Tag Archives: Halo 3

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Zerg Rushed by a Tiger? Just give up.

Neuroscientist and avid blogger Jonah Lehrer recently published a great article in the Wall Street Journal about what he and others call “the superstar effect.” The piece is well timed, seeing as it deals largely with the effect that someone like Tiger Woods has on his competition and Mr. Woods has in fact just returned to harass his competitors for the title of “Most Badass Dude Ever at Golf.” Lehrer describes the work of economist Jennifer Brown, who meticulously studied not just Tiger’s performance in high stakes golf games, but the performance of his peers:

Ms. Brown discovered the superstar effect by analyzing data from every player in every PGA Tour event from 1999 to 2006. She chose golf for several reasons, from the lack of “confounding team dynamics” to the immaculate statistics kept by the PGA. Most important, however, was the presence of Mr. Woods, who has dominated his sport in a way few others have.

…

Such domination appears to be deeply intimidating. Whenever Mr. Woods entered a tournament, every other golfer took, on average, 0.8 more strokes. This effect was even observable in the first round, with the presence of Mr. Woods leading to an additional 0.3 strokes among all golfers over the initial 18 holes. While this might sound like an insignificant difference, the average margin between first and second place in PGA Tour events is frequently just a single stroke. Interestingly, the superstar effect also varied depending on the player’s position on the leaderboard, with players closer to the lead showing a greater drop-off in performance. Based on this data, Ms. Brown calculated that the “superstar effect” boosted Mr. Woods’s PGA earnings by nearly $5 million.

The reason, Lehrer goes on to explain, is that when faced with such an overwhelming favorite in the odds, people tend to short sell themselves and not give their best performance, as if the outcome is predetermined. And what’s worse is that this need not even take place in our conscious thought to have an effect. And what’s worse than that is the fact that the phenomenon seems to be most potent with more experienced players. Veteran golfers play a good chunk of their game on autopilot, not wasting mental energy over analyzing every tiny movement, angle, or twitch. But when Tiger Woods is on the fairway, they may begin to overthink their strokes, their choices, and their plan –to engage in too much of what psychologists call “action identification.” The result is that they change the way they play and play worse as a result because they’re wasting their finite concentration on things that didn’t need it yesterday. Writer Malcom Gladwell of The Tipping Point and Blink fame also has a nifty article about this phenomenon, which you can read here.

When we talk about someone “psyching out” the competition, this is what we mean, and it appears to jive with actual scientific research. The WSJ article goes on to discuss how this same phenomenon happens in other competitive environments outside of golf, such as law firms or the executive boardrooms of General Electric, and how it’s especially potent in “winner take all” situations.

…Like, say a game of StarCraft! In the realm of video games, what this all made me think of is the importance of proper matchmaking based on skills and how some games seem to do it a lot better than others. Whenever I jump in to competitive game of Modern Warfare 2, for example, I can’t seem to take four steps without getting owned because everyone else in that game seems to be SO MUCH BETTER than I am. I think many of us have been in a poorly mached game where we round a corner to face the person dominating the top spot on a scoreboard and we just sort of sigh and wait to get headshot rather than try and fight back, especially if we’re squatting at the bottom of the rankings. Halo 3, on the other hand, always seems to group me with people closer to my skill level, and I have a lot more fun and win a lot more matches as a result.

A list of the people who would crush me in any given game of StarCraft II.

The superstar phenomenon is something that Blizzard seems to be actively trying to avoid in its ranking system for StarCraft II with its bronze, silver, and whatever levels of play and the ability to see the ranking of your opponent. Though not perfect and obviously still being tweaked, the system seems to go to great lengths to match players with opponents of similar skill. So I can be relatively sure that I’m not going to waste time second guessing my build order or metagame because I was matched against Tiger Woods, who in the context of this game would be some Korean dude who has been playing StarCraft for 12 hours a day for the last 10 years.

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Regression to the Mean and Owning Some Chumps

Let’s say that you’ve hired a coach to help you improve your Slayer game in Halo 3. I’ve heard of stranger things. Let’s say this coach looks like Mr. Miyagi but he curses WAY more. He uses a variety of training and motivational techniques, ranging from grenade throwing drills to trigger finger sprints, doing everything he can to drive you towards perfection. You notice, though, that he eventually stops praising you whenever you rank at the top of a match. He did at first, but now when you earn more than your usual number of kills your coach stands stoically by, straight faced and not giving you a single word of praise for those outstanding rounds.

