David Sirlin

> "good to avoid people that have a tendency to game things"

Sorry, but most employers essentially "game things": they extract as much value as they can out of you in return for the smallest amount of compensation they can get away with giving you. Yet I don't see you being critical of managers and CEOs, just other engineers. Managers love it when engineers getting into pissing matches about "passion", hackathons, which stack is most l33t, etc. (Erik Dietrich's term "carnival cash" comes to mind.) Meanwhile that business major 10 years your junior with a PMP certificate they got online -- and who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag -- just got promoted to senior project manager and gets to tell you what to do.

By 40, to put it in high-level abstract terms, the most important thing is figuring out what you need to be doing so you're earning the compensation you want/need and living the lifestyle you actually want to live. The "game" that other engineers around us in the marketplace are playing, so to speak, is the one having to do with optimizing compensation and quality of life. I can choose to walk onto the court and play a different game -- one with rules I personally feel are more noble, or something -- but that won't change the external reality around me, and nobody will care, except employers looking to take advantage of engineers willing to prioritize "passion" over things like "compensation" or "spending time with my kids" or "adequate health…

>Chess is as balanced as it gets.

It's "balanced" in some respects but both sides use the same features and most games end in a draw, and high level play is less and less interesting. And for that matter it's not even balanced really -- tournaments have players play both white and black because they are so inequal. This is like balancing starcraft by having everyone play mirror matchups or swap races.

>So Anand encountered a "mild surprise" in the opening moves that left him "flying blind" (meaning the board was in a position with which he had not previously studied) and because of that he decided to not keep pursuing the game. He just engineered a draw.

>Most real people are "flying blind" after the first couple moves of the game, and it's the challenge of trying to solve a puzzle against a live opponent (who is also flying blind) that makes the game so fun. At the highest levels, Grandmasters go very deep into the game in positions they have studied exhaustively, and then the moment they feel uncomfortable they search for the emergency brake, and consider themselves happy to escape with half a point.

>Intuitive understanding of the game and moments of brilliant improvisation are the most exciting aspects, and yet memorized lines of play are so deeply entrenched now that when a top player encounters anything outside of memorized, studied lines he heads directly for the draw. It's really the opposite of what you'd…

Hi, fighting game player here. You're very right about the way we see the games: Ryu's Shoryuken isn't a stylish kung-fu uppercut, it's an attack that's invincible on startup and with a strong vertical hitbox, making it useful against jumping attacks and to beat careless attacks from the opponent, but which is easily punishable if blocked.

The essay you're referring to is written by a man named David Sirlin, and he runs a website where he talks about his ideas on game design[1]. He's perhaps most known in the community for helping to bring to light the concept of "yomi," (lit. "reading"), the process of taking actions specifically to get a grasp on your opponent's thought process and be able to predict it. To him, that's the one pure essence of fighting games (though this view is not universally held).

In fact, he's already done something like you describe. He designed a card game named, appropriately enough, Yomi[2], that attempts to bring the core of a fighting game into a card game format. Much like in fighting games, attacking beats throws, throws beat blocking, and blocking beats attacks. Hitting a player allows you to attempt to combo them, but the opponent can play cards (that may be bluffs) which can break the combo.

He did something similar with chess, calling it Chess 2, though it's much less popular than Yomi.

[1] http://www.sirlin.net

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomi_(card_game)

If you've never read it before, I highly recommend reading David Sirlin's Playing to Win.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/

Specifically the chapter "Introducing... the Scrub" discusses exactly this sentiment.

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub

> In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely.

I think it's pretty hard to get into a "playing to win" mindset at any age. At least it is/was for me, it's hard to let go of the joy of winning through clever or flashy moves and focus on the joy of winning a high level competition, where everyone is playing to win.

Sirlin's (fighting game player / game designer) has a good book/series of articles about this that's made the front page a few times: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub

"I once played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him five times in a row asking, “Is that all you know how to do? Throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’”"

And just to be clear to you, the rest of the article was great. I think there was three or four points that I was going 'but ...' and then the next sentence you explicitly mentioned exactly that. Very well put together.

> Issue: Multiple undifferentiated inputs to node

Under this segment you say 'and it never is' implies that it's just really difficult, you can be even more forceful here - it's impossible. Sirlin's article on Viable Options[0] goes into depth here - while he's talking about best move to attack in a fighting game, and while your case is simpler in that the enemies don't have options for themselves, the mapping between the two arguments is there. For any given use-case there can only ever be two choices, the best choice, and the counter to the best choice. The counter to the counter just ends up being the best again so you can't have any more depth without creating a new use-case.

[0]: https://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-part-2-viable-options