This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don't think it has to be an either or. I think AI can solve a lot of problems that currently exist in human spaces with the result being that humans are more drawn in to those spaces.
Take an ELO matchmaking algorithm as an example. In a 'pure' setting there is a pool of players looking for a match and the algorithm matches the players to their closest ELO available. But what happens if you are having a bad day? Or the players around your ELO happen to just be better than you? If the algorithm is 'pure' it wont care, because technically the ELO will balance itself out, so it wont account for the fact that you just lost 3 matches in a row and are probably tilted to the point where you will stop playing if you lose again. But if the algorithm isn't 'pure' and is instead designed with the goal of keeping players playing as long as possible, it can pick up on the fact you are losing to much and send you to play a lower ELO player so you don't burn out. The problem there being that a lower ELO player has to take a loss.
Now the algorithm has a lot of 'power'. It essentially dictates for 80% of players whether they win or lose. The only way to make the field 'fair' is to segment the playing population until the vast majority of players trend towards a 50% winrate. Having a good day? Face higher ELO players, lose, go back to your own ELO. Got tilted? Playing bad? We happen to have a player that's significantly lower ELO, who still has one loss to go before we have to give him a 'win' game, cheer up.
The problem with a 50% winrate is that it isn't satisfying. The problem with ELO is that you can see it go up and down and it might demoralize you. The problem with hidden ELO is that you start feeling the algorithm working behind the scenes. A 50% winrate feels like a slog. It burns people out and they stop playing.
So what happens if we inject the player population with bots? Bots that just lose. Or if need be, bots that win. We can use the bots to break up the predictability of the algorithm. Just throw in random bot games. Give players an extra win because winning feels good. Don't worry about feeling lonely, the vast majority of players are human. We can even make the bots emulate a bad player. Have it make obvious rookie mistakes so that instead of suspecting it of being a bot, you just feel sorry for it. No one is worse off here. Matchmaker has happier players playing for longer.
As an example for the motte, I am sure the AI can figure out what kind of a post will garner the most replies. Why would it be bad for the motte to have an AI that constantly fuels discussions that keep people glued to their screen? If we are completely honest, what else is this place good for?
AI isn't bad for humans from a hedonistic perspective. If we have some higher goals for humanity than wasting time playing chess and arguing online then, sure, AI is probably bad. But for the internet? So long as you know that there are real people watching, like twitter recently started showing, the interaction is real. It doesn't even have to be typed by human hands. A new age of Robot Wars. Watch an AI expertly rattle off all the arguments of 'your side' against the 'opposition'. And if we are being honest, how different is that from the type of representative politics we already settle for? Be it in parliament or in media or online.
I made be a weird outlier, but I find a 50% winrate perfectly acceptable and satisfying as long as the matches feel fair and the competition is close.
I neither want to feel like I'm effortlessly cruising to victory nor like I'm struggling just to keep pace. Okay, there are times I'd like to go on a power trip and just crush everyone, but that's not the same kind of satisfaction as a hard-fought victory.
I think the 'problem,' then, with most matchmaking algos is that they aren't so good at optimizing for close wins except at the very highest levels, and only in games like Chess where random factors effecting outcomes are minimized.
Basically, if you get a couple 'lucky' wins you get paired with people who will absolutely stomp you and that is demoralizing. If you get stomped badly enough you're paired with people who are probably not so good and you win handily, which increases your morale but isn't as satisfying as eking out a hard-fought win. Win too hard and you get launched up back to the big leagues to be smashed.
Maybe 1/4 of the matches you play, if that, are genuinely close to your actual skill level. Thus, the 'quality' of every match, in terms of its enjoyability, varies immensely even if your win rate is consistent.
This yo-yo effect is what I find frustrating. I'd like to play against people whom I feel challenge me when I'm playing at my general 'best' without exerting myself to try to keep pace.
