Those that game together, stay together | Hacker News Reader

Those that game together, stay together

mpg.de

82 points_Microft23 comments

In that context, I wonder about the implications of a 'shifting alliegences' game like Diplomacy or Catan.

Oh, I am sure the lessons learned are well worth the risk.

So the only good games of diplomacy I’ve had were with other strategy gamers, where there was no pity or misunderstanding - we all wanted to win. The game is naturally self balancing in a sense, weaker players have some utility so they tend to get strung along as puppet states. By the end of the game, we just respect what likely crazy shenanigans the winner pulled, then go eat together and dissect.

That said, I’ve been roped into diplomacy games with RPG groups, which tend to go south long before any real double-crossing occurs. After about two turns, someone is already dead, people are realising there’s another 7 hours of doing the same thing over and over, and the game gets abandoned.

If you want to strengthen friendships with games it’s important to pick the right games. Playing diplomacy at work would… not be a great idea. It would be like suggesting murder-and-incest-sim CK3 over a family zoom call.

Makes me think of Magic the Gathering. People will tend to target the biggest threat at the table, so things end up balancing themselves out a bit.

> If you want to strengthen friendships with games it’s important to pick the right games.

A lot of the new school border games have very little interaction with players just calculating the optimal way to increase their score.

That's basically the whole genre of Eurogames where there is very little actual player interaction for most of the session, isn't it?

Yes. Those tend to be either an excuse to meet your friends or a bunch of introverted rejects calculating things in their little kingdoms. It's super hard to design games for more than 2 players with real interaction in a way that avoid ganging up on the winner so in most of the games for more than 2+ players the designers take the easy way out.

Ironically enough I find "social" games (or perhaps "social dilemma" games) to be anti-social as they often hinge on deception, lies, betrayal, and ganging up on people. I would agree that they aren't a good match for people who aren't merciless strategy gamers.

I have also found kingmaking/vote who wins to be a largely unpleasant feature/flaw of most multiplayer games that aren't races or competitive solitaire, so I'm unenthusiastic about a game where kingmaking is the core mechanic.

Or, those that stay together, game together.

Some of those that stay together, game together.

Or those that play together stay together?

Or those that stay together stay together?

Correlation does not imply causation

Those that correlate together, causate together. Of that we can be pretty certain.

The article doesn't say anything about causation, so what's your point?

"researchers from Leipzig, Jena, Gera, and Australia aimed to answer the question whether the games cultures play correspond to how cooperative they are"

Title does

It actually doesn't! Title makes a correlative statement, not a causative one.

I think we all know how editorialising can create inference. The targeted pedantry is actually counter productive to the genral discussion of an article and its merits.

I like to say that you can't even begin to have a productive conversation until you can represent what people say accurately. Saying, "we all know X" is just making up the thing you want to argue against.

I wonder how this one works on competitive games like DOTA2, Valorant, LoL, and other e-sport type of games. All of these games require high skills and teamwork.

As a family we pick sports that we can all go together at the same time. Hiking, back country camping, skiing, windsurfing, swimming, soccer and kayaking so far in the past year. If we were active, I could see gaming be something else but I would choose board games first.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I appreciate that last paragraph more than the author may realize...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com