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Mario meets Pareto

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Re: Mario meets Pareto

#141

Post by kibwen »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #98
wcrossbow wrote: post #93

Nice article! The resulting Pareto front really highlights how hard game design is. You can get millions of possible combinations but the reality is that only a handful of them will ever happen in a competitive environment.

That doesn’t mean that the other combinations are worthless. Presumably there’s value in the cosmetics, plus the puzzle aspect of creating and optimizing the builds along the different dimensions. Surely there’s a meta-Pareto-front of the balance between usefulness of each combination in competitions and amount of fun it adds to the game!

Seconded.

As a game designer, you want to add silly and suboptimal things to your game. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that every decision must be perfectly balanced and equally weighty, because your game will turn out bland and textureless. And beyond the considerations of "optimal" play, putting suboptimal options into your game can serve as both a way of naturally selecting difficulty without having to implement ungainly difficulty sliders, and also accommodate fun/silly challenges for people who just want to mess around.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#142

Post by kibwen »

wcrossbow wrote: post #125
KeplerBoy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that the pareto front is not a two-dimensional line, but a surface in a some high dimensional vector space. In every game there are many, many aspects to min/max. As others pointed out even Mario Kart doesn't boil down to speed and acceleration. In a sufficiently complex game every build is on the pareto front as it optimizes some specific cost function.

I was refering here to playing competitively, that is, playing with the only goal of winning. Of course, it is perfectly acceptable to play for style or to manage a podium with the worst configuration or anything you fancy [ ]. However, if your one and only goal is winning I suspect that the high dimensional vector space will end up not looking so high dimensional once you account for the correlations between the dif…

> playing with the only goal of winning

Even if you're only optimizing for race times, in the case of Mario Kart, the choice of track will have a huge impact on the optimal kart selection. Tool-assisted speedruns pick different karts for different tracks.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#143

Post by thaumasiotes »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #133
sspiff wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to quantify into numbers, no? I like Luigi more than Mario. But do I love Mario like a 6 and Luigi like an 8?

Time for binary sort or an elimination chart; take every character, compare them to another, sort them as to which one you prefer. Then assign a number to each one of them.

Preferences don't tend to work that way. You know how, if you use a sort function that accepts a user-defined comparator, the documentation will have dire warnings about making sure that the comparator gives consistent results?

The procedure you're suggesting here doesn't comply with those warnings. Sorting will not terminate, or will yield different results from attempt to attempt.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#144

Post by cout »

xanderlewis wrote: post #12
modeless wrote: post #8

Wait, Bowser and Wario are the fastest? I thought it was the other way around. I guess it's reversed from Mario Kart 64.

I'm not sure, but it kind of makes sense as a choice, since acceleration and speed should be negatively correlated and since Bowser and Wario are both massive they should accelerate more slowly than others (given constant force). So they get to have the highest top speeds to compensate.

In a real kart a heavier driver would have lower top speed and acceleration, in exchange for better handling (more body weight means you can more easily shift weight to the wheels that need more traction, unlike a car where the driver's weight is insignificant).

But they seem to have ignored kart physics and made it more like a car, where bigger cars might accelerate slower but can accommodate a more powerful engine.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#145

Post by davemp »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #132
davemp wrote: post #131

This great visualization/article highlights one of my pet peeves with current game design--options for the sake of options. I feel like the common trap for designers is to put too much stock in tag lines like "Over 700,000 different builds!" You're dumping a combinatorial explosion of overhead onto players. If all those choices don't significantly enhance the core game experience, you as a designer as wasting people'…

It depends on why you play though; the "combinatorial explosion of overhead" is only a problem if you're trying to min/max, if you play for fun it's more "What character do I like" or "What wings do I find pretty". The most important thing: Don't tell others how to play. Don't tell them "you should pick X because it's the best" unless they explicitly ask for it. Let people play their own way, and don't push how you p…

I don't think we're on the same page.

> It depends on why you play though; the "combinatorial explosion of overhead" is only a problem if you're trying to min/max, if you play for fun it's more "What character do I like" or "What wings do I find pretty".

Exactly. These choices don't affect players in the same way.

> The most important thing: Don't tell others how to play. Don't tell them "you should pick X because it's the best" unless they explicitly ask for it. Let people play their own way, and don't push how you play games onto others.

I definitely agree with you here.

As a designer, you're defacto telling people how to play by designing choices like this. You're punishing casual, competitively natured players with >700,000 options because they care about performance.

If you don't derive fun from winning the trade-offs are mostly irrelevant and you can simply ignore most of the problem, choose a configuration based on fewer/simpler dimensions (I'm going to pick yoshi and the egg kart because that's awesome), and avoid most of the decision space. This type of player probably wouldn't care if all the configurations performed the same or more likely could be annoyed that their desired configuration performs strictly worse. (If the choices meaningfully affected gameplay, like having an ability to lay eggs or something, that's different).

