The cult on "player skill"

[hooby]

Playing actually is on the very first things (except for crying, eating, sleeping and shitting oneself) that any human being does. But why do we play instinctively? Because it's the most efficient form of learning.

Fueled by curiosity babies just randomly try to do things, and figuring stuff out is the greatest joy they can have.

A baby shakes a rattle and hears the sound. The baby shakes it again - and the rattle gives of the sound again. By this the baby learns the basic principles of cause and effect. Shaking causes the rattle to make a sound. Reliably. On top of that, the baby learns that it can influence it's surroundings, which leads to basic understanding of one's self vs. the rest of the world.

As kids grow older their games become more complex and sophisticated, and simple trial and error is replaced by more planned methods. One of the first new methods children employ is imitation. They see a parent do something, and try to do the same thing themselves. This type of play starts off very simple, but evolves over time, leading to children using puppets and toys to imitate being a parent themselves by playing through scenes observed and/or invented/fantasy scenes. The children not only imagine being someone else, they also imagine being someone with a specific task (like being a mother, a car driver, etc.) - someone with a specific role. This is the most basic form of role-playing. Playing make-belief to be someone else. By doing so children learn and train social interaction and general patterns of behavior.

The instinct to learn (and therefore the will to play) is very strong in children. And although it is natural for this impulse to learn to decrease a bit when getting older, we are loosing it way faster than is natural. That's because the common method of ex-cathedra teaching as used in schools is possibly the worst thing you can do. This very much extinguishes (or burns out) the will to learn in many of us.

Still I believe that whatever is left of that will to learn through playing inside everyone of us, is still a driving force behind our fascination with games. Surely not the sole driving force - but a major contribution.

So I hope we can agree that learning/training is one of the most central aspects of any game.
If we wanted to just passively waste time, we'd rather watch some stupefying TV-shows, than to play games where we have to get active ourselves, and where some learning of the games rules and the workings of it's mechanics is required from us, to be able to master it.

[hooby]

Games for a more juvenile or grown up audience (including computer games) tend to be far more complex and demanding than child's play - but they still follow many of the same principles - albeit at a higher level.

Playing Foosball (tabletop soccer) requires much better handy-eye coordination, reaction times and dexterity than doing some baby puzzle:
Image.

Playing a pen&paper role-playing game (like Dungeons&Dragons) requires the players to take on much more distinct and well-defined roles than playing mother with a doll, and may even require a lot of thinking, since any decision the players make in the game could have a serious impact on the story. (At least if the DM is any good).

Did you notice the distinction I made here?
The first example is of a game that's based on entirely physical/bodily skills, while the second example revolves mainly around mental/cerebral skills. This is a distinction which also can be found in early children's games, as well as in mature computer games.

There's a second important distinction in these examples, that you probably did not notice:
Foosball is a purely competitive game - you absolutely have to play it against each other, there's no way of playing cooperatively.Pen&paper games on the other hand are purely cooperative games, that just don't work if you try to play them competitively.

Now how does all that stuff apply to computer games in general, and to the discussion of Character Stats vs. Player Skills in detail?

First I'll need to debunk some misconceptions about what "player skill" actually means. When gamers brag about their skills (which mostly happens in competitive multiplayer shooters) they are mostly talking about purely physical skills. How pixel-precise they can swing around their mouse-cursor in the blink of an eye, hand-eye-coordination, reaction time, high speed button hitting and stuff like that. (You might disagree with this - more on that later...)

In a competitive game the winner always should be the more skilled player, and outcome should not depend on chance/luck or other factors. But there's no reason it has to be physical skills. Chess is fully competitive and fully skill based - no luck involved. Still it is completely cerebral and does not require any physical skills at all.

Athletic sports on the other hand are purely based on physical skills - you need no tactics nor strategy to run 100 meters as fast as you can or throw a spear as far as you can. But those kind of sports aren't really games, are they?

Sports games - like baseball, football, etc. - _always_ include things like team play, team strategy, play tactics and the like. No matter how small or unimportant that mental skill part may be - it's always there. If you remove it, the sport ceases to be a game.

So you can't have a game without any cerebral skills at all, but as chess shows you totally can have a great, competitive game without any physical skills at all.

And shooters do feature elements like team tactics, strategic positions on the map, cover and stealth elements, and other stuff. How important those mental skills are for winning the game differs from game to game, but I believe that older shooters were more likely to favor physical skills to the exclusion of anything else, while more modern shooters tend lay a bit more focus on the mental part.

And to me personally that mental part is the real important part - the "fun" part. But why is the mental part the more important part?

I already talked about how learning/training is a very important (if not the most important) motivator behind the desire to play. And that mouse-twitch skills and all that more mental skills are both things a new player has to learn. But there's one big difference: The physical skills have to be learned only once, and they carry over from one game to the other.

