This doesn't mesh with why lots of people play things. It's play. It might just be a nice way to pass the time. I would rather play basketball against someone my level than Steph Curry playing all out. I'm not playing to win or even to get better (getting better is fun, but isn't the point). I just want to have fun.

For many kinds of play, if you have to train for it, you may as well play something else.

That was fun! I learned and improved but also every point I won was a victory. Had I played against a professional I'd probably never have won a point, never have got better, and quickly got disheartened. There is just a limit past which the skill gap stops things being fun imo

After a while I managed to return the ball back and forth a couple of times, maybe they were going easy on me tho :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

Monopoly is a bad game though. Play Acquire instead.

I think there are times for both kind of play. It's annoying when people only play one kind of way. It's like beating you is all that matters to them.

* Common house rules prolong the game. Don't use house rules.

* People forget the rule that when someone lands on an unowned property and doesn't buy it, the bank auctions it off.

A game of monopoly should take about an hour. It's almost always those exact house rules that people create that make the game drag.

> It's like beating you is all that matters to them

It does, which is weird considering this is not actually real life or real money; it's (can be anyway) a nice boardgame on a rainy sunday.

If training isn't fun, then don't train up. Instead, learn to be satisfied with losing.

Which is fine: I'm satisfied when I play a decent game (but lose) against stronger players. I probably was going to lose anyway.

Being satisfied with your skill level, and learning to enjoy a game without necessarily improving at it, is important. For most of us, playing games is just a hobby. Our professions... the skill we ACTUALLY practice to get good at throughout our lives... takes priority over our hobbies.

Part of what makes a hobby a hobby... is the decision to remain weaker than professionals at that skill. I'll never become as good of a Harmonica Player as Magic Dick (who played "Wammer Jammer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0q2Vy3fx2I). But that's fine, because Magic Dick is a professional Harmonica Player.

But when your level of skill gap with another player is too large, such that you won't learn anything by playing them and the entire match will be under their control 100% of the time, then there really isn't any point in playing them, and you'd be far better off—both for your enjoyment, and for your growth—to play against a weaker player.

It might be fun to have a sprinting match against your local state champion. It might even be fun to have a sprinting match against Usain Bolt. But there's no point to having a hypothetical sprinting match against The Flash. You wouldn't even leave the starting line before he crosses the finish line. There's no gradation of success available to you. You're simply crushed.

Likewise, there's no point, if you're a five-year-old, to trying to (seriously) arm-wrestle an adult. Your undeveloped strength will be overwhelmed without accomplishing the slightest movement of the opponent's arm, right at the beginning of the match, every time. You won't even get to practice the skill or build the muscles involved in arm-wrestling.

Unless you're playing in an exceptionally small or dying gaming community, most video games and online board games have good matchmaking services, which provides a quick-and-easy matchup to people of similar skill levels as you.

A lot of the discussions in this thread are about Overwatch (one of the most popular video games right now), or Chess (one of the most popular board games). You should have no issues finding opponents close to your skill in either of these games.

If there's an ELO matchmaking system in place, then the whole discussion—"How to play with people who are better than you"—is moot. So, for the purposes of discussion here, you should probably assume that there isn't such a system in place for the game in question. (The people who are bringing up examples from games with ELO presumably haven't read the article.)

The only reasons I do it - to have fun and relax - is already there, it doesn't get better the better I get since there is not top level cap. One example - I do climbing, in & out. If I climb 4c (french grade, which is very beginner level), say after some accident or other longer time off, its the same type of challenge as climbing routes at 5c/6a level after some training period. It really doesn't change anything for me, the challenge, fear of fall/death, pushing through it and sense of accomplishment is the same.

Maybe not the best mental wiring to achieve most in life in measurable aspects like career or net worth, but sure as hell I can be happy with little. It is great. I wish more people were like this.

In my sport, I train and enjoy competing as hard as I can.

I find the highs I enjoy from winning over a player who is a similar or higher skill level than me outweighs the disappointment of losing to someone I shouldn't. And it seems the better I get, the less often I seem to lose to people that I shouldn't. I enjoy seeing that progress and enjoy competing against better players.

