Is it okay to have no win scenarios designed into your game? Are they a hindrance to the game or an opportunity for self-reflection? Or are they something else entirely? And do you consider yourself more of a Captain Kirk or a Captain Picard?
I personally dislike no win scenarios if they are the result of you playing a game your way. Those tend to be pretty common in old-school RPGs. Like, sure, if you do something stupid like putting all of your skill points in melee, but proceed to use only ranged weapons, then of course you should be punished. But if you decide to spec your character for melee combat, only to find out that even the best melee weapon in the game does no damage to the final boss, that's just dumb. Devs should at the very least make sure that, if their game allows multiple approaches to character creation, then all of those can be used to achieve victory, even if some may be harder than others. And preferably without ridiculous amounts of grind.
Extra Credits in games we are the sole winners and losers of the situation, in real life it is possible to know your going to lose and position that loss as a win for others, I think Harry Potter proved that when he let Voldemort kill him, turning a no win scenario for himself into a winnable scenarios for others
Here's the hybrid of the Kirk and Picard philosophies: If the scenario you find yourself in is actually unwinnable, then change your definition of winning. Learning something about yourself is as valid a win condition as completing a level or attaining a certain score. Decide how YOU would like to win, and achieve that.
That's essentially what Data does at the end of that same episode of The Next Generation. He's played a game against this supreme tactician, and he's begun to doubt his abilities because he lost - so he plays a rematch aiming for a stalemate rather than victory. The tactician gets angry and forfeits the game, so in a way he's won without winning.
this probably applies to games, too in starcraft 2, for example, a fair amount of the game is decided pretty early in the match based on how well each player sets up their economy. it's possible to enter a sc2 match and essentially lose before ever seeing the opponent if they're more experienced or prepared than you are. when pros address this situation to less skilled players, a common refrain is for the losing player to use that loss to build on their overall play. they implore players to watch the replays of their losses and assess how the loss happened in and effort to grow as a player. in that sense, they're changing the win condition from winning the match to becoming a better player overall
That's part of why Civilization is so great; depending on what civ you're playing as, you can change your strategies and go for a different win scenario if you can't catch up in one category. Case in point, if someone's outpacing you in a Science victory, you could always cut the knot and just start conquering their civ.
I think you disregarded Kirk's approach a bit too quickly. Remember he beat it on the third attempt. The point of his "cheating" is that he found a weakness in the game that wasn't intended (an exploit) in order to still win. I think his philosophy is that by not "believing" in no-win scenarios you say that, I won't accept the conditions laid before me and will instead look for the weaknesses inherent to the problem and find a way to win that no-one has yet considered. This is the same motivation that inspires speed-running and even coupon hoarders.
If there is an exploit he can use to win, the situation no longer meets the definition (in this video) of an unwinnable game. While there is utility in not believing in no-win scenarios (it promotes useful problem solving techniques), this method only works if the scenario is actually winnable some how. Refusing to believe in no-win scenarios is a recipe for disaster if a true unwinnable scenario is encountered. To me, it seems like the root of this topic is the idea of grappling with something that is impossible for you to do, regardless of your feelings towards it. It's certainly an idea worth exploring
I mean, when you look at the problem he was facing, it would be the same as giving someone a clearly rigged game (unachievable win condition). Searching for an exploit is the proper way to address such cases (I mean, if that were a "realistic" scenario to happen with the crew, than finding the exploit or shifting winning points was the way to go)
Actually from my perspective, Kobayashi Maru was a test of thinking outside of the box, and breaking (hacking the game) was one of those. It reminds me of the chuunin test, where the questions where really hard and you are expected to fail and they had to use their skills to overcome this and cheat to prevail w/o being caught.
An important part in the Star Trek TNG version of the dilemma is that, in the rematch, Data changes his strategy from play-to-win to play-to-tie (i.e. a defensive strategy instead of an aggressive one), with a better outcome for him than if he would've played-to-win. He still didn't technically win (well, his opponent gave up in frustration, but with a higher score than Data's). So IMHO this shows another meta-strategy for the Kobayashi Maru: if you know that you are not going to win, change your strategy accordingly, because a simply "to win" strategy might not me optimal for this premise.
Actually, playing to tie (actually playing to _stalemate) is_ a win for Data, because Data has functionally limitless stamina. He didn't have to beat his opponent mentally, he could just run the clock and beat his opponent _physically_ .
Example: hold opponent's forces back long enough for reinforcements to arrive. A direct onslaught might be impossible to succeed, but it might be feasible to stand your ground (e.g. in a siege scenario).
Moritz von Schweinitz Interesting idea of a strategy, but can one really “play to tie” in most games, which tend to be zero sum? Even the comments below debate whether Data “won” with that strategy, because that’s the point; you either win or lose. It seems like, if you know you’re not going to win, rather than change the strategy, one should change the goal. Instead of playing defensively to wear out your opponent’s stamina/patience (so you win that way), aim for making the opponent’s victory as pyrrhic as possible.
MrInternetHermit And that’s a very understandable point of view. I believe that life is unfair, but in the positive direction: I think we deserve more pain, but that God is merciful enough to overpay us. If life were fair, every mistake would immediately yield pain.
If the game designers are cognizant of the fact that parts of their game are unwinnable then there's a lot of interesting things they can do with the game that a more traditional "win to progress" game can't. As someone who plays mostly strategy games, I've always been annoyed by how at times in that genre the game's narrative demands that you lose, but that's always a cutscene or debriefing text and not something that plays out in gameplay. The concept of "failing forward" is something I think games could do more and do better.
But then there is purpose of challenge or scenario modes, where there are scenarios meant for advanced players who either learns or exercises advanced concepts. For a game designer making a scenario where there is no way to be victorious, there is an opportunity for implied or emergent mechanics where a player does not have to follow orthodox means to make the win and not make the end objective obvious.
I dislike "you have to lose" moments in a similar fashion to "you have to win ones". There was a dbz game which had "unwinnable fights" but if you actually managed to win them then you would unlock a secret path in the history. Always thought it was a brilliant approach
I can remember a level from company of heroes 1 that was at the end of the german campaign. It didn't have win conditions, just a scoreboard on how long you could hold the line and make a retreat possible. Those retreating troops you could recruit in exchange for not getting a reward for getting them out. It was a really interesting scenario, and definetly hte most memorable of the game for me. I haven't seen anything like that yet in other games i played.
To be fair I could recall there being a few strategy games where the goal isn't to win, but to avoid losing for a set period of time. There definitally isn't enough, especially since most of those end with "miracle reinforcements" of some sort. Actually now that I think of it most of Outpost 2's campaign maps aren't about winning, but building up enough supplies that you can start again with a bigger colony on the next map.
The first Kessen game on the PS2 did this brilliantly. The "historic" outcome of the campaign was "tokugawa wins all of these battles". But what if the player didn't? Or was playing the other side and won? Well... The campaign branched. It did mean it was a bit shorter, admittedly. Also, after every main battle there was a pursuit of the loosing commander. Tokugawa always escapes successfully, but his various subordinates Don't. Likewise, if the opposing side loses the battle but retreats successfully... Well, historically they go through a bunch of commanders who died for various reasons (I believe mostly by way of not getting away after the battle), but If you keep them alive... well, some of them die anyway due to other factors (illness and such) but Others surviving the battle causes the campaign to branch again! It's great. It does mean that, from memory, some paths are only three battles and a couple of pursuits, and the Longest path was no more than 6, but there were fully voiced cut scenes all over the show. Apparently the actual gameplay in battle wasn't super popular (personally, I loved it), mostly because units took a bit of time to respond to orders (they had to get the order, sort themselves out from what they were doing, turn a (usually close order) formation of anything from a few hundred to several thousand men to face the right way, and only Then could they advance, for example. Which could sometimes take a while.)
I think I agree, but would like to know what your reasoning is for that. If a scenario is mechanically winnable, but narratively unwinnable, then Kirk's "Cheat to win" makes sense. If it is Narratively Winnable, but mechanically unwinnable, then I can only see people getting frustrated and rage-quitting. If it is unwinnable in both ways, then why play in the first place?
@@offduty23 How would a game that is only narratively winnable even look like? I have never heard about a game that was mechanically unwinnable AND had a narrative.
@@yonokhanman654 While I can't speak for the person making this post, I don't think he's referring to something you could win narratively, but fail mechanically. Usually if you win a game, you've won both mechanically AND narratively. (And, yes, even games without story tend to fall into a "narrative consistency." Or in other words, since we as human beings usually interpret information in a form that resembles a story, even technically story-less events have stories.) But as for unwinnable games and scenarios, you could fail one way or the other, or even both ways. You could fail mechanically, and be fated to fail before you've begun, because you were dealt a bad hand, because RNG was not good to you, because you're matched against an opponent who paid actual money to get enhancements in a free-to-play game, etc. Or you could fail narratively, where even though you did everything right and technically won, the script still fates you to lose in the narrative. There's no way to save Aerith, no matter how well you play. Sarah Kerrigan will always become the Zerg Queen, even if in play, you completely hold back the Zerg invasion. Even after winning Portal, Chell is guaranteed to be captured and dragged back into Aperture. And then you can fail both, of course. Tetris or Pac-Man are classic examples of that; the games can't technically be "won" - only continued, but fated to end eventually. So, the mechanics will make your play eventually impossible, and the narrative is that the Tetriminoes always fall into disarray, or that Pac-Man never escapes the ghosts. Thus, you "fail" both mechanically and narratively, even though you technically succeeded. But yeah. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying, you're right; much more often than not, you can't win narratively while failing mechanically. There are a few rare exceptions, of course; one of the Harvest Moon games allows you to marry your rival, resulting in a game over, but the story ends somewhat happily. Or... if you secretly consider the Game Over animation in Banjo-Kazooie to be a reward (I admit, there was a time when I did), then, losing the game results in a "win" of sorts. Anyway. That's just my thought on this. Sorry for taking up so much time.
Anyone remember the AI that played Tetris that paused the game indefinitely when it worked itself into a corner? That'd probably be a fun episode topic, too!
There are a handful of similar anecdotes from other AI development during games. My favorite is when an evolutionary AI "learned" to crash the game if it was losing. Playing through to the end would result in a bot's strategy not being included in the next generation but if the game crashed it was assumed by the developers that it was unrelated to the AI so it was run again for that generation. That gave it an additional chance to win so it outperformed competing variants. Eventually, that lead to many of the AIs independently discovering a strategy where they played reasonably most of the time but triggered a crash when they were close to losing until most of them had that strategy. If I'm remembering correctly, the attack was actually pretty clever in its simplicity. It would just start sending instructions that units should go to a location out of bounds. That caused the error log to record "hey, this unit is trying to go out of bounds". But unlike everything else, error logs were written to a persistent hard disk instead of just being in memory on a virtual machine so it was orders of magnitude slower. If it just sent enough of those orders, the portion of the hardware allocated to it couldn't keep up.
I thought you were gonna talk about the end of Halo: Reach or those intro sequences in a lot of games where you're designed to lose for thematic reasons.
While those sections are technically "unwinnable", they don't actually cause a failure state in the game. Losing there is whats *supposed* too happen, so they don't really count as "not winning".
Yes. Most of my favorite memories in strategy games came from no-win scenarios. There is something satisfying in holding out for as long as you can in a valiant last stand.
@@mitwhitgaming7722 Playing magic, I find particularly more satisfying when you can take your defeat as your own. Finding a unlikely way to kill yourself before the opponent, or just making your defeat the most enjoyable (making your opponent go overkill). In chess, I remember how once I would clearly lose to my opponent, yet it always resulted in a stalemate (only had the king left while he had a bunch of pieces. he was having a hard time). It was particularly pleasing
@@mitwhitgaming7722 ah but even then you can cheese the game a lot. For example, in medieval 2 I let a castle defended only by some militia, but the castle had cannon towers. As such I "sally" forth and let my towers decimate the enemy.... I got a draw, so i broke the seige, plus I killed a whole lot of enemies. I consider that a win in my book.