On the other hand if the dedicated, competitive players are going to solve the optimization problem and coalesce configurations down ~10 choices. The problem space is also irrelevant to this type of player.

But posing this problem negatively affects competitive people who aren't dedicated to the game. Now they have to consider an intractable problem while their friends are waiting on them so they can actually play the game. I know this because I've sat there plenty of times while friends scroll through all the different options wheels/karts/gliders/characters for minutes until they gave up and said something like "Whatever, I just want to race".

So why not just give 10 performance profiles and the same combination of cosmetic choices as before?

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#146

Post by davemp »

kibwen wrote: post #140
pksebben wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gameplay and narrative don't hook into that acquisitive gambler's streak nearly as well as "all the unlockable things". I do agree with you, generally, that this is a bit of a cheap trick and far too ubiquitous. However, there is something to be said for giving the player "things to do" like unlocking content. It does add to the experience to have a sense of "this is why I'm still playing".

Indeed, like it or not, the idea that the game of Mario Kart (for example) is exclusively the part where you drive around the track is both simplistic and naive. It comes across as a values statement of the following form: "good games are only concerned with moment-to-moment mechanical execution and tests of reflexes, and not any of that other Skinner-box frippery". But (again, whether we like it or not), for a lot o…

> Indeed, like it or not, the idea that the game of Mario Kart (for example) is exclusively the part where you drive around the track is both simplistic and naive. It comes across as a values statement of the following form: "good games are only concerned with moment-to-moment mechanical execution and tests of reflexes, and not any of that other Skinner-box frippery". But (again, whether we like it or not), for a lot of people the frippery is crucial to the enjoyment of the game. (And these are hardly the only two reasons people play games, e.g. there's socialization, mastery, etc.)

I don't think my comment was implying any of this.

I was mostly trying to say something along the lines of "solving NP-hard problems isn't good gameplay" rather than discuss micro-transactions, progression systems, or variance/competitive purity.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#147

Post by sizzle »

davemp wrote: post #131

This great visualization/article highlights one of my pet peeves with current game design--options for the sake of options. I feel like the common trap for designers is to put too much stock in tag lines like "Over 700,000 different builds!" You're dumping a combinatorial explosion of overhead onto players. If all those choices don't significantly enhance the core game experience, you as a designer as wasting people'…

That’s why my go-to Mario kart is the N64 version. No bs just pick a character and go

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#148

Post by superMayo »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #100
superMayo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot! That was my goal. It's a trick I learned: if you zoom in from a distance, everything appears flat. The effect is achieved by zooming out while simultaneously moving the camera closer to the subject!

Could you not just use a parallel projection (which should be the default for this kind of 3d scatter plot)?

Yes, I could have been using THREE.OrthographicCamera(), however, it makes the effect way less cinematic, and most importantly, it makes the depth harder to see (particularly for a scatter plot).

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#149

Post by dwringer »

redman25 wrote: post #135
xanderlewis wrote: post #9

Well... that was a seriously impressive presentation. I already knew about Pareto efficiency/the Pareto frontier, but now I'll never be able to forget it. And I'll think of Mario Kart (and poor Koopa being dominated) every time.

I wonder if Koopa does better with different customization?

One thing I noticed is if you set the graph axes to "Speed" and "handling" and the weight slider about 3/4 toward "handling" then Koopa becomes the only member of that 2D slice of pareto front. I suppose this could be a benefit depending on the course design. At least, it's an example of how looking at only 2 dimensions can be limiting.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#150

Post by kibwen »

davemp wrote: post #146
kibwen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, like it or not, the idea that the game of Mario Kart (for example) is exclusively the part where you drive around the track is both simplistic and naive. It comes across as a values statement of the following form: "good games are only concerned with moment-to-moment mechanical execution and tests of reflexes, and not any of that other Skinner-box frippery". But (again, whether we like it or not), for a lot o…

> Indeed, like it or not, the idea that the game of Mario Kart (for example) is exclusively the part where you drive around the track is both simplistic and naive. It comes across as a values statement of the following form: "good games are only concerned with moment-to-moment mechanical execution and tests of reflexes, and not any of that other Skinner-box frippery". But (again, whether we like it or not), for a lot…

> I was mostly trying to say something along the lines of "solving NP-hard problems isn't good gameplay"

Consider that Tetris is NP-hard. :) Giving the player optimization problems is one of the fundamental pillars of game design. For many, it's more fun to make a deck of cards in Magic or Hearthstone than to actually play the deck against an opponent.

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