Game Design (Losing and Cheating)

You get some interesting cultural perspective reading about the LARPing (live action roleplaying).

On the European side you get people focused on "changing larp culture to make one that was based on the feminist principles of value, care, and compassion"¹ through a variety of approaches to gaming and game mechanics: maximizing the emotionality of a scene through pre-agreement, encourage socializing over combat through the rules, safety words, pre-game character exploration, immersive rituals to get everyone in character, borrowing techniques from writing and film (flashback, monologue). This is the root of RPGs that goes back to improvisational theater not war-gaming.

You can find it from the earliest stages of D&D and earlier, some people always love acting out the stuff, but it was never explored and never incorporated. It stayed in the shadows while more masculine forms of socializing prevailed: sarcasm, threats, and, mostly, discussion of tactics. Gygax enforced this, saying: “If I want to do [role-playing], I’ll join an amateur theater group."² Gygax's D&D was essentially a interesting variation of a miniatures wargame and modern 'roguelikes' faithfully capture this.

A common European LARP maxim is "play to lose"³ and this is a direct reversal of the American LARP style that still operates in the wargame tradition. So you get interesting interactions like Euro LARPers suggest rules that allow a player to 'opt-out' of a situation that is too intense for them and US gamers worried how these rules with be abused by cheaters to try and win.

American wrote:In the context of a campaign game, especially from the American “simulationist” tradition which we come from, players might be tempted to abuse bowing out to avoid consequences for their character for violating in-game rules or undermining in-game forces. For example, a thief’s player might try to avoid being confronted and punished for their theft. There is nothing wrong with this competitive tradition, but it means we have to add an important caveat to our bow-out rule to keep a sense of fair play that many Americans feel is important. If another player feels that a player is using the bow-out rule to avoid consequences for their actions, we explicitly state that this is to be brought before the game staff and that other players should not confront each other directly about it.

This is a mild but telling example. A focus on winning and stopping 'cheaters' dominates the American view of RPGs and how their games are created. There is always a slight absurdity to this as they are a huge class of competitive and such games need a simple, robust system to support this. Chess remains the ultimate example. Whereas to yoke LARPs with this burden is counter to the theatrical experience you are seeking. Yet this bias seems so indicative of modern American thinking where the catching of cheaters/criminals/terrorists is always the primary goal, no matter the social cost. There is a certain paranoia that drives it.

Power-gaming and rules-lawyer have a core place in gaming. There is a cognitive joy in understanding a rule system and learning how to exploit it and maximize your play. But there is a heavy toll on any game designed to withstand such scrutiny to enable deeply competitive play, it becomes like an organism adapted to the harshest environment: no frills, rugged design, prepared for the worst. These can make great computer games (the most impartial judge) or board/card games but when this paranoia is the default for most games it can shape the whole industry in weird ways.

A lifestyle primarily shaped by a fear of serial killers and terrorists is full of latches, passwords, armed men, security pat-downs, and mistrust of everyday strangers. The reality of such dangers has to be weighed by their statistical probability. Games heavily designed to prevent cheating will be similarly distorted with whole genres of games being discounted as too free, too trusting, too loose. In many ways the terrorist and cheaters already win when we design systems primarily to stop them, the lone malcontent essentially determines the laws and rules that the other 99% have to live under. Board any airplane and you can see the ghost of Bin Laden smiling as your water is poured out and your palms are swabbed for explosives.

And of course, much security is just it's own form of theater, many 'terrorists' are actually intelligence assets or police informants, and the Monopoly banker skims off the top. Chess is almost tamper-proof but if I really wanted to win... I could used drugs (stimulants for me, sophomoric in your drink), harass the player, kidnap their pets or kids, bribe them to lose, hire criminals to attack them before the game, ect....  

Copious anti-cheating "fair rules" and a fun time don't have to be opposites, look at Dwarf Fortress where old D&D-type simulation has the motto "losing is fun"⁴. You can min-max Toady1's program and still know the value is in the stories generated, yet this is because the game design philosophy is "losing is fun", the fear of cheating is secondary. Many 'rougelike' have this attitude because the competition is between and the program. Yet without this explicit refusal the default of American design is to imagine the worst, most abusive behaviors and design a game to prevent this, a game created around such grim expectation has already surrounded much of the joy of play.


1] https://nordiclarp.org/2016/09/09/creating-culture-trust-safety-calibration-larp-mechanics/
2] http://www.believermag.com/issues/200609/?read=article_lafarge
3] https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Playing_to_Lose
4] dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.34:Losing