@@nnaauujjddaa Oh I love doing that. Sometimes I will bleed out overwhelming invasion forces with staged and choreographed pyrrhic victories until they are weak, overextended and can't resupply. Combine that with a scorched earth policy and you have a winning recipe. Kind of like all the failed invasions of Russia.
@@TealWolf26 nah man too much trouble I just send twice as many men as they do. "Oh you send 1 full stack, here I have two, oh what's that? You have another in reserve? Me too! What a coincidence!" That said in an emergency I may try to do that until I can send a true army.
I approach the problem from a Tabletop RPG perspective. “Old School” design aesthetic posits that there are some fights or challenges that are beyond the players: the “supposed to run” type of encounters. While I appreciate that perspective, I feel like modern design should include multiple outs or avenues to “victory.” When I make an encounter that is so hard it’s practically unwinnable, that feels like a mistake.
You're approaching this from the opposite perspective. A DnD encounter, for example, isn't really random. Even "random" encounters aren't actually random - they are predetermined by a list of possible encounters which itself was already handpicked by the GM with knowledge of what the players can and can't do. Thus, if you engineer a situation in which your players cannot possibly succeed (and this isn't unlikely to succeed, but actually impossible: even if the party constantly rolls 20s and the enemies are constantly rolling 1s), the question becomes "for what reason?". It could be part of the story, it could be something else, it could be a mistake on your part or on the players' part. In the Kobayashi Maru, the whole point is to test the judgement of the pilot and teach them a lesson about morality. It's different, however, when we are talking about randomness. With randomness there can be a possibility of an unwinnable scenario which might have been unforeseen. This result is due to a sequence of events beyond the player's agency. For example: in Yu-Gi-Oh! getting the 5 cards of the Exodia ends the duel. If you're playing some Yugioh game (simulator or not) and the AI just happens to draw these 5 cards in their first hand on the first turn, you just lose without being able to play at all. Or in the video's case, with solitaire, there are orders of cards that at some point, no matter what you do, will get you locked and run out of possible moves. Both of these examples aren't scenarios the devs calculated and planned for, just natural occurrences due to a mixture of the game's rules and randomness.
I have to say, I was the guy in old AD&D that came up with...*creative* ways of getting the win. (I played wizards a lot.) For example, if some dark lord or some such was threatening to slaughter the villagers if we opposed him, I'd burn down the village to force the people to relocate away from the crazy murder guy.
The players should try and win the encounter... but that doesn't mean the have to WIN the fight and kill everyone. It's simply to win the encounter, however they may think that is the right thing to do.
I love that the Kobayashi Maru is now considered an engineering exercise. Now they expect you to hack it and pass it, and your graded on how well you did your hack, not what you did in the test.
Yeah. I was thinking of *Dwarf Fortress* and *Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.* I play them all the time, but there's no way to "win" either game. There are plenty of ways to lose, but no way to win. Playing the game - even when you end up "losing" - is how you "win."
I was thinking about Don't Starve and Dwarf Fortress. They're evidence that you don't have to win a game. Maybe in that situation a "win" could count as being satisfied with what you accomplished in the game and moving on.
I get quickly bored of games with no win conditions because there is no motivational drive to keep playing. For example I don't find a lot of fun in an endless high score game, but if it is a high score game that is possible to win, for example Super Hexagon, I feel motivated to play for much longer before dropping it in favor of another game. I know that games are meant to be played for fun, but winning is a huge part of the fun for me. If I can't win, I have significantly less fun.
But the interesting thing about the “Kirkian” approach, is that the Kobayashi Maru was winnable- because he hacked it, and it was an unintended solution sure, but the ability to alter the test to ensure victory is a part of the “universal set” of outcomes that can be generated. And I think the dangerous thing with no-win scenarios is their accidental creation: that is to say, when the abilities of the player cannot be sufficiently improved to result in a victory- like the Sekiro accessibility controversy a while back, where it often required reflexes do good that lesser players were unable to win an ostensibly winnable game simply because they cannot react quickly enough, or aren’t dexterous enough to perform actions, especially after long investment, because now it was Sunk cost, they couldn’t refund it, and couldn’t complete it, so it would stick there forever
You knew damn well what you were getting into if you bought Sekiro. Game journalists hiding behind the disabled to cover up their own ineptitude was not only laughable, but also deeply offensive.
@@PutkisenSetä firstly, I didn't buy sekiro, specifically for that very reason, and 2, Sekiro was an example, and accessibility, regardless of whether or not it was a cover for their own ineptitude, is still important, and still an issue worth covering
(necro) I've had a lesser issue like that with _Volgarr the Viking,_ in that I've _never_ been able to play all the way through it. I always screw up somewhere and have to restart. But I knew going into it that it was going to be a challenge. Plus it was only $8 in a Steam sale 7 years ago -- and I've definitely gotten more than $8 worth of fun out of it since then.
And iirc, it wasn't like kirk actively hacked anything, but rather used a weakness in the simulation itself which caused the so-called change in circumstances in the test.
I say Kirk had it right. The army has a saying "If you aint cheatin, you aint tryin". It means, the rules are just a set of intimidation conditions in "the game". If what you are doing is worthwhile, you do what you think is morally right ahead of staying within the rules. When you get caught (as eventually everyone does) you need to be able to say "it was worth it". Kirk knew this and made his choice.
I definitely side with Picard on this one. It's even true when you look at some historical events. The Polish army really stood no chance at all when the Germans initially attacked in World War II, but their struggle to the end bought key time for the Allies to get just a little better organized, many of their soldiers escaped from capture, and went on to fight in other battles later in the war. Just because you can't win now doesn't mean you can't learn from your mistakes and use those lessons to win on another attempt.
To be fair while yes they couldn't have ultimately won on their own, they certainly could've held out a lot longer if it wasn't for the soviet offensive and in the case of germany vs the soviets, yes germany could've won, but realistically it couldn't because of the nazi parties hardline racial policies towards the slavic people
Polanders made mistake before that moment. They were in the wait of the 2 legendary english divisions, that never shown up in any part of Europe. Wrong allies leadnig to loose.
they were also waiting for the soviets to support them from the back, but the soviets just attacked them. it was indeed a unwinnable scenario. but if they knew what would happen, they could have choose a option that would cause less loses.
Ok, I loved the Trek references, because I'm a massive Trek fan (I've watched every series and movie, most multiple times), and this was a brilliant episode! Also, Darmok and Jilad are, in fact, certainly at Tenagra, and your Picard voice is a magical thing. Can't wait to see more guys, and hopefully more with this level of Trek references, because...it's so good...
Xiaolin Showdown TV show had an episode where an interesting lesson happens. _"My goal is not to lose, but to keep you from winning"_ **Destroys item heroes were supposed to get**
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - GBS
While I consider Kirk cheating in the test defeats it's purpose, I would argue that "Kobayashi Maru" playtrough scenario should be at least balanced by low price of restarting game. Otherwise frustration with high chance will drop players out of the experience and instead of learning to handle unwinnable situations they would just drop the game. Probably more interesting choice would be to allow player to "cut the losses" in "Kobayashi Maru" situation (for example failing mission in XCOM game) but allow chance to bounce back and handle the result of the failure.
that is the big risk of such a scenario. If you don´t tell players they are supposed to lose, especially if there is a quicksave option they will try it 3 dozen times and then a lot of them will quit because they think they are too bad
I remember going into a joyful region. There was a lake, a natural chokepoint, plenty of trees, good mineral veins and cows nearby. 2 days in an it rained blood. Things got "fun" from there
I’ve really needed to hear this episode. I’ve had to confront a failing in my life situation I considered un-winnable. I did not expect this episode to provide an insight that was uplifting and true. Thank you Extra Credits.
I thought you were gonna talk about the no win scenarios that are placed when we're still not supposed to have a grasp on the game, such as the first "boss" on Demons Souls. Or when Snake "dies" in Mgs3 walking through the river sequence while ghosts haunt him...that kind of game designs. I whish you could address those some time.
@@lostwizard Actually, you're wrong about that one as the most popular opinion amongst statistical mathematicians is that ALL free-cell games are winnable. Granted, as of yet, no one has been able to present concrete evidence one way or the other because EVERY time someone claims to have found a shuffle of freecell that is unwinnable, someone solves it. BUT, as soon as it's number is divulged, experts are very quick to de-bunk this, detailing exactly how each one can be solved with detailed instruction on each solution. Granted the path is narrow, and quite often, only has a singular path to solution, but improbable doesn't mean impossible. tl;dr = Give me a specific 'un-winnable' free-cell game number (each one of the over 1 million shuffles are numbered for your convenience), because I'd LOVE to prove you wrong!!! (just do yourself a favor and google it first)
For me the more important question is: when a game is unwinable, do I know it? Kirk know about the fact that it was build to lose, so he was able to chance it. But if he didn't know about the fact, he couldn't cheat and had lost. So an important factor is the knowlege about an impossible situation!
I feel like iteration time plays a big factor in a game getting away with a no win scenario. If you have to devote a great deal of time into a game only to find out you were doomed from the start, that’s just frustrating. Shaka, when the walls fell.
Yes kids, life is a Kobayashi Maru scenario where believing in an afterlife is the captain Kirk solution and stoicism is the captain Picard solution. These are by no means the only solutions to life's RNG giving you a bad deal though, personally I'd like to see a captain who laughs at the gods and embraces absurdism.
Hey, EC, can you guys do an episode on the situation in China with regards to Blizzard taking lawfully won earnings and firing happenstance casters over a player showing solidarity for human rights protestors? This is eSports, and oughta be in your wheelhouse.
Also, let me rephrase your comment, because you seem to have left out a few important points here. “Blizzard bans gamer from joining future tournaments due to breach of contract” That should be enough.
In another way, Spec ops the like has a "win state". But I knew that the only real way to win that game was to stop playing. Which I think is a metaphor the game was trying to make. There are no anti war movies. But spec ops is an anti war game.
The game would have been cooler if, at the first few chapters of the game, you could backtrack to the beginning and leave at any time, the reasoning being you have accomplished your scouting objectives. But there was a "point of no return" that the squad couldnt go back anymore
In my personal opinion, it’s not “should randomly generated games have the possibility of being unwinnable?” But the more important question being “how much of a percentage should games be unwinnable?” What percent of games are acceptable to be unwinnable is determined on what type of game it is, because if the percentage is too high then you end up with one of two scenarios. 1. You get complaints from customers saying your game is unplayable, not knowing it is possible to win but they just never got the chance to win 2. Your game becomes a skinner box where winning feels as rare as winning the lottery or pulling that 1% ultra rare from that mobile game you play
Since we know that Klondike Solitaire has about a 20% probability of being unwinnable, and yet is enjoyed pretty widely, I’d call those odds pretty good. Well, pretty good for a single-player card game, anyway.
The main thing with unwinnable runs a la solitaire is that, at the start of the game, you do not necessarily know that it's unwinnable, which makes it more fun to try. If you become so rediculously experienced at the game that you see the starting hand and then know "oh this ones unwinnable, restart" and any other ones "oh this one's winnable, gg", it takes away the fun and the sensation of important choices. (Similarly, with slay the spire, imagine always know that playing a certain class, you'd NEED to get a certain card during the first few encounters to win the end boss, and if you didn't get it, it'd be unwinnable, that would be very frustrating.) It is the uncertainty of the "winnable" nature and the sense of influence you have over the game that can make something more fun, rather than just a dice-roll game. Also, if you've played old adventure games like King's Quest, you'll know how frustrating it is to have unwinnable scenarios without ANY feedback about winnability. This again has to do with agency; you can see how you can influence the randomness and try to make the right choices, knowing it won't always be perfect (as that is not a weakness, that is life) and have the sense of learning. But playing a game for 10 hours only to constantly die to a yeti with NO info that you should've saved the mouse six hours earlier to get past this encounter, well, that's what we call bullshit (Note that this is designed to be unwinnable, not caused by randomness).
