It will never playtest them or write their rulebooks or do any of the other things that need doing to make one’s own games happen. Having fun isn’t doing work; it’s taking one away from the tough stuff.

This doesn’t mean that a designer should only work, leaving no time for play. Experiencing other designers’ games can be very valuable. Again, no artist would be expected to practice in a vacuum, ignoring the masterworks of his or her field.

What it does mean is that play time and work-on-own-designs time need to be kept separate. Don’t set aside two hours to work on a project, and then spend them playing Flower “to learn about non-conflictual games.” Play Flower during free time, and put those two hours into creating the next generation of non-conflictual gaming.

It’s often said that ideas aren’t worth much in game design, because lots of people have them; what’s rare and valuable is the follow-through to make an idea into a publishable game. Getting into a “playing = working” mindset is an easy way to end up on the wrong side of the ideas/follow-through divide. Play, definitely play–take it from a lawyer, making some time for not-work is a good idea–but recognize that playing doesn’t move one’s own designs forward, and keep the time for that latter goal sacrosanct.

A while ago I talked about stand-in AIs. I mentioned that they need to imitate human players–but I didn’t have much to say about how that could be achieved.

That question was very ably addressed in Mr. Pedersen’s BGG blog post on Monday, which gives some really fascinating suggestions about how deck-building could be used to change an AI giving random responses into an AI that looks like it hates you personally . . . or loves you!

If you haven’t seen it yet, I would urge you to give his post a look. Even if designing solo games isn’t your thing, the ideas have applications elsewhere.