Icycalm Watch

Toni responds

Toni was kind enough to link me on his forums. This is not something you can expect from someone who swears by Baudrillard (or any French philosopher for that matter) for these are the guys who happen to deflect each and every criticism, and so I’m very grateful for the free traffic he’s giving me.

So let’s take a look at his very insightful response:

he says a sprint race is simple, lol, whereas the most complex videogame yet made is only about A BILLION TIMES SIMPLER THAN A SPRINT RACE lol

On the surface it might sound really convincing, but if you take a closer look it’s an obvious logical fallacy. Which one, I don’t know, but it’s a good one. (contenders are petitio principii and fallacious reductio ad absurdum, but in any case it’s a strawman)

Let’s take a look at what I said:

there are games which apparently are not complex, have no depth and yet have high skill ceiling, perhaps even higher than that of Civilization.

Clearly, I wasn’t talking about complexity. I was talking about skill ceiling which I defined earlier in the same post.

It’s a qualitative difference between two games in terms of how much there is to learn.

That said, there is no contradiction in what I wrote. In fact, it’s kind of laughable to accuse me of one when Toni, in the first place, didn’t even bother to define key terms (which you may think is due to his exposure to Baudrillard, but since this article is from 2008, even one of the better ones he ever wrote in fact, it is quite likely from the time he didn’t even know what philosophy is in the first place).

As for complexity, this is what Toni said in his article.

Each new meaningful[1] rule makes a game more complex

This led me to assume that what he meant by complex is either huge number of rules or huge number of decisions to make at any point in time. In which case, it’s pretty clear that 100m dash isn’t complex. The number of rules, as well as the number of decisions one has to make at any point in time, is clearly minimal.

It is, however, possible to describe sprinting as complex but that’s only by equating skill ceiling to complexity, that is, only by saying that THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER between complexity and skill, which Toni didn’t.

Instead, he babbled about some sort of mystical logically impossible relation between complexity, depth and skill, all the while implying there is a difference between these three.

Bad Word: Emergence

In his article published few years ago, Toni argues that word emergence is redundant.

Disregarding the unnecessary quotes from the work of infamous postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard, Toni presents several arguments that actually do sound quite good.

If something is emergent because it’s not expected by the designer, then to the player it’s intangible, for there is no way player can tell what the designer actually expected.
What matters is what the player expects, and not what the designer expects, and so, to the player, everything will be unexpected.
Code is deterministic. All the possible outcomes can be predicted. That said, no outcome is ever truly emergent.
Code will always produce outcomes unexpected to the programmer. This is simply because programmers do not bother to map every single input to corresponding output. Instead, what they do is test their code in hopes of finding unexpected outcomes. Sometimes they catch them all, but often, they don’t.

While these arguments are all sound, they do not support the conclusion.

So where is the mistake?

It is not disputed that the word emergence has not been bastardized by the game journalists. However, to say that the word emergence means absolutely nothing simply because some journalists meant nothing by it is akin to saying that Chaos Theory means nothing simply because Baudrillard meant nothing by it.

The reality is that pretty much any word, no matter how clearly defined it is, can be bastardized, and so, that a word was bastardized does not mean it’s completely devoid of meaning.

It should also be noted, that yes, video games cannot exhibit true emergence. However, that was never implied, and so it’s pretty much just a strawman on Toni’s side.

So what is emergence?

Emergence is a concept that is used to distinguish two different approaches to game design.

Since games are basically just a bunch of tests, all game designers do is make tests. There are two ways to do this.

One is to simply hand-craft each test and then place it inside the game. These tests may share the same rules, or, as it’s often the case, expend the base ruleset gradually. During design phase, designers are pretty much aware of all tests.

The other is to make a ruleset from which all the tests will emerge through the interaction between players and the opposition (which can be another player, a computer-controlled player or some other rules). During design phase, designers may be aware of some tests, but good chunk will be completely unknown to them. This is the main reason why this approach is referred to as emergent.

Thus, an example of an emergent game would be Chess or Go, or pretty much any sports game, for they are nothing more but rules, whereas games such as Super Mario Bros, Do/DonPachi and Half Life are structures of fixed tests.

It can be argued whether players can actually see the difference themselves. However, even if they can’t, the concept is still quite relevant.

Toni on Complexity, Depth and Skill

In one of his articles, Toni talks about three concepts: complexity, depth and skill.

Without actually defining these terms, he goes on to claim that it’s logically impossible to conceive of these concepts separately. More complexity leads to more depth and more depth leads to more skill. Therefore, complexity = depth = skill.

There are two reasons why this is bollocks.

1. Terms such as “complexity” and “depth” are fuzzy terms. They have no standardized definitions. They are often used to mean several different things. Since Toni didn’t bother to define them, I can only guess what he’s trying to say.

2. What Toni is really talking about is called, and I’m going to bold this, SKILL CEILING. It’s a qualitative difference between two games in terms of how much there is to learn. It also describes, as Toni says, the difference between the best and the worst players.

The problem Toni failed to address (and the problem that shows that these ideas didn’t undergo proper scrutiny) is that there are games which apparently are not complex, have no depth and yet have high skill ceiling, perhaps even higher than that of Civilization.

Can you think of any?

I’m going to provide you with SINGLE WEAKEST EXAMPLE and let you come up with others on your own. This example won’t be a video game though. I’ll leave that up to you.

Sprint races.

Sprint race is neither complex nor deep. Sprint race is a single test that involves manipulation of one’s body. Unless by “complexity” one means complexity of human biology (or some other external system or structure such as computer keyboard) one is pretty damn wrong in saying that video games must be “deep” or “complex” to exhibit high skill ceiling. Sure, unlike sports which allow us to put our bodies to the test, video games often really only test the brain for the only input they involve is that from the button-presses, which on its own, physically, isn’t challenging at all. However, video games can and do test reflexes which on their own can exhibit quite high skill ceiling.

It is true that including more and more tests within one game leads to increase in skill ceiling. However, this does not mean that “complexity” and “skill” are the same or that they cannot be separated. They, in fact, can and should be.