If AI can optimize for that better I'd say "AWESOME." If that means I end up playing against AIs that are optimized to give me that experience, I'd be rather annoyed.
The trick about modern games is that they're not actually fun to lose. I want to derive joy from playing, so if it's not fun to lose I don't get to relax as much and if I lose it invalidates the entire experience- to the point where I actively despise most multiplayer games, and that inability to derive any joy whatsoever from playing them has alienated me from my friends to a non-negligible degree.
A long time ago we invented games that have interesting mechanics with multiple different ways to find the fun in a match; it should be extremely revealing that almost all of the best selling multiplayer video games are either completely open world, have multiple different win conditions, or a massive amount of variations on those win conditions that don't boil down to "win match" or "lose match".
Most modern games, however, do indeed boil down to this. Warcraft 3-descended games (League of Legends and DOTA 2) have very little other obvious strategy other than "wait for the timer to run out" or "the highest APM wins" (which is the problem the former games try to solve), all Battle Royale games move incredibly slowly and winning the engagement is based significantly on luck, and other shooters like Halo and Counter-Strike/Rainbow 6 only record win/loss and getting back to where you were again takes a long time. In the latter's case, the game is "do nothing but stare at a few pixels for a minute and if they change color click the mouse otherwise you die and will spend another minute waiting for the round to end", which is neither fun nor engaging. Titanfall 1 (and Battlefield, and the newer Call of Duty titles) also suffer greatly from this with their increasingly lengthy time between seeing something to shoot at. Racing games suffer from this as well to some extent, but that's also due to the nature of racing games (and why the AI has to cheat as the player continually outmaneuvers it- because if it doesn't there's no longer any challenge) and the refusal to contrive a system where those things are natural... but then again, you only ever notice it when it's done badly.
Most to all lower-tech board and card games also suffer from this, though it's interesting that some foundational observations on player types come from the makers of such a card game. Sure, those games in particular are best seen as iterables, since it doesn't take that much time to play and random chance can and will make perfect plays lose, but that's not necessarily how people view them and the longer they take the less fun they get.
This sort of "there are 5 different games and you're playing them all at once, and each game appeals to a specific type of player" was what made Call of Duty massively successful; where even losing would be advancing your other goals, and there were lots and lots of goals. Provided matches were large enough, and at least on PC they were, you could basically just do whatever and still always be taking an engagement (win or lose) within 15 seconds of spawning in. Payday 2 is the spiritual successor to this kind of game where the name of the game is to complete objectives rather than just kill enemies, has a massive number of ways to go about this (including encouraging certain ways to play through integrated achievements), and each player is scoring a kill once every 15 seconds on average.
I would find a high loss rate acceptable if the difference between win and loss didn't matter in terms of how much fun you're going to have that match. Since most of them tie fun to winning alone, the only winning move is... not to play.
Bingo. Allowing players to define their goals to an extent lets them have an enjoyable time even if they're not ultimately crowned the final winner. Sometimes I find myself doing this manually. "Okay, I don't care if I win this match per-se, but I'm going to try to get X number of kills with this weapon that rarely gets used."
I've realized that there is a burgeoning selection of cooperative-competitive games where the players all share one large over-arching goal, and all are expected to contribute to it, but there are sub-goals, often secret, that each player is trying to achieve in the meantime AND there are certain metrics along which the players ARE competing and can get rewards for better performance.
It's especially interesting and engaging when the gameplay is heavily asymmetric/class based so every player is contributing some particular element which is necessary for success, and is thus having a very different gameplay experience than everyone else. Not a new innovation, Tank/Healer/DPS roles are a well-known staple of multiple genres.
So the group wins or loses as a whole, but each player still has individual 'recognition' for their performance and some incentive to, if not backstab the group, to undermine them in order to advance their own victory conditions.
The trick with THOSE games is to avoid situations where one person's screwups completely tank the group's efforts which makes the whole thing a VERY negative experience for the person catching the blame.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link