Eventually, you ask him why he never praises you when you do a really good job.

“Because,” he says, “I’ve noticed that praise doesn’t work. Every time I praised you for a really good round, your next round is always mediocre. And what’s more, when I yell at you for playing poorly, next round you always do better. Praising not only doesn’t make you better, it makes you worse.”

You pause for a second, then cry “You’re not my real dad!” and run out of the room, bawling like a child. Yes, you do. That emotional outburst aside, though, is your coach’s logic sound, given that you DO in fact perform worse every time he praises you for doing well and perform better whenever he rebukes you for doing poorly? Praise makes you do worse and berating makes you better, right?

Nope. Your performance following stellar rounds of Halo or Starcraft II any other game involving skill can be best explained not by the effects of praise or punishment, but by something called “regression to the mean.”

Let’s assume that if we looked at your performance over a bunch of matches and plotted them out with ending scores along the X axis and how often you end a match with that particular score on the Y axis. They’d probably form something close to a normal, bell-shaped distribution like this:

Normal Curve

Figure 1: Your sick skilz, plotted

If we were to pick any single match at random, it’s more likely that your performance would be about in the middle somewhere –somewhere near the “mean,” which is basically another word for “average.” ((Actually, in statistical parlance “average” is a vague term, but most normal people use it in the same sense that statisticians use the word “mean.” So let’s not make a big deal about it, okay?)) In this example, that’s 10 frags. It’s rare that you’re at the very top (17 frags) or bottom (3 frags). In fact, if your performance follows a normal distribution like the one above, then the following will be true:

  • 68% of your matches will end with scores between 8 and 12
  • 95% will be between 6 and 14
  • Only 0.6% will be under 4 or over 16 ((For the advanced students in the audience, these numbers refer to one, two, and three standard deviations above/below the mean))

And even if your distribution is a little skewed because you do well more often than you do poorly, the numbers won’t change much until things get REALLY skewed. At which point no amount of coaching is going to change your game in either direction.

This is the reason that you seem to do worse after good matches and better after bad ones. The particularly good or bad matches are rare, and because they’re rare it’s improbable that you’d have two in a row no matter what your coach does.

So don’t get discouraged when you can’t consistently come out on top multiple times in a row in any game of skill. You may be able to move your distribution up the right-hand side of the scale and/or squish it together so that there’s less variation, but you’re always going to regress to the mean somewhat because every round can’t be your best (or worst) round.

Now go give your dad a hug.

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The Glitcher’s Dilemma: Social Dilemmas in Games

Note: This article is also published in my columns on GameSetWatch.com and Gamasutra.com.

Soon after its release, some players of the online first person shooter Modern Warfare 2 discovered what became known as “the javelin glitch.” Someone, somewhere, somehow figured out that through a bizarre sequence of button presses you could glitch the game so that when you died in multiplayer you would self destruct and murder everyone within 30 feet, often resulting in a net gain in points. It wasn’t long, though, before the method for creating this glitch spread through the Internet and servers were filled with exploding nincompoops. In fact, it quickly got bad enough that developer Infinity Ward had to rush out a patch to fix it.

The javelin glitch presented players in the know with an interesting dilemma: they could either abuse the glitch to boost their own rankings and unlock new perks, or they could abstain and preserve the game’s fair play. Of course, the problem is that if they abstain, someone else may abuse the glitch and dominate the match. The middle ground is when everyone glitches, but the resulting pandemonium isn’t as much fun as fair play for most normal people.

Let’s simplify the discussion by assuming a two-player deathmatch game in Modern Warfare 2. Look, I’ve created a table to summarize the dilemma for you! It’s suitable for framing.

The Glitcher's Dilemma

Figure 1: The Glitcher's Dilemma

So what do you do? Psychologists and economists who study this kind of decision-making call it a “social dilemma.” In these situations, intentional griefing notwithstanding, each person has what’s called a “dominating” alternative where they’re most likely to win (in this example, abusing the glitch) but most people REALLY want the “nondominating” alternative produced when everyone chooses to abstain from it. Especially once the novelty factor wears off.