Actually players even expect their skills to carry over, and any game that completely defies common aiming and control mechanics in order to require the players to relearn their physical skills, will inevitably fail. Players will hate the controls and drop the game. Gamers don't actually find it fun to learn that physical skills anew. They want to keep them and take them with them, from one game to the other. (Many even prefer games that do offer aiming help, like almost all console shooters do - so that they don't have to perfect their aiming skills themselves).

But players do expect their new game to provide them with something new to learn. And this they expect to happen within the mental skills department. They want the game to feature innovative game mechanics, new combat rules like cover or stealth mechanics, that require them to learn new strategies and tactics. New ways of map design that force them to use new approaches to game-play. That stuff is held in high regards - and that's also the reason why shooters tend to put more and more effort in those things.

I hope you agree with me, that those strategic, tactical and team skills are the important part of a games learning curve, and that those crazy mouse twitch skills have their value, but aren't that central to the learning experience - except for the very first game in which you need to train them.

[hooby]

Now that we have found out that it's really those mental skills that do matter - and that those mouse-hand twitch skills are only secondary - it's time to take a closer look at computer RPGs.

When talking about roleplaying before - whether it was child's play/make-believe or pen&paper roleplaying games - we were always clearly on the mental side of things. So does this change for computer RPGs? No, it doesn't.

Planning which of your characters stats to rise, which skills and spells to take and learning the right combinations of these skills and spells to use to beat differnt types of enemies/monsters with different weaknesses is pure strategy - and surely a mental skill.

More generally speaking the mental skills most centrally required in any game are to learn and get a deeper understanding of the game mechanics (including the combat mechanics). To learn how to play the game, to make best use of those mechanics, to find and use to your advantage hidden, inherent synergies of the mechanics, to know all the strengths and weaknesses of the different actions you can perform during the game;

Now the deeper and more complex the mechanics of a given game are, the more there is to learn about them. And I hope we can agree that roleplaying games feature some of the deepest, most complex gameplay mechanics out there. Not all of them make good use of that - but games staying behind their potential is an entirely different topic.

So do RPGs require player skills? Yes they do. At least in the mental skill department.

So when we talk about "Character Stats vs. Player Skills" - that "Player Skills" has to refer to physical twitch skills. Because if it would be about mental skills, the comparison would make no sense. Those stat-based RPGs require at least the same amount of mental player skills than twitch based games do. So we are talking purely about twitch skills here - just if they were the only type of player skill in existence.
But we alreay know that they are not. There are cerebral player skills too, and - as pointed out before - those cerebral skills are more important even in most twitch based games, since they are an important part of that learning curve, whilst those physical skills are just carried over from some other game.

So what about RPGs and physical twitch skills?

Some RPGs do need those skills too. If you play a sorceress in Diablo2, being able to always cast your firewalls at the perfect angle can more than double your effective damage output. If you play the Witcher 2 oder the Gothic series, you can aim almost like in a shooter, and you can use attack combos and blocks, a little bit like in Street Fighter or other fighting games.
If on the other hand you play a non-action-oriented RPG you'll probably need less physical twitch skills. If you play a round-based RPG, you'll need none of them at all - just like with chess.

So what's the big difference to twitch-based games?

In a shooter, your physical skills come first. You need to be able to aim and shoot long before you can get the taste of more cerebral team strategies and stuff. To soften that a bit there's those aiming helps commonly employed in many modern shooters, which effectively reduce the amount of physical skills required.
In an RPG the mental skills clearly come first and with more weight, while the phsyical skills - if they do exists - are not required to play the game. You can instead just grind some level ups and get strong enough to play on that way - without having to learn the finer intricacies of action oriented combat. Physical skills in RPGs are optional - or even not present at all.

So, if player skills are not the real factor - what is this "Character Stats vs. Player Skills" discussion really about?

"Player skill" is like a cult. People belive in it, people worship it, and whenever they bring it up, it happens along the lines of: "My game needs player skill, yours does not - that's why my game is better than yours!". It's nothing but a try to claim superiority over non twitch-based forms of gameplay, but it's argument's aren't very grounded and don't hold up closer inspection. There simply is nothing to it.

What people mentioning "Character Stats vs. Player Skills" really are concerned about is competitive gameplay vs. non-competitive gameplay. That's the whole point there is to it.

RPGs suck at competitive gameplay. No matter how much some may laud their PvP - it never can be anywhere close to twitch based games. The reason is quite simple: In an RPG you have a class, a level, items and you enter a fight carrying those stuff with you. So the fight does not start with a mirrored/symmetrical setup, there's no guarantuee that the there is a fair premise. Also players cannot change their strategy on the fly, because their strategy is manifested within their character. If they loose a round and want to try another strategy next round, they'd need to switch their character.

Competitiveness is what people really want when they talk about that ominous "player skill". And twitch-based games simply are better suited for that, than stats-based games ever will be.

