eevee

@lexyeevee

troublesome fox girl

she/her
eev.ee/

hello i like to make video games and stuff and also have a good time on the computer. look @ my pinned for some of the video games and things. sometimes i am horny on @squishfox

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eevee @lexyeevee

7/7/2023, 7:47 PM

@TalenLee asked:

do you think a multiplayer game is more interesting if it's trying to make someone win, or make someone lose?

hmmmm my gut feeling is that the line is pretty fuzzy which makes it hard to give a good answer

like the first thing to come to mind is mtg, where strictly speaking you are trying to make every other player, because the default win condition is that you are the last player remaining who has not lost. but even in multiplayer it feels like trying to win, in the sense of setting up the strongest board i guess, even though there's not a threshold you're crossing.

what's a game where you try to win? the things coming to mind are lots of board games, and deathmatch. though i guess in deathmatch (or smash, if you like) it's not exactly winning, it's that there's a ranking, and you are trying to be first in the ranking. but then everyone else doesn't quite "lose" as much as "place elsewhere". it doesn't feel as much like you can "come in second" at catan, because the progress isn't quite as linear.

i'm surprised i mentioned catan, because when i said "board games" i was really thinking of stuff like snakes and ladders, sorry, and other stuff with a Win Square that you're trying to reach first. games that i would not call very mechanically deep. but catan does also have a threshold you're trying to cross, and it's got a little bit more going on than fucking candy land.

i guess i don't know! "make someone lose" games have opportunities to team up and take out opponents strategically? ...but "make someone win" games have just as many opportunities to team up and either leap ahead or drag the player in front back into the crab bucket. i wonder if the two styles are such neat opposites that all their possible properties are basically inverses

#game design

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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

red lez @red-lez7/7/2023, 8:59 PM

So an interesting question to bring up with that last comment: are there any games where there are multiple winners and only a single loser? As an inversion of games where there's one winner and everyone else loses.

eevee @lexyeevee7/7/2023, 9:03 PM

i suspect it's hard to design such a game in a way that anyone wants to play it, haha. but i feel like... something is tickling my brain here, it must exist?

oh. oh you're just describing drawing straws.

i guess this is really just a game with one winner, except winning is bad?

red lez @red-lez7/7/2023, 9:21 PM

I feel like you could totally make some sort of role-playing game (tabletop or otherwise) where everyone but one person "winning" would have like, a really satisfying narrative arc even if it kinda feels bad

chaotic_iak @chaoticiak7/7/2023, 9:31 PM

when i said "board games" i was really thinking of stuff like [...] games that i would not call very mechanically deep.

you're missing out on so much

that said now that you've mentioned board games: both styles exist in board games. "make yourself win" is less conflict, you tend to do your own thing and any interaction between players is less direct. Dominion tends to be more on this side. "make others lose" is more conflict, you tend to mess with opponents directly. Catan is actually here as conflict is much more direct. Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, Azul, and quite a number of other popular board games are here too.

that said maybe i'm entirely misreading the question since "make someone win" only makes sense if it's make you win, otherwise it's kingmaking which is a whole host of different problems

eevee @lexyeevee7/7/2023, 9:34 PM

oh i'm Aware of the range of modern board games (but our player base is 2 which seems to rule out most of them). i don't mean i always associate board games with sorry!, just that that's what i was initially thinking about and which i had generalized as "board games"

and yeah i assume the "someone" was for parallelism, though i guess strictly speaking nothing's stopping you from trying to make another player win in a lot of games

chaotic_iak @chaoticiak7/8/2023, 7:27 AM

oh geez there's a huge swath of games great at 2p; granted, it's usually difficult to make games that are good at both 2p and 3p+, so it will feel like the 3p+ games you know don't work. and yeah being exposed to modern board games so much, i now think of them for "board games" and i have to stop and think if monopoly, sorry, etc are also included

also yeah nothing really stops you from kingmaking, it's a social norm mostly. but also that's why i dislike 3p+ games in general; with 2p there's no kingmaking, and "making you win" and "making [your only] opponent lose" are identical

SP @SP-7/7/2023, 9:41 PM

i love engine building mechanics because they are at face value "win more", and don't inherently require any options to hurt your enemy/ies (or require you to utilize those options even if they are available) usually it's a balancing act of the two and knowing when to make decisive plays, sometimes it depends on the skill level of the players, sometimes it can swing dramatically in one direction or the other as the same players do several games in a row and a metagame develops

RTS games are engine builders so while technically a game of starcraft is won by destroying your enemy, but in practice games end when a player realizes they can no longer achieve that win condition and GG, so wins sometimes happen without launching a single attack

eevee @lexyeevee7/7/2023, 10:18 PM

hm. a game state of "i cannot possibly catch up even though in principle we are nowhere near the win condition yet" seems like kind of a bummer.

SP @SP-7/8/2023, 1:21 AM

if you have to play it out it extremely is! but nobody does, you just tap out and play another game. that said, it's too stressful for me to play despite being my favorite thing to spectate haha.

tabletop games try to have a design such that the game length rarely goes much longer than the potential for comeback exists, always having alternate viable plan B paths to victory, limiting the amount you can plausibly get set back, having some endgame scoring conditions that you can try to bank on as you push through but can't know if it'll work out until it's over

wingspan is an example of a great game that i hate, if you're casual about it and not overthinking it's very fun, but i can't stop myself from risk taking and obsessing over optimizing and once i make a mistake and my sand castle starts crumbling i emotionally am Not Great At Playing It Out

chaotic_iak @chaoticiak7/8/2023, 7:30 AM

modern board games with engine building usually make sure to end the game soon after an engine manages to fire; if any, they sometimes intentionally end the game early so that rush strategies have a chance. imagine if M:TG had 200 life for each side, and how 20 is much nicer. i do agree if you have no way to catch up but can't end the game, it's a bummer, and it's bad game design

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