Back in the 1960s research on these kinds of dilemmas exploded and out of it came what’s known as “the prisoner’s dilemma” based on an anecdote about getting confessions from two prisoners held under suspicion for a bank robbery. In his book, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World ((1. Dawes, R. (1988). Rational Choice in an Uncertain World. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Publishers.)) Robyn Dawes summarizes the classic scenario thusly:

Two men rob a bank. They are apprehended, but in order to obtain a conviction the district attorney needs confessions. He succeeds by proposing to each robber separately that if he confesses and his accomplice does not, he will go free and his accomplice will be sent to jail for ten years; if both confess, both will be sent to jail for five years, and if neither confesses, both will be sent to jail for one year on charges of carrying a concealed weapon. Further, the district attorney informs each man that he is proposing the same deal to his accomplice.

Here are those choices in table form:

Prisoners Dilemma

Figure 2: The prisoner's dilemma

In this case, both prisoners will probably confess if they’re rational about it. Why? Because each prisoner get a better (or no worse) payoff by confessing no matter what the other guy does. Prisoner A thinks, “I don’t know what B is going to do, so if I confess it’s the best way to keep myself from getting screwed. If he keeps quiet, I go free. If he also confesses, I get 5 years instead of 10.” In other words, confessing is the only way to keep the other guy from being able to screw you over. Notice how this mirrors the javelin glitch dilemma, only with fewer explosions.

Now let’s take another example from the golden years of PC gaming. In the early days of Starcraft, a strategy called “Zerg rushing” emerged where at the beginning of the match players would quickly build lots of cheap Zerg units to overwhelm opponents before defenses could be constructed. Counter strategies developed, ((as well as a game-balancing patch or two, I believe)) but for a good chunk of the player base Starcraft became a game of seeing who could Zerg rush faster, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as choosing from any other number of play styles or even races. So the dilemma was:

Zerg Rush Dilemma

Figure 3: The ...Zerg dilemma?

Again, the dominating strategy was to Zerg rush, because if you didn’t and the other guy did, you lost, which was worse than any of the alternatives. This despite the fact that what you really both want is a varied, fun game. It’s a design issue that still plagues strategy game developers today.

Prisoner’s dilemmas and social dilemmas in general can similarly be used to illustrate the reasons for “ninja looting” in World of Warcraft where one player exploits the “need/greed” loot distribution system to get a piece of equipment:

Loot Dilemma

Figure 4: Oh, you know what? Forget it.

Or you could apply it to “tick throwing” and “fireball trapping” techniques in fighting games. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. My 2×2 table making machine burnt out, anyway.

What’s really more interesting and useful, though, is to look at what psychology has to show us about when people DON’T choose the purely rational option of abusing a glitch or a winning but boring strategy. Generally, people are more likely to do this when:

  • They know they will be playing against their opponents in the future and face retribution
  • They expect to interact with their opponents outside the game
  • They don’t expect to remain anonymous
  • They don’t know how many games will be played with the same person

Under these conditions, many players will adopt a strategy where they cooperate at first (for example, they don’t glitch or rush), then if the other player abuses that trust they retaliate in kind. This is known as the “tit for tat” strategy. Some researchers with lots of time on their hands even organized tournaments where people were invited to write computer programs to play iterated prisoner dilemma games, and the programs that adhered to the “tit for tat” strategy tended to do the best.

This is why things like playing with people on your friend’s list, Steam community group, guild/clan, or a favorite dedicated server is good. And it’s one reason why random matches between strangers or pickup groups can be infuriating. Making it easy to submit ratings to the profiles of people you just played also helps resolve these dilemmas to everyone’s benefits. It’s also the reason that I love the way that Halo 3 lets you remain in a lobby with the people you just played and go straight into another round with them. ((Ringing a bell? You may be thinking about my article on how deindividuation fosters antisocial behavior and how to similarly deal with that))

People being the complicated beings they are it’s not a perfect system, though. Some people are just griefers out to disrupt the game no matter what. Some people won’t abuse a glitch out of a sense of honor. Some will value their ranking on a leaderboard more than a sense of fair play for any individual match. But even if none of the suggestions above is a silver bullet, they help across large numbers of games.