Please stop Messing Up Your Games!!!

Re quidditch I agree, it wouldn't be a very good game if played for real. It's really difficult to make up a sport without actually playing it. You play games, it doesn't work, so you change the rules to make them work. Or to stop players from maiming/killing each other. And strategies evolve as people play the game. And sometimes the rules change because of the strategies people employ. Like how they changed the rules in rugby to allow players to lift other players in the air during line-outs because that's what everyone was trying to do anyway.

Re Hunger games - if they tried that, the government would find a way to stop them. The government in the Hunger Games doesn't play fair. The "games" isn't really a game, it's a form of torture and oppression. The ones who run the game win the whole thing so they win no matter what, and the "players" always lose. Even the "winners" don't really win - they're still pawns in a bigger "game".

See also Rollerball. The whole point of the event was to teach the oppressed masses the futility of individual effort, and the rules evolved in exactly the opposite direction to making sure players didn't hurt each other.

RE Hunger Games:

You are assuming that the extra rations are added to whatever the district gets. From the way the government oppresses the districts, I'd say one person's "extra" rations are that much less another person gets. The incoming rationing is the same from the government. So your greed would have to weigh against your concern for your friends and neighbors. If you only care about yourself, you'd probably be living in the capitol with money and food and no concerns anyway.

And as others have said, the "game" is just another form of oppression. They're taking children, taking the district's future. How is THAT anything that can be considered a game.

The Hunger Games don't sound like fun "games", lol... Pretty sure the evil, oppressive government doesn't give a fig about rules or fairness in an "anything goes"/"Lord of the Flies" type of "game".

It's a Battle Royale type of thing. (Read Battle Royale manga for some more of this brutality "game".)

I don't know how one games the purposely unfair and oppressive system, unless one manages to sneak in experienced rebels.

Better yet, read Koushun Takami's original Battle Royale novel. Now *that*'s brutal, and there's no way to game that system. At all.

filwi said:

One thing that annoys the heck out of me as a game designer and game lover, is when writers who clearly have no idea about games come up with something oh-so-clever.


Case in point: Quiddich. Lovely game. Completely broken. Would have played out totally differently if you'd let a bunch of teens at it, and even more if it was a world championship thing.

Not sure what you mean. Would be nice to explain how you think it's broken.

Or the Hunger Games - logical thing to do, if you'd live in that world, would be to have your own lottery in the District right after the official lottery. Then the "losing" family will request a bazillion rations and share with the community. Same result + everybody gets rich.

Or have EVERY family request more food, that way the risks are the same and everyone becomes rich. In any world where there's a system to be gamed, there will be people who game the system. Law of nature. (Ok, law of human greed.)

This sounds like it would simply be treated as inflation. The more tesserae are taken, the less each one is worth. The total amount of food for the District remains the same. It's the same as saying "Why doesn't the government print gazillions of dollar bills, and we'll all be rich and idle?"

If you're interested, I've mashed up the rant with a bunch of tips for writing games: http://www.wiltgren.com/2016/04/04/simple-guide-writing-games/



[/angry rant]

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Not sure why you're angry, and some of your suggestions are unlikely to work given the worlds they're in.

filwi said:

One thing that annoys the heck out of me as a game designer and game lover, is when writers who clearly have no idea about games come up with something oh-so-clever.


Case in point: Quiddich. Lovely game. Completely broken. Would have played out totally differently if you'd let a bunch of teens at it, and even more if it was a world championship thing.


Or the Hunger Games - logical thing to do, if you'd live in that world, would be to have your own lottery in the District right after the official lottery. Then the "losing" family will request a bazillion rations and share with the community. Same result + everybody gets rich.


Or have EVERY family request more food, that way the risks are the same and everyone becomes rich. In any world where there's a system to be gamed, there will be people who game the system. Law of nature. (Ok, law of human greed.)


If you're interested, I've mashed up the rant with a bunch of tips for writing games: http://www.wiltgren.com/2016/04/04/simple-guide-writing-games/



[/angry rant]

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I disagree completely. I think you're so far wrong that it isn't even worth arguing about.

Okay, looking at the post, it is simply designed to draw hits to the guy's website.

I thought I read that Quidditch was based on cricket, only more ridiculous.

Having spent the last two weeks watching the T20 World Championships with my husband, I have to wonder about the "more ridiculous" part of that idea. What a weird game. Fun. No doubt it's fun to watch. India vs. West Indies in the semi-finals--wow! What a game. But most of the time, I swear the commentators aren't even using real words.

Quidditch was never mean to actually be played. It was meant to be a bit silly, but grand and wondrous, on a scale that would set a young reader's imagination flying. In that way. it succeeds completely.

As for The Hunger Games, I'm going to go with the others. The system was meant for oppression. Had the citizens of any district started to work together to try and overcome the system, they would have been suppressed, brutally. Possibly, early on, people tried it, and they were beaten, imprisoned, brainwashed, mutilated or killed. Everyone else would have quickly learned just to eek out what they could working in the system.

I never got the impression that Quidditch was meant to be a logical game. I think it was supposed to seem somewhat ridiculous and exaggerated, kind of like having earwax-flavored jellybeans. And flying motorcycles.

Harry Potter, especially the earlier books, have a mixture of serious drama and whimsy/silliness.

Jamesaritchie said:

I disagree completely. I think you're so far wrong that it isn't even worth arguing about.

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Why register your disagreement then?

You disagree that Quidditch is broken (it clearly is), or you disagree that the residents of the various Districts could have gamed the Hunger Games? (No doubt there would be some sort of blackmarket/underground dealings, but the Capitol would certainly have criminalized any attempts to circumvent the Games.)

Jamesaritchie said:

I disagree completely. I think you're so far wrong that it isn't even worth arguing about.

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Yes, why even BOTHER posting this? It's so pointless, it's a sphere.

Yeah, we're not here to push traffic; we're a community of writers.

Locking this.