A game i love playing that often has occasionally no win scenarios is Rimworld. Sometimes Randy simply decides your colony is done. Raid, raid, raid, blight, infestation, toxic fallout, and just for good measure, a drop pod of milk that'll spoil in 3 days. Even if the scenario presented is unwinnable, its always fun to hash it out until the bitter end. "Everyone is dead or gone. This story is over. Perhaps someone else will find a use for the ruins of this place". Such is life in the rim
A good way to solve random generated games that have the possibility of a "no win" issue is to have the program test to see if it's generated content can be one. If not, it tosses it and randomly generates again and again until the conditions are meant that allow a player to possibly win. For example, the Mario Maker games have a condition that in order to upload a level for others to enjoy, you must make it possible for the players to reach the goal and complete that level. I can see a game using bots to test if a randomly generated level is completable or not, granted that will take some additional programming. A lot probably. But it is possible.
optionally you can implement fail safes, if an scenario appears where nothing you can do can allow you to win the game, the game "cheats" and makes it possible, hard, but possible Imagine if in the binding of isaac you faced a boss whose attacks are way faster than your move speed meaning that you'll take guaranteed damage, then you could make the attack move just slow enough for it to be dodgeable BUT only when you are in such a situation, optionally, you could add the condition of the player having only half a heart left for the "cheat" to trigger
Better versions of computer solitaire have a toggle in their configuration options for if you want an actual purely-random deal, or one proven through brute-force solving to be winnable. This is the correct design choice. Some people are interested in optimising their performance on an unsolvable board (if that has meaning for the particular game they're playing) or care strongly about tabletop authenticity, and some are not (or want to track their improvement without the statistical complication of random unsolvable boards). In my view, if you are making a deterministic game with a state space simple enough to be solved quickly with brute force or similar methods, you have a responsibility to write a solver that can test randomly-generated levels and provide at least the option to prune bad levels (this solver is also useful for debugging and balancing purposes). If it's quick enough to play all possible games on a particular setup without introducing much wait, you can then use this test data to provide things like 'par' systems and more detailed scoring (explaining to the player that this level has one solution in 50 moves, three solutions in 51 moves, 37 solutions in 52 moves, etc.) Obviously not every game is simple enough to solve in such a fashion, and games with random factors during play get a pass (on top of being nightmares to check rigorously, the player typically has an expectation of luck being involved).
Microsoft's implementation of Freecell is supposed to always be solvable, but in reality, there are around half a dozen unsolvable deals within the first million. The older versions have fewer total deals (32768), and only one of those is unsolvable.
Reminds me if King's Quest: "Oh, you ate that pie in jail 8 hours ago? Well now the Yeti kills you cause you can't blind him by throwing the pie to it's face!"
Reminds me of FTL: Faster than Light (yeah, it's another DMC: Devil May Cry situation), in which the game is randomly generated and really, _really_ doesn't want you to win. Beat it a few month ago for the first time (on Easy, but still) and it was glorious. Randomly generated games sure are dangerous if you don't balance the options well enough. FTL sort of has that problem, since I never wanted to use Missile systems or Drones as I could run out easily at anytime and there were no consequences for not using them. Heck, some of the weapons that didn't use them were always my go-to weaponry, like Flak I. Plus, Drones had crazy timers as well, and weapons were just so much faster. Boarding was always a fun option, too, though it was tricky.
But it's not a no-win scenario in FTL. Because then it'd mean no matter how you reach the final boss, you still lose. perhaps if you are at the best of capability and arrive... the big boss ship's already destroyed your base, or you realize you've only destroyed the prototype and the REAL thing has just appeared, etc. etc. Now THAT is a no-win scenario, when the parameters of the 'game' keeps changing to counter whatever it is you do.
Mathematicians have found that you need 17 clues to solve a Sudoku. It would be neat to try to figure out what people need to be able to solve Solitaire puzzles.
With Klondike, it's just a matter of the random deal of cards sometimes making it unwinnable because you can't get to the cards you need to solve it, because they're trapped under the cards you need those hidden cards to move out of the way. One of the simplest to explain (but most extreme in practice) examples would be a deal where all the kings and and any 4 of a lower set are buried under queens. You'll never be able to win it, because there are no kings to move the queens on to and you can't solve down any stacks far enough to remove the queens that way. In practice, it's usually just two or three cards collectively buried. If you use the strict draw 3 at a time ruleset, that adds the factor of cards being buried in the stack order of the deck as well as under the played out cards.
@@MiseFreisin i dont know about known variables that signal a winnable game but im pretty sure that when you tell it to deal you a winnable hand the program just brute force checks every move.
I love playing rhytmn games, and while technically the win states for this genre would be an 100% for each song/map, most of the time actually grinding away to get 100% is way less fun than, say, challenging yourself to a harder level which you perform not as well in. (most) rhytmn games don't have a full win state really, there are always more songs, harder levels which you may not even be physically able to play, but that doesn't detract from any of the enjoyment you have playing the game.
That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate on this? I'm sure people would love to read about the writing lessons you manage to draw from this. And if not them, than at least I would.
MisterJasro Thank you for being interested! The lessons I glean from these gaming videos are mostly related to world-building and storytelling. For example, from this video, I learned to not be afraid of ending my stories in a way that may be awful finality for my characters. From their deck-builder explanations, I learned how to possibly write minor characters into great advancements for a story. From their video on games and emotions, I got an inside look on how to craft a world my readers feel for and characters my readers will be able to empathize with. (I mostly write on Wattpad, and consider myself good. Not great, but readable.)
Here's a related anecdote for this topic: There was a time when I played a ridiculous amount of Minesweeper. All the time, often while watching youtube on the side or something. I stumbled upon an interesting project somebody had made: a version of Minesweeper that removed guessing. Every board was solvable, every board was winnable. And it was SO BORING! I was pretty darn good at sweeping, so I just... won. A lot. Even though the actual challenge, the puzzle solving aspect, was the exact same, being forced to lose games by random chance alone made the game more enjoyable, so I went back to the regular game.
I was thinking about Minesweeper, too. Every game of standard Minesweeper is technically winnable, but you generally need both luck and deduction to find the solution. That combination makes it fun. Also, I'm glad I'm not the only one who has played an embarrassing amount of Minesweeper :-)
The one thing that's always annoyed me in many games is the concept of the Designer Induced No Win Scenario. You know what I'm talking about. You're in a boss battle, obviously curb-stomping him into the dirt, but then just as his health bar gets to a sliver it switches over to a cutscene where, somehow, the boss turns things around and beats you in a few hits. You KNOW you could beat him if the game hadn't wrested control away from you but because the story demanded it, you lose. It's such a clunky and irritating thing to do. Although, arguably even worse are the battles where the designers INTEND for you to lose. You go into the fight but the boss has constently regenerating health, or is just too strong with moves that kill you in a couple hits, where no matter how much to reload you can't beat him. So you lose. And, oh look, a cut scene where your pals swoop in and save you, indicating that you never had a chance to win.
The bad type of your second scenario is when the 'forced loss' isn't obvious. A situation where the game let you level up a bit, so you can almost keep up with the boss's kill shots using items/ect, only to find out after expending your entire inventory that you were supposed to lose in the first minute or two.Then, the next time you get into a tough fight, you assume its the same 'unwinnable' situation, only to have a game over screen, because the levels finally caught up to you.
Oh, and don't forget the even worse variation: if you actually get beat by the boss, it's game over, but if you beat it, THEN the narrative takes over and shoehorns you into a loss. Yeah, honestly, if the encounter is a cutscene disguised as a boss fight, just make it a cutscene from the beginning.
its important that those scenarios at least feel fair. in Battleforge reborn, higher level random PVE scenarios against certain factions are basially unwinnable. thats more of a botched balancing issue imo.
If the scneario is so rare then there should be a feature to prevent it from happening, rarely telling the player "you're not allowed to win" is a flaw, so at least make it, that in the case it you where to get that unlucky, the game "counter-cheats" the situation to give you a chance, many games do this as to ensure players always have a chance
I've always hated solitaire because I quickly figured out no-win starting states were possible. I guess I'm just not the kind of player that is motivated by impossible situations.
Chika: * breezes through rules and rock, paper, scissors * Then let's start! President: Hold your horses, Fujiwara Chika: Wh-wh-what is it president- President: There are a number of points in not clear about First, the fact that you challenged us to a memory game I didn't quite get that. Normally, I'd think you'd choose a game you were actually good at and you breezed through this rule, but minus 5 points for cheating? Not instant disqualification? That made me wary. I may not have noticed if you'd kept your mouth shut, but these designs (on the card) kinda look like numbers. President (now shouting), This is a marked deck! Shirogane: It really is! Fujiwara senpai, that's low! Underhanded! And getting caught by the gambit you relied on! That's the most embarrassing thing! Sauced from Love is war, an anime
Combine randomly unwinnable games with a Skinner box mechanic, plus some predatory micro transactions, and you've got yourself a reliable way to spend an unlimited amount of money.
I've actually played Slay the spire and had the feeling of it sometimes being unwinnable, personally, I find that fact to make it much less enjoyable, I play games to enjoy testing my skill, when no level of skill makes it winnable then it's not fun.
this probably wasnt the case for you tho. Will plays exclusively on ascension 20, the hardest difficulty mode available. The best player in the world, jorbs, has won ascension 20 7 different times in a row, and wins it super consistently on stream. The issue here isnt that it was unwinnable, it's that you (and this happens to me too) werent good enough to see what mistake you made previously. Your mistake might have been on some card u chose wrong, some path, maybe a potion u didnt get at a shop. But the run was winnable, the mere existence of jorbs proves that. I think people are too fast to call runs "unwinnable", simply because they dont see what they could have done better. But there is always stuff u could have done better, at least at lower difficulties (lower than A18)
@@Speedy-Rabbit To be more precise, It's important to know that the difference between a good and a great is slim, but makes the difference. Max might have made a little mistake overall and that might not even hit people back mostly, but a few times it does. And that's good because while they are nuances, nuances are important for learning to be better.
No win scenarios can sometimes enhance the experience of a game. Halo Reach comes to mind. The final mission is quite literally unbeatable. Even if you play perfectly, you will eventually die, because the game will simply keep spawning more and more and more enemies. You're supposed to try your hardest to keep those Spartans alive, only to lose them. Because the game itself is about loss. This being done through gameplay, rather than a cutscene, was a brilliant decision to my mind. Our natural inclination is to try our hardest to win and survive, even if we know intellectually that the Spartans do not make it out of this fight alive. That we try so hard, and then lose, makes the loss all the more bitter, but also more sweet in a way, because we took as many as those darned aliens with us as we could.
A mild tangent of un-winable as well as lose scenarios: One of the great things about games is the immense toolbox of learning, iterating, and problem solving we learn along the way. As stated we will face situations beyond the game where we can't or don't get to "win." If we were to omit the cases of un-winable scenarios from our games we would lose much of the lessons we can learn within the categories I previously listed. Games can and do teach analysis of systems and by having un-winable situations we are able to learn to identify when those systems align to create a situation we can't solve at no fault of our own.
With way the hell too much time on my hands, I have thought up at least three scenarios where a cadet can actually beat the Kobayashi Maru as established within the world of Star Trek. It takes a lot of outside-the-box creative thinking (one of the scenarios took me more than a year to think up) but it's actually "do-able".
This is another version of the classic dilemma about "voyage vs destination". The purpose of a game is not to win, but to enjoy the time spent playing! And oftentimes a played can have great fun even if they lost, because they pushed their skills to the limit. I believe it's the same for our life.