So I hope we can finally get over that old misconception, that stats-driven games (like RPGs) don't require player skill, and that player skill is all about pixel-precise aiming in shooter games.
Because that simply is not true.

[pts]

I agree with most of what you've written above and I do think that "player skill" is different from game to game. There is no single variable of "player skill", it's what makes you good at a game, competitive or not.

If I say I have some general RPG-skills I may mean that I'm aware that strength often increases melee damage and that armor translates to damage reduction. I may also mean that I know which skill to use when to be fully effective, after writing my owns charts in Excel. Building characters, making the best possible choices, doing quests quickly and so on. Player skill.

In Counter Strike it may be those twitch-skills, knowing when to buy and when not to buy, predicting, communicating and so on. Those are also player skills.

In games like Heroes of Newerth (and Dota & LoL ofc.), the playable characters all have different abilities. Some are more support-oriented while the only output of some characters is pure damage. Knowing what to buy, reacting fast to enemy actions, acting with your team, using your abilities and knowing about all or most of the involved characters and their abilities.

Calculating general player skill for one person in a game would require many variables, be it physical or cerebral skills, as most are required to be "good at" a game.

[Opal Monkey]

Very interesting, and very well written (as usual ;)), Hooby.

I think I agree on pretty much everything. I will say this though.

The competitive nature of people that play twitch-based games likely contributes to why they like to say other types of games don't take player skill. Whereas those playing single player or co-op multplayer games are likely the less competitive type, and therefore less likely to try and make it sound like they are better that others.

But then I suppose that aspect is far more variable and prone to bias than what you wrote about.

[hooby]

Actually, what prompted me to write all this, was reading a "developer blog" from Wolfire Games. In that blog, which was titled "Character Stats vs. Player Skill" their main game designer (also known as the guy with the pink beard) explained in his thoughts on that topic in detail - and also explained what thoughts lead to the decision of making their new game fully twitch-based, and with no character-development at all.

His reasons were player skill. He said he didn't want character-stats because they were all about invested time, and canceled out player skill. He believed that RPGs only went that way, because by making "invested" time the main important factor, the game can reach a greater audience, since every idiot (with enough time on his hands) can successfully play it, without having to learn any player skills at all.
He wanted to create a hardcore game for skilled players only, and that's why he couldn't have any character-development or stats-raising in that game.

That made me think about how wrong that argument was on several levels...

And as usual - once I start to think about something in greater detail - I have to write it down.

I first posted this in the Wolfire Forums - but it did not lead to a satisfying discussion there... it was more or less completely ignored (too much text to read). So I decided to repost it here - just to see if I'd get more interesting answers in the Forum of a Stats-Based game ;)

[eisprinzessin]

I read your posts two days ago, but couldn't come up with a satisfying answer. Now I have one, but am not sure, if I remember your key points correctly. But first, thank you for clarifying why you posted this ... thought I need to scan your recent posts for the origin of this thread. (That would have been a waste of time ... or maybe not?)

Haven't you gone into the other extreme? You present two video game elements: hand-eye skills and strategic, tactical and team skills.


I'd like to split the latter into intellectual and social skills. Intellectual skills come from your own brain power, whereas team skills are these elusive softskills we require in any community. Not sure if games and video games in particular are good in this area.
In your first post you point out, that babies and kids play to learn and this includes physical skills (like hand-eye coordination). So I find it only natural, when video games include this factor, too. Sometimes these skills rival, sometimes they only work when in unison. I agree with you that physical skills are more like a reflex once you learned them - as opposed to intellectual and social skills, which mostly require a deliberate action. But all require the use of our nervous system - different parts though.
For some reasons each of us, prefers different games. Our basic interest appears to be the same - the two of us like games in which we can hone our intellectual skills. I believe that the mesolimbic pathway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesolimbic_pathway) rewards us for playing such games, while others get more satisfaction from other types of games. That said game designers need to decide how much of which element they want to include. Mixing them can be used to appeal to multiple audiences but also to provide each of them with different challenges - which brings us back to learning by playing.

[hooby]

@Eisprinzessin:

add 1.)
That's fine with me. I only split into twitch-skills and non-twitch-skills, since I didn't need any finer distinction to drive my point home. I fully agree that those non-twitch skills can be divided further in a meaningful way.

add 2.)
Well the original blog made a point of comparing two types of games: Stats-based games and Player-Skill based games. I tried to prove that this distinction is bullshit.
I believe that twitch based skills do provide for learning opportunity and satisfaction in games. I just strongly oppose the idea that twitch skills are the only source of learning and player skill.
They don't even rank first. I'd personally rank both intellectual and social skills higher than twitch skills, so that twitch skills would come in third.

add 3.)
I'm not opposed to twitch-based games. I love foosball and honing my skills on the table (that's why I choose it as an example). I play it a lot and have great fun at the table.
I love those console fighting games. Street Fighter, Tekken, and especially the old classic: Bushido Blade.
I even like competitive shooters on lan-parties. It's a lot of fun to have fierce battles with and against your friends. I just don't like playing against strangers online - but that has nothing to do with twitch skills at all.