I've lost close matches and still enjoyed every second too.

I'm speculating here, but I think people who don't enjoy it on some level usually don't make it to that highest level in sport. Every top-level sportsman I can think of looks like they enjoy it.

I can have a fun conversation with my two year old, but it's going to be pretty limited in depth.

So no podcasts/radio-or-tv shows then?

If I was playing against Steph Curry, I would try to come up with achievable goals, such as trying to defend well enough to force him to take a jumpshot instead of a layup, trying to make one of my own shots, trying to get him to fall for a pump-fake, trying to get a steal, trying not to fall over, etc.

Winning may not be, but there's always an achievable goal you can strive for.

Overall effect is that you do nothing. There is no strategy you can use or think about, no time to try trics with ball or even shoot or dribble.

One reason it is not fun is that the less good person don't actually get to be active in play - he will be effectively in much passive position and it wont even be challenge.

If my goal is to get better at basketball, playing against Steph Curry is not useful. Learning happens most efficiently when the challenge is somewhat above your current skill level, but not enormously so.

If someone just recently started going to the gym, would you put a 300 pound barbell in front of them and tell them to lift that, and assume they're a loser if they don't get any enjoyment from failing to lift it?

That's more like the weight lifting you're comparing it to - the competition involves artificially choosing the other person as a benchmark, and I can work against whatever internal benchmark I want.

This is very different than a game of one-on-one, where it's his job to change how I interact with the ball (which he would, to the point of meaninglessness) and vice-versa (which I would fail at to the point of triviality).

It's not strange (or a personal failing) to find that less interesting.

You have to understand, you are making the hardcore fallacy; you assume everyone will stick to the game no matter what and take whatever abuse or steps they need to git gud. It doesn't work that way; what happens over time is the better people raise the skill floor by driving weaker players out.

And increasingly the skill floor is getting ridiculous. Overwatch University on reddit recommends players post videos of matches for point by point analysis on how to get better, and half the posts are just frustration in dealing with the drudgery of playing so many matches to even climb.

This has nothing to do with skill floors or ceilings.

Then play newer or different games. Overwatch has been out for a while by now. Chess has been out for a rather long time by now.

> The issue is that when you play chess, all you can play against are wanna-be grandmasters who drive the skill floor up to the point where you need to make a heroic effort just to be mediocre.

On chess.com you start at 800 ELO, on lichess.org you start at 1500(?) ELO and rapidly decline if you lose many games, until you get around where you should be. You do not need to make "heroic effort" in order to start gaining ELO. You do need to learn basic chess theory like how much the pieces are worth, and some strategy, etc, but it's really not that bad if you genuinely like chess.

> It doesn't work that way; what happens over time is the better people raise the skill floor by driving weaker players out.

Alternatively, people who play push the game forward and make exciting breakthroughs, keeping the game fresh. No one is forcing you to play a game that you don't like. There's no point in shaking our fists at the sky because we didn't start playing a game right when it came out.

Games are fascinating when they -don't- explicitly cater to new players. TF2 is a hard game, yet it's one of my most played games at ~1700 hours. Why? Because I was able to improve and because it has a high skill ceiling (and floor) for certain playstyles.

Pressing Shift to rocket up as Pharah is totally boring compared to learning how to Rocket Jump as the soldier. Learning how to do that took me weeks, yet it's now one of my favorite aspects of TF2. I have hundreds of hours in tf2 just on jump maps- something that wouldn't be possible if TF2 were designed to have as little skill floor as possible (like overwatch).

TF2 doesn't seem to have this option and thus new players don't get much of a chance to learn because they're immediately thrown in with people with 1700 hours of gameplay and don't get a chance to learn the necessary skillset incrementally by climbing a ladder.

However I disagree that people don't get a chance to learn. Unlike chess, tf2 is a team game, so even if the teams aren't super balanced it's still possible to play. Unless one team is absolutely stomping the other, which happens more frequently ever since tf2 made some matchmaking changes in the Meet Your Match update- that's a different can of worms.