There are some runs of Halo with self-imposed rules that cause a game to be unwinnable, for instance the rocket sloths run of halo ce maw warthog run warthog a warthog
I love randomly generated games that have the potential for 'No Win' scenarios, as long as they aren't toooo common, of course. What I'm really looking for as a gamer are those RNG's that occasionally generate the 'sweet spot' of that session that seems *almost* unbeatable, but which through pluck, determination and cleverness, I manage to beat anyway. Followed by a session of personal back-patting that should result in severe shoulder dislocation. Likewise those sessions that I just barely lose, when I really know I could have beaten them if only I had only seen that obvious opening or correct move in hindsight. And those sessions where I just get unfairly creamed? Well, I can always blame those on the RNG and move on to the next session! :D
I Think no-win Scenarios are good if they are the result of a players choices. In XCOM if you don't research laser and plasm guns efficently, it doesn't matter how good your luck is.
I think this serves as a bridge to the RPG notion that we ultimately define for ourselves what constitutes victory or a satisfactory outcome. In games where victory conditions are not defined for us, we define ourselves what _winning_ is. Roguelikes are notorious for having plays-through that are not winnable (or become super-hard-mode) due to turns of luck. The challenge then is less about getting to the end but just getting as far as you can.
When doing random generations, it's possible sometimes to design your algorithms based on the idea of either working backwards from and endpoint or defining a set of constraints on how far the deviations can stray from an initial known path to success. One example, the classic NxM sliding-tile puzzle can often have its tiles placed into an unsolvable pattern. But if you start with the solution and scramble using randomized user-choices, you know the outcome is solvable. Another example is how 2d level maps are often algorithmically expanded atop a fixed set of connected ends/points. Substituting straight paths for detours, or adding other branches to explore wont prevent the user from reaching the goals you started with.
I would like to use another example as a counterpoint to the idea that no-win scenarios can be helpful: Young Justice. In a season 1 episode, the main characters were put into a no-win scenario that they didn’t know was unwinnable. The very next episode had them all going to a therapist to talk about the psychological damage it did to them. No-win scenarios might be able to teach us a few things, but they can also drive a person into despair
yeah, having a sense of agency is really important for mental health. teh easiest way to make somebody depressed is to do things to them that they have no control over.
"but now we're no longer playing the same game we started" was literally the idea I had for an unwinnable solitaire hand, once you reach a point where you can't continue just switch to counting down and don't worry about alternating colors
This might be the topic for another video, but randomness doesn't need to leave room for no-win starting points. It helps to start from a known solution work backwards so there's always at least one solution - just be sure you can still check for other valid solutions if the player finds any. Working backwards could be making sure at least one of several ways to beat a challenge are possible, or shuffling a portion of your solved puzzle in a way that still results in a valid solution.
I think it depends entirely on the nature of the no-win scenario. Thematic no-win scenarios like "In Utter Darkness" in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty can still be fun, but it requires changing 'win' from 'at least do something before losing', which by some metrics just means that the victory condition is different than a conventional 'win outright' - IE, most Star Wars games that portray Hoth from the Rebel POV will still label the mission completion as a victory even though lore wise it was really a defeat that was just mitigated by preparation and buying time. Randomly generated content, OTOH, is a much trickier kettle of fish because usually they aren't designed with that thematic idea in mind, and then you have to ask the larger consequences. Solitaire, for example, is nominally just something you're doing to kill the time so for most people an unwinnable deck doesn't really hurt them that much since they're just passing the time anyways. However, larger in time games such as Total War or XCOM can have a much harder thing with bigger consequences, even if perhaps it thematically fits. Total War: Warhammer II had an issue with the Ritual Armies during the Eye of the Vortex campaign - essentially up to five stacks (armies) of Chaos or Skaven that show up at a random location to try and take your ritual sites to disrupt it. Problem is that they usually would spawn in areas that were secure, and the spawn location also changes to be your least defended territory if you try to save scum. And this also means that you'll be set back in development severely because they just try to burn down everything. Yeah, it can be an interesting challenge to try and bleed out these stacks as much as you can with just garrison units, but it's just frustrating because it comes out of nowhere and you have no real way to interdict this. And worse, no real way to plan for it other than trying to have a garrison army everywhere which can become prohibitively expensive even if you disabled the increased upkeep per extra army (I do, personally, but only because the AI doesn't deal with that penalty - fair is fair). Now, technically this happens in XCOM all the time, especially in nuCOM with Abduction Missions, but the issue is that nuCOM was designed overall with that in mind, while Warhammer II's EotV campaign still uses the basic Total War setup which means that you actually can have effectively secure heartlands. Bit of a tangent, but it brings me to what I think is a missed point. The real question needs to be a philosophical one of design: if a scenario is unwinnable, why is it unwinnable? Is it unwinnable for the right reasons such as being part of the game design and the pitch, or is it unwinnable for the wrong reasons and has consequences long-lasting enough that it just makes it frustrating rather than something that can be accepted? Losing something because of a blunder you made at least has a more direct learning experience: don't repeat that blunder. Losing because the game itself was rigged, or the only path to victory requires professional gaming tier skills when you're just a casual player, doesn't really teach much in my opinion. It can be fine, but there needs to be something more or something thematic to it so it can be more than just 'lol we make you lose because I say so'. (And at risk of another tangent, this is why Kai Leng was so hated in Mass Effect 3 I think: the plot called for Shepard to lose on Thessia, but the situation was not presented as you were going to lose. In fact, you basically *win* that fight then you lose when the cutscene hits. Which could probably be a video of its own - the issue of gameplay victory but storyline defeat and the difficulties of reconciling the two)
In Starcraft 2, there are two levels called In Utter Darkness and Last Stand. In both of them, the objective is basically to survive endless waves of attacking alien monsters - Zergs and Hybrids - as much as possible. It is impossible to actually beat the enemy and the results are either: a) an in-game game over, telling you those events will transpire and the universe is doomed if you do not act to prevent them. b) a Pyrrhic victory, where you lure as many enemies as you can to the planet and then blow it up to prevent it from being overrun. I love those levels. They are some of my favorite in the entire franchise.
It's an interesting topic that I think applies especially to TTRPG's. The adage "you don't win at D&D" comes to mind. The only victory you can achieve is self-determined, based on what you want your character to do before they retire or die. Like life. All the more so with a game like "Call of Cthulhu" where progress or success usually comes at the cost of your own sanity, and "losing" the game because your character went insane is all part of the fun.
I think the best way to define the value of these no-win situations in games is to not think about it in strict terms of all-or-nothing victory or defeat, but rather in terms of progression and player experience. To use Slay the Spire (or other roguelikes, for that matter) as an example, when starting out, even if you have no way of reaching/defeating the final boss of a run, every granular victory along the way contributes to your player level, which can offer new options/playstyles the next time you try, as well as the player learning to identify things that they should avoid along the way. Even though there was no final victory, progression was earned and the player had fun (or didn't) experiencing the game.
This really speaks to how I find Magic: The Gathering. Sometimes you get a hand that looks great, but then you draw all lands for the next 10 turns. I feel like the Kirk reaction would be to go back and tweak your deck to "change the conditions" of the test. Sure you might win the next game, but it's a different deck. The Picard reaction would be to play a few more hands to see how far your strategy takes you. As for how I play, it really depends on the day and the deck. Sometimes if I know I have no Outs and can't respond to a threat i'll concede early to reshuffle and play again, and sometimes i'll stick it out "If I just draw X, I can make it" And what do you know, I draw X.
I think it can be very telling of a player's outlooks and temperament when they take explicit aversion to games with potentially unwinnable situations, genuine or merely perceived. Whether it's that a game is not fun unless they're winning, that it's a realization of futility, or overall the perception of unfairness which they play games as escapism from in real life. These aren't necessarily negative, but one could stand to be more conscious of their own mentality and how they handle such situations, both in games and out.
But that's not the same as the Kobayashi Maru, because that'd be like if the game you played is by DEFINITION unwinnable. whatever you do, you get countered, no matter the min-max tactic, you still lose, etc. etc. If the game as the chance of being unwinnable, you STILL have the actual chance of winning.
![[SFM] Risky Recital](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/RzNkY1_Nk3o/mqdefault.jpg)
Is it okay to have no win scenarios designed into your game? Are they a hindrance to the game or an opportunity for self-reflection? Or are they something else entirely? And do you consider yourself more of a Captain Kirk or a Captain Picard?
Wow
As long as they feel fair im ok
I personally dislike no win scenarios if they are the result of you playing a game your way. Those tend to be pretty common in old-school RPGs. Like, sure, if you do something stupid like putting all of your skill points in melee, but proceed to use only ranged weapons, then of course you should be punished. But if you decide to spec your character for melee combat, only to find out that even the best melee weapon in the game does no damage to the final boss, that's just dumb. Devs should at the very least make sure that, if their game allows multiple approaches to character creation, then all of those can be used to achieve victory, even if some may be harder than others. And preferably without ridiculous amounts of grind.
great potential for a cthulhu-game. like if you agree.
Extra Credits in games we are the sole winners and losers of the situation, in real life it is possible to know your going to lose and position that loss as a win for others, I think Harry Potter proved that when he let Voldemort kill him, turning a no win scenario for himself into a winnable scenarios for others
Here's the hybrid of the Kirk and Picard philosophies: If the scenario you find yourself in is actually unwinnable, then change your definition of winning. Learning something about yourself is as valid a win condition as completing a level or attaining a certain score. Decide how YOU would like to win, and achieve that.
That's essentially what Data does at the end of that same episode of The Next Generation. He's played a game against this supreme tactician, and he's begun to doubt his abilities because he lost - so he plays a rematch aiming for a stalemate rather than victory. The tactician gets angry and forfeits the game, so in a way he's won without winning.
this probably applies to games, too
in starcraft 2, for example, a fair amount of the game is decided pretty early in the match based on how well each player sets up their economy. it's possible to enter a sc2 match and essentially lose before ever seeing the opponent if they're more experienced or prepared than you are. when pros address this situation to less skilled players, a common refrain is for the losing player to use that loss to build on their overall play. they implore players to watch the replays of their losses and assess how the loss happened in and effort to grow as a player. in that sense, they're changing the win condition from winning the match to becoming a better player overall
@Lucas de Abreu That's called playing a game. Hardly any video games, upon victory, actually award you anything meaningful to anyone but yourself.
@Lucas de Abreu how is it delusional or a trick?
That's part of why Civilization is so great; depending on what civ you're playing as, you can change your strategies and go for a different win scenario if you can't catch up in one category.
Case in point, if someone's outpacing you in a Science victory, you could always cut the knot and just start conquering their civ.
I think you disregarded Kirk's approach a bit too quickly. Remember he beat it on the third attempt.
The point of his "cheating" is that he found a weakness in the game that wasn't intended (an exploit) in order to still win.
I think his philosophy is that by not "believing" in no-win scenarios you say that, I won't accept the conditions laid before me and will instead look for the weaknesses inherent to the problem and find a way to win that no-one has yet considered.
This is the same motivation that inspires speed-running and even coupon hoarders.
If there is an exploit he can use to win, the situation no longer meets the definition (in this video) of an unwinnable game. While there is utility in not believing in no-win scenarios (it promotes useful problem solving techniques), this method only works if the scenario is actually winnable some how. Refusing to believe in no-win scenarios is a recipe for disaster if a true unwinnable scenario is encountered.
To me, it seems like the root of this topic is the idea of grappling with something that is impossible for you to do, regardless of your feelings towards it. It's certainly an idea worth exploring
I mean, when you look at the problem he was facing, it would be the same as giving someone a clearly rigged game (unachievable win condition).
Searching for an exploit is the proper way to address such cases (I mean, if that were a "realistic" scenario to happen with the crew, than finding the exploit or shifting winning points was the way to go)
Thanks, I appreciate the new perspective on Kirk's approach!
That was how I took it. It’s not cheating, it’s strategy.
Actually from my perspective, Kobayashi Maru was a test of thinking outside of the box, and breaking (hacking the game) was one of those. It reminds me of the chuunin test, where the questions where really hard and you are expected to fail and they had to use their skills to overcome this and cheat to prevail w/o being caught.