I'm not opposed to twitch based games at all.

I'm only opposed to that "religion" (or should I call it "bragligion"?) that surrounds that faulty concept of "player skill".

[ExNomenDei]

Check out Starcraft (1/2).

I think the point with those two games is very well-aligned with what you're talking about here - games that focus on twitch-skills as you call them (I'm calling them mechanics) can be very good and competitive, but it's a strategy game that is the biggest e-sport in the world. Starcraft is that because there's a lot to learn from watching others - have you often seen a player in Counterstrike kill the whole opposing team because he was being smart, instead of having quick reflexes? I'm sure it's not very often.

In Starcraft, the game began as a strategy-only game. Your 'build' (build order, the name speaks for itself) defined you and you focused on trying to find a new 'trick'. As time progressed and people found more and more ways to make 'builds' that were really, really good, people stopped worrying about that and focused more and more on the execution.

The execution is something that, once a pro-gamer learned it, was all that mattered. The build was chosen, executed, and whoever had the most actions per minute and didn't screw up basically won.

This is a simplification though - there's things like the Bisu build and other such things that showed how strategy still played a major role in Starcraft 1.

Now that Starcraft 2 is here, a game that takes far, far less skill to actually play at a reasonable level (the mechanics are less ridiculous, mostly), more and more the game is about strategy. There might be a point in the future where it goes the way of Starcraft 1, but right now, there's so much terrain unexplored that doing something new can let you win big.

By reducing the required hand speed and actions per minute required to play a game competitively, Blizzard has made Starcraft 2 more focused on the what, and less on the how. It's an intellectual game instead of a mechanics game right now, not because it's really forgiving, but because it's easier to be near-perfect in the game.

Of course, immediately, there are many many many people out there who hate Starcraft 2 because it's "too easy" or it's not exciting enough to them. That's because those players rather like mechanics-based games, unlike you or I for that matter. Those gamers exist as well, those that want to do things perfectly without needing to think about why they're doing it. There's no disrespect there, it's simply a matter of preference.

Some people want to know why their pipes are leaking - others want to fix it. It's not a great analogy, but it's the core of your issue, or so I feel.

[hooby]

I know Starcraft and I don't agree.

If you watch korean league games on Youtube, you will see that in Starcraft 1, even ten years after it had been released (and you would think all possibly strategies have been explored) those people still came up with completely new tricks on the fly (long after they got out of primary build order in the beginning).

They all know their build orders, so those really don't make any difference in the outcome of the game.

There are some famous matches where a player who was already considered defeated and the game considered over, managed to make a comeback and turn the game around entirely.

There's also macro and micro which hasn't to do all that much with build order.

Starcraft 2 has too many hard counters. There are many units that are almost undefeatably strong, unless you produce exactly that one counter unit that they are completely helpless against. Winning or loosing is mostly dependent on building the right units at the right time - and then using those efficiently.

have you often seen a player in Counterstrike kill the whole opposing team because he was being smart, instead of having quick reflexes
I have very often seen a team win, because they perfectly played together and had very good teamwork. They just split into two groups, in which everyone covered each other, which then rushed for the most important tactical positions on the map which they took control of.

With the advantage of controlling the best spots on the map, such a team can easily win against another team consisting of players that are much better in terms of reflexes and aiming, but are all running around solo, and not working together.

If only one team uses teamspeak to talk to each other and coordinate their efforts, they gain an enormous advantage over a team that does not.
If the team is well trained together, so that in many cases they can work coordinated without even have to talk about what to do - they get the same advantage, but they can do things in shorter time and with much less talking. It comes down to one-word or two-word commands then.

Another very important factor is knowledge of the map. If you know a map well and on every corner know exactly where you have to turn your mouse (in advance, even before passing the corner) so your cross-hair then is at the spot where enemies are most likely to appear, you gain a huge advantage over an enemy that isn't so intimate with the map.
No matter how fast the enemies reactions and reflexes are - while he is turning around faster than you possibly could, you can already shoot him.

So while a minimum amount of reflexes is required to learn the game, and while better reflexes do give you an edge in standoffs under equal premises, they are not that important for mastering the game. Mastering the game is all about knowing the maps by heart, playing as a team, and being able to predict the enemies actions.
And yes, being smart helps a lot more in those things, than just being dexterous.

You never want to take on an enemy one on one, face to face. Your goal always is to meet the enemy from behind, to see the enemy before he sees you, and to hit single enemies with a group of allies. All of those things require some wit to achieve, and all of those things almost cancel out the enemies reflexes.