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[dustin]

OK so for a long time I've thought of games being either luck or skill based.  IE you could say things like go fish is lucky while chess is skillful.  I feel like this is a pretty common interpretation of the two ideas but recently I have come to realise that it's not really like this.

Both skill and luck are independent of each other and you can make a pretty cool map from looking at them....



Chess, Go, Checkers, and Tic-Tac-Toe all have no luck (as long as you play an even number of each).  That said you max out your skill much faster at tic-tac-toe then you do at checkers and you stop getting better at checkers long before you stop getting better at chess and go.

That said yahtzee has a lot more luck than tic-tac-toe but you can also gain a higher proficiency in it than you can tic-tac-toe.  (looking at it now the yahtzee dot should probably be way more on the luck axis  ).

Anyway From looking at this it seems like you always want your games higher on the skill axis.  Learning and improving is what makes games fun and having more to improve on means it takes more skill.  Of course to me games like chess and go aren't nearly as interesting as games like dominion because the lack of luck seems to make them dryer or something to me.

Anyway I'm just interested in how other people think of these things. 

[1982]

Throw in lots of skill and little bit luck and its quite good balance.

[rivon]

I'm quite interested where you would place RPS on that graph.

[gimymblert]

You need to add perfect information and imperfect information too.

The reason poker works is that the odds are "known", card are a finite resource you can reason on and act with counter move (so bad hand can still win). Contrast with pure luck without agency.

[Nix]

I don't think I would put Poker up with Chess in skill (though I won't deny that there is plenty of skill involved).

[noah!]

Okay, so I hate to be all Definition Daisuke over here, but I'm really interested in knowing how you define skill. I mean, luck is pretty simple to nail down (I like to think of it as "how much of the game's state is randomly determined"), and I'm not sure how far we can get by debating whether one game has more luck involved than another.

However, skill is another thing. Personally, I'd define a skillful game as one with a large possibility space. In these games, almost all of the errors made are ones where one player makes an action that is not only unanticipated by the opponent, but falls outside that person's possibility space. In other words, "I didn't realize he could make that move..." However, if you were to apply this definition to Poker, it would seem that Poker requires little skill at all, as there are only a handful of possible actions a player could make. Yet most would agree that Poker is a game that requires a fair bit of skill. Why is that?

Enter the mind game. Yomi, as it were. This aspect is what makes Poker entertaining, and makes games like Rock Paper Scissors...well, legitimate games. See, even though there are only a handful of moves that can be made in Poker, the challenge comes in trying to convince the other players to make the move you want them to make. And in this case, errors are caused when your opponent makes an action that is unanticipated (as opposed to unconsidered).

This raises an interesting question: Is the mind game just one aspect of what makes a game skillful? Or should it belong on its own axis entirely? Tune in next time, when we answer these questions...and more...

[dustin]

I'm quite interested where you would place RPS on that graph.

Yeah that is interesting I'm not really sure how I would place RPS

I don't think I would put Poker up with Chess in skill (though I won't deny that there is plenty of skill involved).

Yeah I don't play enough poker or chess to know,  it was really just to show the four corners more.  Like poker obviously has skill and also a lot of luck.

You need to add perfect information and imperfect information too.

The reason poker works is that the odds are "known", card are a finite resource you can reason on and act with counter move (so bad hand can still win). Contrast with pure luck without agency.

Huh also very interesting,  i realize that my definition of skill may be a little strange

Okay, so I hate to be all Definition Daisuke over here, but I'm really interested in knowing how you define skill.

So my definition of skill for this was really something more statistical.  Something along the lines of the larger the gap between top level players and bottom level players the more skill is involved.  For example tic-tac-toe a bottom level player only has to play for about 10 minutes in order to become a top level player so there is only a small gap.  With yahtzee a bottom level player has to play for more then 10 minutes but probably only for a couple of games before they reach the top level players.  With chess, go, and poker it takes years and years in order to enter the top bracket of players. 

For example with dominion after playing for a while with friends it seems like we've maxed out our skill after around 100 games.  Lets say our skill is X and it's taken us 30 hours of play to achieve skill X.  Now if skill X really is the top teir then it's not a very skillful game.  30 hours to master is not that long of a time compared to chess.  So to see if skill X really is the top I go online and play against other people.  There is a group of people who beats me consistently so they must be X+1.  But there is another group that beats them consistently so they must be X+2.  I don't know how far this goes for a game like dominion but in general I would say the more tiers there are then the more skillful the game is.

This definition would include mind games in it since it just relies on playing the game a bunch of times and seeing what happens.  The mind games thing is very interesting and I'm sure you could seperate out the skill axis into multiple axis.  For instance one axis being the in game skill and the other being the meta-game skill.  The Yomi aspect of skill seems one very important aspect as you say and it'd be interesting to hear others.

[s0]

You need to add perfect information and imperfect information too.

The reason poker works is that the odds are "known", card are a finite resource you can reason on and act with counter move (so bad hand can still win). Contrast with pure luck without agency.

Dominion (also on the graph) works in a similar way, both games are about luck management, except that in poker the odds are always fundamentally the same, whereas in Dominion you decide the odds yourself via "buying" cards and building your own deck as you play.

[Theophilus]

You need to add perfect information and imperfect information too.

The reason poker works is that the odds are "known", card are a finite resource you can reason on and act with counter move (so bad hand can still win). Contrast with pure luck without agency.

Dominion (also on the graph) works in a similar way, both games are about luck management, except that in poker the odds are always fundamentally the same, whereas in Dominion you decide the odds yourself via "buying" cards and building your own deck as you play.

It also has the factor of knowing your opponent's odds if you pay attention close enough.

[tesselode]

[Derakon]

Just as a random aside, the Iain M Banks novel Player of Games discusses gaming in a post-scarcity (post-singularity) civilization. It notes in an aside that purely skill-based perfect-knowledge games were all "solvable" (combinatorial explosions apparently no longer presenting a barrier to the inconceivably vast AIs of the day) and thus had fallen out of favor. All games that were considered worth playing had some amount of luck and/or hidden knowledge, and the player's skill was not just in dealing with the known and the rules of the game but also in anticipating the unknown and preparing for unexpected changes.

The book's pretty awesome in general, though it doesn't do much on game theory.

[Glyph]

Rock-Paper-Scissors needs to be much further on the luck scale, unless that was a joke about Mario Kart Wii.
Seriously, Mario Kart Wii,

[gimymblert]

Mario kart wii jumped the shark in so many place

[rivon]

Well, RPS should be higher on the skill scale.

[s0]

Mario Kart DS is the best Mario Kart. Just thought I'd say that.


Anyway,

u kno its tru

[gimymblert]

 

[tesselode]

Well, RPS should be higher on the skill scale.

I would have made it about half on the skill scale (since I think it's half skill and half luck), but RPS is a pretty simple game; the only skill involved is predicted what the other person will choose, so it doesn't deserve that high of a skill rating.

[rivon]

Well, there's a lot of skill involved, otherwise there wouldn't be championships and the same people winning all the time.

[Derakon]

RPS is a pretty simple game; the only skill involved is predicted what the other person will choose, so it doesn't deserve that high of a skill rating.

Predicting what other people will do, particularly when their actions are based on what they think you are going to do, is not easy.

[tesselode]

RPS is a pretty simple game; the only skill involved is predicted what the other person will choose, so it doesn't deserve that high of a skill rating.

Predicting what other people will do, particularly when their actions are based on what they think you are going to do, is not easy.

True, but there aren't many choices either person can make.