An important part in the Star Trek TNG version of the dilemma is that, in the rematch, Data changes his strategy from play-to-win to play-to-tie (i.e. a defensive strategy instead of an aggressive one), with a better outcome for him than if he would've played-to-win. He still didn't technically win (well, his opponent gave up in frustration, but with a higher score than Data's).
So IMHO this shows another meta-strategy for the Kobayashi Maru: if you know that you are not going to win, change your strategy accordingly, because a simply "to win" strategy might not me optimal for this premise.
Actually, playing to tie (actually playing to _stalemate) is_ a win for Data, because Data has functionally limitless stamina. He didn't have to beat his opponent mentally, he could just run the clock and beat his opponent _physically_ .
See also Troi trying to save the Enterprise without anyone dying.
Example: hold opponent's forces back long enough for reinforcements to arrive. A direct onslaught might be impossible to succeed, but it might be feasible to stand your ground (e.g. in a siege scenario).
Oh, how I miss good trek! :-(
Moritz von Schweinitz Interesting idea of a strategy, but can one really “play to tie” in most games, which tend to be zero sum? Even the comments below debate whether Data “won” with that strategy, because that’s the point; you either win or lose.
It seems like, if you know you’re not going to win, rather than change the strategy, one should change the goal. Instead of playing defensively to wear out your opponent’s stamina/patience (so you win that way), aim for making the opponent’s victory as pyrrhic as possible.
Well, just an hour ago I started a round of solitaire and INSTANTLY, without moving one card, I got the message that no other moves were possible
Solitaire needs achievements just so that can be one of them
I have had that happen before back on windows XP. Also I once made two moves, and then lost.
Or take Marcus's pov from B5.
[paraphrased]
"I'm glad that life is unfair, otherwise it mean you deserve all the awful stuff that happens to you".
MrInternetHermit That is, if life is unfair.
"So now I take great pleasure in the pervasive bitterness and apathy of the Univers." Also paraphrased.
B5, and Marcus in particular, are wonderul
@@herosmith5662 Very true.
@@CurtisJensenGames My personal pov is that life is unfavorable fair. Bad stuff happens, you are just the unlucky sod in the wrong place and time.
MrInternetHermit And that’s a very understandable point of view.
I believe that life is unfair, but in the positive direction: I think we deserve more pain, but that God is merciful enough to overpay us. If life were fair, every mistake would immediately yield pain.
If the game designers are cognizant of the fact that parts of their game are unwinnable then there's a lot of interesting things they can do with the game that a more traditional "win to progress" game can't. As someone who plays mostly strategy games, I've always been annoyed by how at times in that genre the game's narrative demands that you lose, but that's always a cutscene or debriefing text and not something that plays out in gameplay. The concept of "failing forward" is something I think games could do more and do better.
But then there is purpose of challenge or scenario modes, where there are scenarios meant for advanced players who either learns or exercises advanced concepts.
For a game designer making a scenario where there is no way to be victorious, there is an opportunity for implied or emergent mechanics where a player does not have to follow orthodox means to make the win and not make the end objective obvious.
I dislike "you have to lose" moments in a similar fashion to "you have to win ones". There was a dbz game which had "unwinnable fights" but if you actually managed to win them then you would unlock a secret path in the history. Always thought it was a brilliant approach
I can remember a level from company of heroes 1 that was at the end of the german campaign. It didn't have win conditions, just a scoreboard on how long you could hold the line and make a retreat possible. Those retreating troops you could recruit in exchange for not getting a reward for getting them out. It was a really interesting scenario, and definetly hte most memorable of the game for me. I haven't seen anything like that yet in other games i played.
To be fair I could recall there being a few strategy games where the goal isn't to win, but to avoid losing for a set period of time. There definitally isn't enough, especially since most of those end with "miracle reinforcements" of some sort.
Actually now that I think of it most of Outpost 2's campaign maps aren't about winning, but building up enough supplies that you can start again with a bigger colony on the next map.
The first Kessen game on the PS2 did this brilliantly. The "historic" outcome of the campaign was "tokugawa wins all of these battles". But what if the player didn't? Or was playing the other side and won?
Well... The campaign branched. It did mean it was a bit shorter, admittedly. Also, after every main battle there was a pursuit of the loosing commander. Tokugawa always escapes successfully, but his various subordinates Don't.
Likewise, if the opposing side loses the battle but retreats successfully... Well, historically they go through a bunch of commanders who died for various reasons (I believe mostly by way of not getting away after the battle), but If you keep them alive... well, some of them die anyway due to other factors (illness and such) but Others surviving the battle causes the campaign to branch again!
It's great.
It does mean that, from memory, some paths are only three battles and a couple of pursuits, and the Longest path was no more than 6, but there were fully voiced cut scenes all over the show.
Apparently the actual gameplay in battle wasn't super popular (personally, I loved it), mostly because units took a bit of time to respond to orders (they had to get the order, sort themselves out from what they were doing, turn a (usually close order) formation of anything from a few hundred to several thousand men to face the right way, and only Then could they advance, for example. Which could sometimes take a while.)
Am I the only one who is stuck thinking about sleeveless shirts having sleeve holes for characters with no arms?
that should be an episode here
I am now...
That's an unwinable scenario right there...
Its there to cool the armpits
You're not the only one. XD
A strange game.
The only winning move is not to play.
Basicall what the devs of Spec Ops The Line had in mind.
Takahashi Fujihita The Game
Good references are good. ^^
Dating in a nutshell
Has Cold War flashbacks
A meaningful distinction here would be the difference between games which are narratively unwinnable vs Mechanically unwinnable
I think I agree, but would like to know what your reasoning is for that.
If a scenario is mechanically winnable, but narratively unwinnable, then Kirk's "Cheat to win" makes sense.
If it is Narratively Winnable, but mechanically unwinnable, then I can only see people getting frustrated and rage-quitting.
If it is unwinnable in both ways, then why play in the first place?
@@offduty23 How would a game that is only narratively winnable even look like? I have never heard about a game that was mechanically unwinnable AND had a narrative.
@@yonokhanman654 While I can't speak for the person making this post, I don't think he's referring to something you could win narratively, but fail mechanically. Usually if you win a game, you've won both mechanically AND narratively. (And, yes, even games without story tend to fall into a "narrative consistency." Or in other words, since we as human beings usually interpret information in a form that resembles a story, even technically story-less events have stories.)
But as for unwinnable games and scenarios, you could fail one way or the other, or even both ways. You could fail mechanically, and be fated to fail before you've begun, because you were dealt a bad hand, because RNG was not good to you, because you're matched against an opponent who paid actual money to get enhancements in a free-to-play game, etc.
Or you could fail narratively, where even though you did everything right and technically won, the script still fates you to lose in the narrative. There's no way to save Aerith, no matter how well you play. Sarah Kerrigan will always become the Zerg Queen, even if in play, you completely hold back the Zerg invasion. Even after winning Portal, Chell is guaranteed to be captured and dragged back into Aperture.
And then you can fail both, of course. Tetris or Pac-Man are classic examples of that; the games can't technically be "won" - only continued, but fated to end eventually. So, the mechanics will make your play eventually impossible, and the narrative is that the Tetriminoes always fall into disarray, or that Pac-Man never escapes the ghosts. Thus, you "fail" both mechanically and narratively, even though you technically succeeded.
But yeah. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying, you're right; much more often than not, you can't win narratively while failing mechanically. There are a few rare exceptions, of course; one of the Harvest Moon games allows you to marry your rival, resulting in a game over, but the story ends somewhat happily. Or... if you secretly consider the Game Over animation in Banjo-Kazooie to be a reward (I admit, there was a time when I did), then, losing the game results in a "win" of sorts.
Anyway. That's just my thought on this. Sorry for taking up so much time.
@@yonokhanman654 when you can win the fight but the cutscene shows you losing. -.-
@@anthonynorman7545 But that's winning mechanically while losing narratively. I asked for the opposite.
Anyone remember the AI that played Tetris that paused the game indefinitely when it worked itself into a corner? That'd probably be a fun episode topic, too!
This
That's just AI learning to rage quit
@@goteer10 They grow up so fast.
There are a handful of similar anecdotes from other AI development during games. My favorite is when an evolutionary AI "learned" to crash the game if it was losing. Playing through to the end would result in a bot's strategy not being included in the next generation but if the game crashed it was assumed by the developers that it was unrelated to the AI so it was run again for that generation. That gave it an additional chance to win so it outperformed competing variants.
Eventually, that lead to many of the AIs independently discovering a strategy where they played reasonably most of the time but triggered a crash when they were close to losing until most of them had that strategy.
If I'm remembering correctly, the attack was actually pretty clever in its simplicity. It would just start sending instructions that units should go to a location out of bounds. That caused the error log to record "hey, this unit is trying to go out of bounds". But unlike everything else, error logs were written to a persistent hard disk instead of just being in memory on a virtual machine so it was orders of magnitude slower. If it just sent enough of those orders, the portion of the hardware allocated to it couldn't keep up.
I got reminded of this too actually
I thought you were gonna talk about the end of Halo: Reach or those intro sequences in a lot of games where you're designed to lose for thematic reasons.
That last level in Reach is actually one of my favorite video game levels in any game
Hmm. Wonder why that trip wire is there. . . well I'll just cut it or step over it and. . . aw great. Its one of *those* trip wires. . .
My mind immediately went to the first Seath encounter in Dark Souls.
While those sections are technically "unwinnable", they don't actually cause a failure state in the game. Losing there is whats *supposed* too happen, so they don't really count as "not winning".
@@Ryktes Not being a dick, I agree with you, but to*
Good rule of thumb is if the word can be replaced with "also" then you use 2 "o"s
"Gentlemen, welcome to Dubai."
I understood that reference.
You could have just...stopped.
@@quietone610 But on you marched...
WE DID THIS ALREADY
Truly one of the greatest games I own, that I will NEVER play again.
In the Total War series I think we call this a "valiant defeat." Go down fighting... and take the foe with you.
Yes. Most of my favorite memories in strategy games came from no-win scenarios. There is something satisfying in holding out for as long as you can in a valiant last stand.
@@mitwhitgaming7722 Playing magic, I find particularly more satisfying when you can take your defeat as your own.
Finding a unlikely way to kill yourself before the opponent, or just making your defeat the most enjoyable (making your opponent go overkill).
In chess, I remember how once I would clearly lose to my opponent, yet it always resulted in a stalemate (only had the king left while he had a bunch of pieces. he was having a hard time). It was particularly pleasing
@@mitwhitgaming7722 ah but even then you can cheese the game a lot. For example, in medieval 2 I let a castle defended only by some militia, but the castle had cannon towers. As such I "sally" forth and let my towers decimate the enemy.... I got a draw, so i broke the seige, plus I killed a whole lot of enemies. I consider that a win in my book.
@@nnaauujjddaa Oh I love doing that. Sometimes I will bleed out overwhelming invasion forces with staged and choreographed pyrrhic victories until they are weak, overextended and can't resupply. Combine that with a scorched earth policy and you have a winning recipe. Kind of like all the failed invasions of Russia.
@@TealWolf26 nah man too much trouble I just send twice as many men as they do. "Oh you send 1 full stack, here I have two, oh what's that? You have another in reserve? Me too! What a coincidence!" That said in an emergency I may try to do that until I can send a true army.
"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Reload a previous save, or continue in this doomed world."
The thread of prophecy is severed. Why do i feel like you are referring to morrowind
@@thenthson More games should do what Morrowind did and let players derail the story.
hey if you kill vivec when he is still immortal (yes it is possible) you literally break the game and you need to reload a save.
