Rock-Paper-Scissors
Don’t you just love capitalized titles? Anyway, I red the following a few days ago:
Rock Paper Scissors – A Method for Competitive Game Play Design
I strongly recommend its reading to anyone interested in game-design. It explains the RPS technique for multiplayer game design, and shows this model at work in videogames, sports and other types of competitive games.
Just to explain a bit:
A game applying the RPS model must have a set of different attack and defend moves which cancel each other in a way that no move has an advantege over the others.
This should allow the player to identify quickly and through experimentation which are the options available to him and how to counter them.
A player may choose to act randomly and quickly as an strategy which prevents the oponent from distinguishing an attack pattern, which would be easily countered. But this takes the point of the game, which becomes not one of strategy but one of simple luck. To stop this from happening “signals” are introduced to the model.
Signals announce an attack just before its occurence. They must be identifiable under normal conditions, that means not faster than the normal reaction of a human and neither as slow as to allow anyone to counter it without effort.
On these conditions the game may stall as players choose not to begin a strike, since skilled players develop conditioned reflexes to the signals. This kind of strategy (“turtling”) is not desirable, therefore separation between signal and attack is introduced.
Separation between signal and attack allows “fakes” to be thrown, that means signals which are not followed by its corresponding attack. “Faking” ruins the turtling strategy since one could fall to a fake leaving oneself open. The player has to read more into the game and into the opponents, and the game becomes more about the players and less about the game mechanichs. This is the scenario that RPS wants to achieve.
What I didn’t found explained in the article is how to apply RPS in competitive team play game design. The model should be appliable very simply just by using the RPS on one-on-one confrontations, but the team play conditions allows for richer strategies that aren’t considered in the article. It’s a doubt I have worthy of more research…