I approach the problem from a Tabletop RPG perspective. “Old School” design aesthetic posits that there are some fights or challenges that are beyond the players: the “supposed to run” type of encounters. While I appreciate that perspective, I feel like modern design should include multiple outs or avenues to “victory.” When I make an encounter that is so hard it’s practically unwinnable, that feels like a mistake.
You're approaching this from the opposite perspective. A DnD encounter, for example, isn't really random. Even "random" encounters aren't actually random - they are predetermined by a list of possible encounters which itself was already handpicked by the GM with knowledge of what the players can and can't do.
Thus, if you engineer a situation in which your players cannot possibly succeed (and this isn't unlikely to succeed, but actually impossible: even if the party constantly rolls 20s and the enemies are constantly rolling 1s), the question becomes "for what reason?". It could be part of the story, it could be something else, it could be a mistake on your part or on the players' part. In the Kobayashi Maru, the whole point is to test the judgement of the pilot and teach them a lesson about morality.
It's different, however, when we are talking about randomness. With randomness there can be a possibility of an unwinnable scenario which might have been unforeseen. This result is due to a sequence of events beyond the player's agency. For example: in Yu-Gi-Oh! getting the 5 cards of the Exodia ends the duel. If you're playing some Yugioh game (simulator or not) and the AI just happens to draw these 5 cards in their first hand on the first turn, you just lose without being able to play at all. Or in the video's case, with solitaire, there are orders of cards that at some point, no matter what you do, will get you locked and run out of possible moves.
Both of these examples aren't scenarios the devs calculated and planned for, just natural occurrences due to a mixture of the game's rules and randomness.
I have to say, I was the guy in old AD&D that came up with...*creative* ways of getting the win. (I played wizards a lot.)
For example, if some dark lord or some such was threatening to slaughter the villagers if we opposed him, I'd burn down the village to force the people to relocate away from the crazy murder guy.
The players should try and win the encounter... but that doesn't mean the have to WIN the fight and kill everyone. It's simply to win the encounter, however they may think that is the right thing to do.
I love that the Kobayashi Maru is now considered an engineering exercise. Now they expect you to hack it and pass it, and your graded on how well you did your hack, not what you did in the test.
That certainly explains DS9's "Valiant".
This made me think of Don't Starve and some roguelikes where there is no win scenario baked into the game at all.
Yeah. I was thinking of *Dwarf Fortress* and *Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.* I play them all the time, but there's no way to "win" either game. There are plenty of ways to lose, but no way to win. Playing the game - even when you end up "losing" - is how you "win."
I was thinking about Don't Starve and Dwarf Fortress. They're evidence that you don't have to win a game. Maybe in that situation a "win" could count as being satisfied with what you accomplished in the game and moving on.
I get quickly bored of games with no win conditions because there is no motivational drive to keep playing.
For example I don't find a lot of fun in an endless high score game, but if it is a high score game that is possible to win, for example Super Hexagon, I feel motivated to play for much longer before dropping it in favor of another game.
I know that games are meant to be played for fun, but winning is a huge part of the fun for me. If I can't win, I have significantly less fun.
Or CK2 or EU4. You can't technically win, but survive.
Or Kenshi. There are plenty of games with no win conditions, and they tend to be the ones I get the most enjoyment out of.
But the interesting thing about the “Kirkian” approach, is that the Kobayashi Maru was winnable- because he hacked it, and it was an unintended solution sure, but the ability to alter the test to ensure victory is a part of the “universal set” of outcomes that can be generated.
And I think the dangerous thing with no-win scenarios is their accidental creation: that is to say, when the abilities of the player cannot be sufficiently improved to result in a victory- like the Sekiro accessibility controversy a while back, where it often required reflexes do good that lesser players were unable to win an ostensibly winnable game simply because they cannot react quickly enough, or aren’t dexterous enough to perform actions, especially after long investment, because now it was Sunk cost, they couldn’t refund it, and couldn’t complete it, so it would stick there forever
You knew damn well what you were getting into if you bought Sekiro. Game journalists hiding behind the disabled to cover up their own ineptitude was not only laughable, but also deeply offensive.
@@PutkisenSetä firstly, I didn't buy sekiro, specifically for that very reason, and 2, Sekiro was an example, and accessibility, regardless of whether or not it was a cover for their own ineptitude, is still important, and still an issue worth covering
(necro) I've had a lesser issue like that with _Volgarr the Viking,_ in that I've _never_ been able to play all the way through it. I always screw up somewhere and have to restart.
But I knew going into it that it was going to be a challenge. Plus it was only $8 in a Steam sale 7 years ago -- and I've definitely gotten more than $8 worth of fun out of it since then.
And iirc, it wasn't like kirk actively hacked anything, but rather used a weakness in the simulation itself which caused the so-called change in circumstances in the test.
... Seems Zoey knows all too well what happens to those in Star Trek wearing red shirts...
"A Strange Game, The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play."
I say Kirk had it right. The army has a saying "If you aint cheatin, you aint tryin". It means, the rules are just a set of intimidation conditions in "the game". If what you are doing is worthwhile, you do what you think is morally right ahead of staying within the rules. When you get caught (as eventually everyone does) you need to be able to say "it was worth it".
Kirk knew this and made his choice.
I definitely side with Picard on this one. It's even true when you look at some historical events. The Polish army really stood no chance at all when the Germans initially attacked in World War II, but their struggle to the end bought key time for the Allies to get just a little better organized, many of their soldiers escaped from capture, and went on to fight in other battles later in the war. Just because you can't win now doesn't mean you can't learn from your mistakes and use those lessons to win on another attempt.
To be fair while yes they couldn't have ultimately won on their own, they certainly could've held out a lot longer if it wasn't for the soviet offensive and in the case of germany vs the soviets, yes germany could've won, but realistically it couldn't because of the nazi parties hardline racial policies towards the slavic people
Polanders made mistake before that moment. They were in the wait of the 2 legendary english divisions, that never shown up in any part of Europe. Wrong allies leadnig to loose.
Going back to games however, since in most games of this nature you don't get anything from loosing, it's just a waste of time
Britain promising to defend Poland with two legendary divisions gave Poland a blank check for their interactions with the Third Reich.
they were also waiting for the soviets to support them from the back, but the soviets just attacked them. it was indeed a unwinnable scenario. but if they knew what would happen, they could have choose a option that would cause less loses.
This was oddly relevent to my current health situation.
Oh god. I wish you good luck.
:(
Dont take the Kirk way or Picard way. Take the Klingon way and laugh.
Ok, I loved the Trek references, because I'm a massive Trek fan (I've watched every series and movie, most multiple times), and this was a brilliant episode! Also, Darmok and Jilad are, in fact, certainly at Tenagra, and your Picard voice is a magical thing. Can't wait to see more guys, and hopefully more with this level of Trek references, because...it's so good...
Trek fans seem to be a dying breed. :c
He didn't beam up at the end... I was slightly disappointed.
There is still wisdom to be gained when you _fail faster_
I mean you learn more from 'failure' than you do from 'success'.
I thought this was about forced game over situations.
Would love to hear you guys talk about that concept.
Xiaolin Showdown TV show had an episode where an interesting lesson happens.
_"My goal is not to lose, but to keep you from winning"_
**Destroys item heroes were supposed to get**
The beast at Tanagra
Shaka, when the walls fell
Kadir beneath Mo Moteh
Kailash, when it rises
Sokath, his eyes uncovered
Temba, at rest.
Temba, his arms wide
Shaka, his sails unfurled
I’ve got the nostalgia feels after that guys.
“A strange game, the only winning move is not to play”
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - GBS
"You brought this on yourself"
"Do you feel like a hero yet?"
While I consider Kirk cheating in the test defeats it's purpose, I would argue that "Kobayashi Maru" playtrough scenario should be at least balanced by low price of restarting game. Otherwise frustration with high chance will drop players out of the experience and instead of learning to handle unwinnable situations they would just drop the game.
Probably more interesting choice would be to allow player to "cut the losses" in "Kobayashi Maru" situation (for example failing mission in XCOM game) but allow chance to bounce back and handle the result of the failure.
that is the big risk of such a scenario.
If you don´t tell players they are supposed to lose, especially if there is a quicksave option they will try it 3 dozen times and then a lot of them will quit because they think they are too bad
"Losing is Fun!" - Dwarf Fortress
Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time...
I remember going into a joyful region. There was a lake, a natural chokepoint, plenty of trees, good mineral veins and cows nearby.
2 days in an it rained blood. Things got "fun" from there
@@bossman983 General Kenobi? :-)
Lots of "fun" to be had in Dwarf Fortress...
I’ve really needed to hear this episode. I’ve had to confront a failing in my life situation I considered un-winnable. I did not expect this episode to provide an insight that was uplifting and true. Thank you Extra Credits.
I thought you were gonna talk about the no win scenarios that are placed when we're still not supposed to have a grasp on the game, such as the first "boss" on Demons Souls. Or when Snake "dies" in Mgs3 walking through the river sequence while ghosts haunt him...that kind of game designs. I whish you could address those some time.
No win Scenarios?
Normal day in Darkest Dungeon Hardcore
And now you know why I stopped playing solitaire and switched to free cell decades ago.
Same! If I lose, it has to be by my on hand!
There are arrangements that are unwinnable in Freecell. You'll eventually run into one if you deal enough games.
@@lostwizard Actually, you're wrong about that one as the most popular opinion amongst statistical mathematicians is that ALL free-cell games are winnable. Granted, as of yet, no one has been able to present concrete evidence one way or the other because EVERY time someone claims to have found a shuffle of freecell that is unwinnable, someone solves it.
BUT, as soon as it's number is divulged, experts are very quick to de-bunk this, detailing exactly how each one can be solved with detailed instruction on each solution. Granted the path is narrow, and quite often, only has a singular path to solution, but improbable doesn't mean impossible.
tl;dr = Give me a specific 'un-winnable' free-cell game number (each one of the over 1 million shuffles are numbered for your convenience), because I'd LOVE to prove you wrong!!! (just do yourself a favor and google it first)
@@NulienTia amusingly, I found one. I can't remember the number, tho.
"When you try your best but you don't succeed"
Lights will guide you home.
For me the more important question is: when a game is unwinable, do I know it?
Kirk know about the fact that it was build to lose, so he was able to chance it. But if he didn't know about the fact, he couldn't cheat and had lost.
So an important factor is the knowlege about an impossible situation!
I think that no-win scenarios are in addition to other things, a way of making it so the player doesn’t get bored of winning constantly.
Its worth pointing out that in math, sometimes the correct answer is NA. But you only get points if you prove NA.
I feel like iteration time plays a big factor in a game getting away with a no win scenario. If you have to devote a great deal of time into a game only to find out you were doomed from the start, that’s just frustrating.
Shaka, when the walls fell.
3:56 - Captain Jean-Luc Picard would never, ever, *ever*, drink tea with the teabag still in the cup. C'mon guys. C'mon.
"...Darmok and Jelad are most certainly at Tanagra."
I KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!
When the walls fell!
Shaka
Yes kids, life is a Kobayashi Maru scenario where believing in an afterlife is the captain Kirk solution and stoicism is the captain Picard solution. These are by no means the only solutions to life's RNG giving you a bad deal though, personally I'd like to see a captain who laughs at the gods and embraces absurdism.
Hey, EC, can you guys do an episode on the situation in China with regards to Blizzard taking lawfully won earnings and firing happenstance casters over a player showing solidarity for human rights protestors? This is eSports, and oughta be in your wheelhouse.
It's really more of an international politics and business issue. They probably won't cover it.
Also, let me rephrase your comment, because you seem to have left out a few important points here.
“Blizzard bans gamer from joining future tournaments due to breach of contract”
That should be enough.
This will take time to study the incident and what to learn from how politics is something we don't ignore when it breaches gaming circles.
You can also have comparative no win scenarios. You try to mitigate the losses to a minimum, even if your objective won't be met.
In another way, Spec ops the like has a "win state". But I knew that the only real way to win that game was to stop playing. Which I think is a metaphor the game was trying to make.
There are no anti war movies. But spec ops is an anti war game.
The game would have been cooler if, at the first few chapters of the game, you could backtrack to the beginning and leave at any time, the reasoning being you have accomplished your scouting objectives. But there was a "point of no return" that the squad couldnt go back anymore
War Games would like a word with you...
In my personal opinion, it’s not “should randomly generated games have the possibility of being unwinnable?” But the more important question being “how much of a percentage should games be unwinnable?”
What percent of games are acceptable to be unwinnable is determined on what type of game it is, because if the percentage is too high then you end up with one of two scenarios.
1. You get complaints from customers saying your game is unplayable, not knowing it is possible to win but they just never got the chance to win
2. Your game becomes a skinner box where winning feels as rare as winning the lottery or pulling that 1% ultra rare from that mobile game you play
Since we know that Klondike Solitaire has about a 20% probability of being unwinnable, and yet is enjoyed pretty widely, I’d call those odds pretty good.
Well, pretty good for a single-player card game, anyway.
The main thing with unwinnable runs a la solitaire is that, at the start of the game, you do not necessarily know that it's unwinnable, which makes it more fun to try. If you become so rediculously experienced at the game that you see the starting hand and then know "oh this ones unwinnable, restart" and any other ones "oh this one's winnable, gg", it takes away the fun and the sensation of important choices. (Similarly, with slay the spire, imagine always know that playing a certain class, you'd NEED to get a certain card during the first few encounters to win the end boss, and if you didn't get it, it'd be unwinnable, that would be very frustrating.) It is the uncertainty of the "winnable" nature and the sense of influence you have over the game that can make something more fun, rather than just a dice-roll game.
Also, if you've played old adventure games like King's Quest, you'll know how frustrating it is to have unwinnable scenarios without ANY feedback about winnability. This again has to do with agency; you can see how you can influence the randomness and try to make the right choices, knowing it won't always be perfect (as that is not a weakness, that is life) and have the sense of learning. But playing a game for 10 hours only to constantly die to a yeti with NO info that you should've saved the mouse six hours earlier to get past this encounter, well, that's what we call bullshit (Note that this is designed to be unwinnable, not caused by randomness).
A game i love playing that often has occasionally no win scenarios is Rimworld.
Sometimes Randy simply decides your colony is done. Raid, raid, raid, blight, infestation, toxic fallout, and just for good measure, a drop pod of milk that'll spoil in 3 days.
Even if the scenario presented is unwinnable, its always fun to hash it out until the bitter end.
"Everyone is dead or gone. This story is over. Perhaps someone else will find a use for the ruins of this place".
Such is life in the rim
But you still have a chance to win it. by definition it's not a no-win scenario because the game does not actively counter every move you make.
Some games doesn't even have a win-scenario, like most versions of Tetris
Doesn't mean they are without value
A good way to solve random generated games that have the possibility of a "no win" issue is to have the program test to see if it's generated content can be one. If not, it tosses it and randomly generates again and again until the conditions are meant that allow a player to possibly win.
For example, the Mario Maker games have a condition that in order to upload a level for others to enjoy, you must make it possible for the players to reach the goal and complete that level. I can see a game using bots to test if a randomly generated level is completable or not, granted that will take some additional programming. A lot probably. But it is possible.
optionally you can implement fail safes, if an scenario appears where nothing you can do can allow you to win the game, the game "cheats" and makes it possible, hard, but possible
Imagine if in the binding of isaac you faced a boss whose attacks are way faster than your move speed meaning that you'll take guaranteed damage, then you could make the attack move just slow enough for it to be dodgeable BUT only when you are in such a situation, optionally, you could add the condition of the player having only half a heart left for the "cheat" to trigger
Better versions of computer solitaire have a toggle in their configuration options for if you want an actual purely-random deal, or one proven through brute-force solving to be winnable. This is the correct design choice. Some people are interested in optimising their performance on an unsolvable board (if that has meaning for the particular game they're playing) or care strongly about tabletop authenticity, and some are not (or want to track their improvement without the statistical complication of random unsolvable boards). In my view, if you are making a deterministic game with a state space simple enough to be solved quickly with brute force or similar methods, you have a responsibility to write a solver that can test randomly-generated levels and provide at least the option to prune bad levels (this solver is also useful for debugging and balancing purposes). If it's quick enough to play all possible games on a particular setup without introducing much wait, you can then use this test data to provide things like 'par' systems and more detailed scoring (explaining to the player that this level has one solution in 50 moves, three solutions in 51 moves, 37 solutions in 52 moves, etc.)
Obviously not every game is simple enough to solve in such a fashion, and games with random factors during play get a pass (on top of being nightmares to check rigorously, the player typically has an expectation of luck being involved).
Microsoft's implementation of Freecell is supposed to always be solvable, but in reality, there are around half a dozen unsolvable deals within the first million. The older versions have fewer total deals (32768), and only one of those is unsolvable.
Reminds me if King's Quest:
"Oh, you ate that pie in jail 8 hours ago? Well now the Yeti kills you cause you can't blind him by throwing the pie to it's face!"
Reminds me of FTL: Faster than Light (yeah, it's another DMC: Devil May Cry situation), in which the game is randomly generated and really, _really_ doesn't want you to win. Beat it a few month ago for the first time (on Easy, but still) and it was glorious.
Randomly generated games sure are dangerous if you don't balance the options well enough. FTL sort of has that problem, since I never wanted to use Missile systems or Drones as I could run out easily at anytime and there were no consequences for not using them. Heck, some of the weapons that didn't use them were always my go-to weaponry, like Flak I. Plus, Drones had crazy timers as well, and weapons were just so much faster.
Boarding was always a fun option, too, though it was tricky.
But it's not a no-win scenario in FTL. Because then it'd mean no matter how you reach the final boss, you still lose. perhaps if you are at the best of capability and arrive... the big boss ship's already destroyed your base, or you realize you've only destroyed the prototype and the REAL thing has just appeared, etc. etc.
Now THAT is a no-win scenario, when the parameters of the 'game' keeps changing to counter whatever it is you do.
Favorite episode so far.
Mathematicians have found that you need 17 clues to solve a Sudoku.
It would be neat to try to figure out what people need to be able to solve Solitaire puzzles.
With Klondike, it's just a matter of the random deal of cards sometimes making it unwinnable because you can't get to the cards you need to solve it, because they're trapped under the cards you need those hidden cards to move out of the way. One of the simplest to explain (but most extreme in practice) examples would be a deal where all the kings and and any 4 of a lower set are buried under queens. You'll never be able to win it, because there are no kings to move the queens on to and you can't solve down any stacks far enough to remove the queens that way. In practice, it's usually just two or three cards collectively buried. If you use the strict draw 3 at a time ruleset, that adds the factor of cards being buried in the stack order of the deck as well as under the played out cards.
afaik it's always known whether a deal is solvable or not. There must be a paper out there which identifies key conditions
@@MiseFreisin i dont know about known variables that signal a winnable game but im pretty sure that when you tell it to deal you a winnable hand the program just brute force checks every move.
I love playing rhytmn games, and while technically the win states for this genre would be an 100% for each song/map, most of the time actually grinding away to get 100% is way less fun than, say, challenging yourself to a harder level which you perform not as well in. (most) rhytmn games don't have a full win state really, there are always more songs, harder levels which you may not even be physically able to play, but that doesn't detract from any of the enjoyment you have playing the game.
Am I the only one who watches these to help with writing and not actual gaming?
No but some topics are interesting
That sounds interesting.
Could you elaborate on this?
I'm sure people would love to read about the writing lessons you manage to draw from this. And if not them, than at least I would.
I also do that! There's a lot of storytelling theory threaded into these videos!
I do it for both. I wanna learn about game design cause I’m a writer and artist, and wanna learn the prat-falls before I start getting into it.
MisterJasro Thank you for being interested!
The lessons I glean from these gaming videos are mostly related to world-building and storytelling. For example, from this video, I learned to not be afraid of ending my stories in a way that may be awful finality for my characters. From their deck-builder explanations, I learned how to possibly write minor characters into great advancements for a story. From their video on games and emotions, I got an inside look on how to craft a world my readers feel for and characters my readers will be able to empathize with.
(I mostly write on Wattpad, and consider myself good. Not great, but readable.)
Here's a related anecdote for this topic:
There was a time when I played a ridiculous amount of Minesweeper. All the time, often while watching youtube on the side or something. I stumbled upon an interesting project somebody had made: a version of Minesweeper that removed guessing. Every board was solvable, every board was winnable.
And it was SO BORING! I was pretty darn good at sweeping, so I just... won. A lot. Even though the actual challenge, the puzzle solving aspect, was the exact same, being forced to lose games by random chance alone made the game more enjoyable, so I went back to the regular game.
I was thinking about Minesweeper, too. Every game of standard Minesweeper is technically winnable, but you generally need both luck and deduction to find the solution. That combination makes it fun.
Also, I'm glad I'm not the only one who has played an embarrassing amount of Minesweeper :-)
The one thing that's always annoyed me in many games is the concept of the Designer Induced No Win Scenario. You know what I'm talking about. You're in a boss battle, obviously curb-stomping him into the dirt, but then just as his health bar gets to a sliver it switches over to a cutscene where, somehow, the boss turns things around and beats you in a few hits. You KNOW you could beat him if the game hadn't wrested control away from you but because the story demanded it, you lose. It's such a clunky and irritating thing to do.
Although, arguably even worse are the battles where the designers INTEND for you to lose. You go into the fight but the boss has constently regenerating health, or is just too strong with moves that kill you in a couple hits, where no matter how much to reload you can't beat him. So you lose. And, oh look, a cut scene where your pals swoop in and save you, indicating that you never had a chance to win.
The bad type of your second scenario is when the 'forced loss' isn't obvious. A situation where the game let you level up a bit, so you can almost keep up with the boss's kill shots using items/ect, only to find out after expending your entire inventory that you were supposed to lose in the first minute or two.Then, the next time you get into a tough fight, you assume its the same 'unwinnable' situation, only to have a game over screen, because the levels finally caught up to you.
Oh, and don't forget the even worse variation: if you actually get beat by the boss, it's game over, but if you beat it, THEN the narrative takes over and shoehorns you into a loss. Yeah, honestly, if the encounter is a cutscene disguised as a boss fight, just make it a cutscene from the beginning.
Failure is your friend. Listen carefully when you meet him, because he comes bearing gifts.
its important that those scenarios at least feel fair. in Battleforge reborn, higher level random PVE scenarios against certain factions are basially unwinnable. thats more of a botched balancing issue imo.
In gaming, if the unwinnable scenario is not inevitable, then it's perfectly fine to have the chance of one, IF the chance isn't too high
If the scneario is so rare then there should be a feature to prevent it from happening, rarely telling the player "you're not allowed to win" is a flaw, so at least make it, that in the case it you where to get that unlucky, the game "counter-cheats" the situation to give you a chance, many games do this as to ensure players always have a chance
I've always hated solitaire because I quickly figured out no-win starting states were possible. I guess I'm just not the kind of player that is motivated by impossible situations.
Chika: * breezes through rules and rock, paper, scissors *
Then let's start!
President: Hold your horses, Fujiwara
Chika: Wh-wh-what is it president-
President: There are a number of points in not clear about
First, the fact that you challenged us to a memory game
I didn't quite get that.
Normally, I'd think you'd choose a game you were actually good at and you breezed through this rule, but minus 5 points for cheating? Not instant disqualification?
That made me wary.
I may not have noticed if you'd kept your mouth shut, but these designs (on the card) kinda look like numbers.
President (now shouting), This is a marked deck!
Shirogane: It really is!
Fujiwara senpai, that's low! Underhanded! And getting caught by the gambit you relied on! That's the most embarrassing thing!
Sauced from Love is war, an anime
Mentions of Kobayashi Maru and solitaire ? Someone has been playing Eliza :D
Combine randomly unwinnable games with a Skinner box mechanic, plus some predatory micro transactions, and you've got yourself a reliable way to spend an unlimited amount of money.
I've actually played Slay the spire and had the feeling of it sometimes being unwinnable, personally, I find that fact to make it much less enjoyable, I play games to enjoy testing my skill, when no level of skill makes it winnable then it's not fun.
this probably wasnt the case for you tho. Will plays exclusively on ascension 20, the hardest difficulty mode available. The best player in the world, jorbs, has won ascension 20 7 different times in a row, and wins it super consistently on stream.
The issue here isnt that it was unwinnable, it's that you (and this happens to me too) werent good enough to see what mistake you made previously. Your mistake might have been on some card u chose wrong, some path, maybe a potion u didnt get at a shop. But the run was winnable, the mere existence of jorbs proves that.
I think people are too fast to call runs "unwinnable", simply because they dont see what they could have done better. But there is always stuff u could have done better, at least at lower difficulties (lower than A18)
@@Speedy-Rabbit To be more precise, It's important to know that the difference between a good and a great is slim, but makes the difference. Max might have made a little mistake overall and that might not even hit people back mostly, but a few times it does. And that's good because while they are nuances, nuances are important for learning to be better.
@@Speedy-Rabbit The runs Jorbs has won with bang average decks is frankly insane.
No win scenarios can sometimes enhance the experience of a game. Halo Reach comes to mind. The final mission is quite literally unbeatable. Even if you play perfectly, you will eventually die, because the game will simply keep spawning more and more and more enemies. You're supposed to try your hardest to keep those Spartans alive, only to lose them. Because the game itself is about loss.
This being done through gameplay, rather than a cutscene, was a brilliant decision to my mind. Our natural inclination is to try our hardest to win and survive, even if we know intellectually that the Spartans do not make it out of this fight alive. That we try so hard, and then lose, makes the loss all the more bitter, but also more sweet in a way, because we took as many as those darned aliens with us as we could.
I was hoping this would talk about how to avoid creating unwinnable scenarios and failsafes to catch them
A mild tangent of un-winable as well as lose scenarios:
One of the great things about games is the immense toolbox of learning, iterating, and problem solving we learn along the way. As stated we will face situations beyond the game where we can't or don't get to "win." If we were to omit the cases of un-winable scenarios from our games we would lose much of the lessons we can learn within the categories I previously listed. Games can and do teach analysis of systems and by having un-winable situations we are able to learn to identify when those systems align to create a situation we can't solve at no fault of our own.
Here so early my parents left me a second time.
D:
With way the hell too much time on my hands, I have thought up at least three scenarios where a cadet can actually beat the Kobayashi Maru as established within the world of Star Trek. It takes a lot of outside-the-box creative thinking (one of the scenarios took me more than a year to think up) but it's actually "do-able".
I think every scenario should be beatable, but not in every playthrough (choices block off other ones)
This is another version of the classic dilemma about "voyage vs destination". The purpose of a game is not to win, but to enjoy the time spent playing! And oftentimes a played can have great fun even if they lost, because they pushed their skills to the limit. I believe it's the same for our life.
-Plays Game
-Game: *OMAE WA MO SHINDEIRU*
-(In the End by Linkin Park starts playing)
You should have also added examples of things that game developers can do to prevent them as much as possible.
simple: don't make everything chance based and give the player some guaranteed way of preventing loss, make it difficult to pull off but not random
There are some runs of Halo with self-imposed rules that cause a game to be unwinnable, for instance the rocket sloths run of halo ce maw warthog run warthog a warthog
did you have a stroke ? you were making sense then...
That Picard line is one the best in the genius of star trek writing.
I thumbs up Star Trek references.
I love randomly generated games that have the potential for 'No Win' scenarios, as long as they aren't toooo common, of course. What I'm really looking for as a gamer are those RNG's that occasionally generate the 'sweet spot' of that session that seems *almost* unbeatable, but which through pluck, determination and cleverness, I manage to beat anyway. Followed by a session of personal back-patting that should result in severe shoulder dislocation. Likewise those sessions that I just barely lose, when I really know I could have beaten them if only I had only seen that obvious opening or correct move in hindsight.
And those sessions where I just get unfairly creamed? Well, I can always blame those on the RNG and move on to the next session! :D
Reminds me of the "Stanley parable".
Ah yes! The control room ending... so poetic
I Think no-win Scenarios are good if they are the result of a players choices. In XCOM if you don't research laser and plasm guns efficently, it doesn't matter how good your luck is.
i see unwinnable scenarios as a programing failure.
I think this serves as a bridge to the RPG notion that we ultimately define for ourselves what constitutes victory or a satisfactory outcome. In games where victory conditions are not defined for us, we define ourselves what _winning_ is. Roguelikes are notorious for having plays-through that are not winnable (or become super-hard-mode) due to turns of luck. The challenge then is less about getting to the end but just getting as far as you can.
Moral of the episode: "no win scenarios are useful because they teach us what we would do in no win scenarios."
Let that sink in.
When doing random generations, it's possible sometimes to design your algorithms based on the idea of either working backwards from and endpoint or defining a set of constraints on how far the deviations can stray from an initial known path to success. One example, the classic NxM sliding-tile puzzle can often have its tiles placed into an unsolvable pattern. But if you start with the solution and scramble using randomized user-choices, you know the outcome is solvable. Another example is how 2d level maps are often algorithmically expanded atop a fixed set of connected ends/points. Substituting straight paths for detours, or adding other branches to explore wont prevent the user from reaching the goals you started with.
I would like to use another example as a counterpoint to the idea that no-win scenarios can be helpful: Young Justice. In a season 1 episode, the main characters were put into a no-win scenario that they didn’t know was unwinnable. The very next episode had them all going to a therapist to talk about the psychological damage it did to them. No-win scenarios might be able to teach us a few things, but they can also drive a person into despair
yeah, having a sense of agency is really important for mental health. teh easiest way to make somebody depressed is to do things to them that they have no control over.
"but now we're no longer playing the same game we started" was literally the idea I had for an unwinnable solitaire hand, once you reach a point where you can't continue just switch to counting down and don't worry about alternating colors
This might be the topic for another video, but randomness doesn't need to leave room for no-win starting points. It helps to start from a known solution work backwards so there's always at least one solution - just be sure you can still check for other valid solutions if the player finds any. Working backwards could be making sure at least one of several ways to beat a challenge are possible, or shuffling a portion of your solved puzzle in a way that still results in a valid solution.
I think it depends entirely on the nature of the no-win scenario.
Thematic no-win scenarios like "In Utter Darkness" in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty can still be fun, but it requires changing 'win' from 'at least do something before losing', which by some metrics just means that the victory condition is different than a conventional 'win outright' - IE, most Star Wars games that portray Hoth from the Rebel POV will still label the mission completion as a victory even though lore wise it was really a defeat that was just mitigated by preparation and buying time.
Randomly generated content, OTOH, is a much trickier kettle of fish because usually they aren't designed with that thematic idea in mind, and then you have to ask the larger consequences. Solitaire, for example, is nominally just something you're doing to kill the time so for most people an unwinnable deck doesn't really hurt them that much since they're just passing the time anyways. However, larger in time games such as Total War or XCOM can have a much harder thing with bigger consequences, even if perhaps it thematically fits.
Total War: Warhammer II had an issue with the Ritual Armies during the Eye of the Vortex campaign - essentially up to five stacks (armies) of Chaos or Skaven that show up at a random location to try and take your ritual sites to disrupt it. Problem is that they usually would spawn in areas that were secure, and the spawn location also changes to be your least defended territory if you try to save scum. And this also means that you'll be set back in development severely because they just try to burn down everything. Yeah, it can be an interesting challenge to try and bleed out these stacks as much as you can with just garrison units, but it's just frustrating because it comes out of nowhere and you have no real way to interdict this. And worse, no real way to plan for it other than trying to have a garrison army everywhere which can become prohibitively expensive even if you disabled the increased upkeep per extra army (I do, personally, but only because the AI doesn't deal with that penalty - fair is fair).
Now, technically this happens in XCOM all the time, especially in nuCOM with Abduction Missions, but the issue is that nuCOM was designed overall with that in mind, while Warhammer II's EotV campaign still uses the basic Total War setup which means that you actually can have effectively secure heartlands.
Bit of a tangent, but it brings me to what I think is a missed point. The real question needs to be a philosophical one of design: if a scenario is unwinnable, why is it unwinnable? Is it unwinnable for the right reasons such as being part of the game design and the pitch, or is it unwinnable for the wrong reasons and has consequences long-lasting enough that it just makes it frustrating rather than something that can be accepted? Losing something because of a blunder you made at least has a more direct learning experience: don't repeat that blunder. Losing because the game itself was rigged, or the only path to victory requires professional gaming tier skills when you're just a casual player, doesn't really teach much in my opinion. It can be fine, but there needs to be something more or something thematic to it so it can be more than just 'lol we make you lose because I say so'.
(And at risk of another tangent, this is why Kai Leng was so hated in Mass Effect 3 I think: the plot called for Shepard to lose on Thessia, but the situation was not presented as you were going to lose. In fact, you basically *win* that fight then you lose when the cutscene hits. Which could probably be a video of its own - the issue of gameplay victory but storyline defeat and the difficulties of reconciling the two)
In Starcraft 2, there are two levels called In Utter Darkness and Last Stand. In both of them, the objective is basically to survive endless waves of attacking alien monsters - Zergs and Hybrids - as much as possible. It is impossible to actually beat the enemy and the results are either:
a) an in-game game over, telling you those events will transpire and the universe is doomed if you do not act to prevent them.
b) a Pyrrhic victory, where you lure as many enemies as you can to the planet and then blow it up to prevent it from being overrun.
I love those levels. They are some of my favorite in the entire franchise.
It's an interesting topic that I think applies especially to TTRPG's. The adage "you don't win at D&D" comes to mind. The only victory you can achieve is self-determined, based on what you want your character to do before they retire or die. Like life. All the more so with a game like "Call of Cthulhu" where progress or success usually comes at the cost of your own sanity, and "losing" the game because your character went insane is all part of the fun.
I think the best way to define the value of these no-win situations in games is to not think about it in strict terms of all-or-nothing victory or defeat, but rather in terms of progression and player experience. To use Slay the Spire (or other roguelikes, for that matter) as an example, when starting out, even if you have no way of reaching/defeating the final boss of a run, every granular victory along the way contributes to your player level, which can offer new options/playstyles the next time you try, as well as the player learning to identify things that they should avoid along the way. Even though there was no final victory, progression was earned and the player had fun (or didn't) experiencing the game.
This really speaks to how I find Magic: The Gathering. Sometimes you get a hand that looks great, but then you draw all lands for the next 10 turns. I feel like the Kirk reaction would be to go back and tweak your deck to "change the conditions" of the test. Sure you might win the next game, but it's a different deck. The Picard reaction would be to play a few more hands to see how far your strategy takes you. As for how I play, it really depends on the day and the deck. Sometimes if I know I have no Outs and can't respond to a threat i'll concede early to reshuffle and play again, and sometimes i'll stick it out "If I just draw X, I can make it" And what do you know, I draw X.
So... what you're saying is... "Shaka, when the walls fell."
I think it can be very telling of a player's outlooks and temperament when they take explicit aversion to games with potentially unwinnable situations, genuine or merely perceived. Whether it's that a game is not fun unless they're winning, that it's a realization of futility, or overall the perception of unfairness which they play games as escapism from in real life. These aren't necessarily negative, but one could stand to be more conscious of their own mentality and how they handle such situations, both in games and out.
But that's not the same as the Kobayashi Maru, because that'd be like if the game you played is by DEFINITION unwinnable. whatever you do, you get countered, no matter the min-max tactic, you still lose, etc. etc.
If the game as the chance of being unwinnable, you STILL have the actual chance of winning.