Is Overwatch truly a game that you fundamentally enjoy, win-or-lose ? Or is Overwatch the kind of game where you can only enjoy it if you win?

If playing more Overwatch is "drudgery" to you, then perhaps you should quit. You should enjoy the games you play. I am serious: there's no real reason to stick to a game if it is making you feel bad. We should play games for enjoyment.

> you assume everyone will stick to the game no matter what and take whatever abuse or steps they need to git gud.

My assumption is that a good game must be enjoyed by the "losers".

Bowling, Golf, and races like 5k, Marathon, and video-game speedrunning, have no "losers". Its just people aiming to improve their own score over and over again. Maybe these games are more suited to your personality.

I have a 14-minute Super Mario World (SNES) speedrun (11-exit). Its not world-class or anything, but I did have to practice and study to get to that point. So its a thing I'm proud of.

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But yes, I truly do enjoy competitive games that I've chosen to play. BlazBlue, Super Smash Bros, and Competitive Tetris, and Puyo Puyo... I've played these games a lot because I enjoy them, win or lose.

Frankly, you are NOT going to get good at a competitive game unless you enjoy losing a LOT. The best players in the world are incredibly talented, with insane reaction times. And now that I'm over the age of 30, my reaction time has begun to decline, so I'll never be as fast as I used to be. Chances are, I'll never be a world-class fighting game player, its too late for me. Reaction times peak at around age 24 by the way.

That doesn't change my enjoyment of Blazblue or Super Smash Bros. But its something I've accepted in life. I still have a lot of fun playing the game even if I'm locked-out of being a world class player.

A decade ago Call of Duty 4 introduced an under-barrel grenade launcher for the m16 rifle as a way to get easy kills even if you could not aim. The devs called it 'first order optimal strategy' and players called it the noobtube. CoD4 did the right thing, every new player still gets stomped but it ends up being roughly 4-20 instead of 0-24. Game design on this matters.

I like chess, but I almost never play chess against anyone I know.

It's too skill-based, and (ironically) too interactive. The better player reliably wins, substantial handicaps warp the game, and at least at amateur levels the better player is often completely dominant. Not only is there no hope of winning, there's very little room to make a good play or try an interesting strategy. If two random people who are familiar with chess sit down to a game, it's very unlikely to be an interesting experience.

There are a lot of ways to mitigate this problem. There are "low skill" strategies that prevent blowouts without dominating (e.g. CoD4), rock-paper-scissors strategies (Stratego), graceful handicaps (Go), or satisfying play while losing (Catan). And of course, hidden information and randomness provide novelty in many of the most popular games like Poker.

Chess is not a bad game by any means, but it's not a party game either. "Accept that they're better and keep losing" is good advice if you want to improve at chess, but it does nothing to provide entertainment for mismatched players. There's nothing wrong with wanting a game that's fun, rather than just educational.

I stopped playing Starcraft 2 after I realized that there is just no chance of getting anything done unless sinking massive time into it to train.

I quite enjoyed the early days of Hearthstone, including the random factors in who won. But successive releases kept adding more randomness, and specifically uncontrollable randomness, until I quit the game. (It may have improved, and this didn't make it a bad game. It just wasn't for me anymore.)

Most people recognize that War is a bad game, because it's entirely random and has no element of choice. But a game like Mario Party is full of choice, and yet the random payouts are so large that skill is often irrelevant. Even near-perfect play can be dominated by random factors, and those random elements (specifically, bonus stars) aren't numerous enough to average out over the course of a game. That's what broke me on Hearthstone: the feeling that the randomness that was too scarce to average out over one session, too potent to avoid or overcome, and too unconstrained to strategize around.

At the far end of that spectrum, a game like poker consists almost entirely of strategizing around randomness, because the random factors are common enough to view statistically and only indirectly produce winners. And so the better poker player will win pretty consistently, and having fun across skill gaps starts to become difficult again. (Hence the popularity of moderate-randomness card games Euchre for social play.)

Randomness is often a good addition to games, especially in combination with hidden information. Not only does it make play across skill gaps worthwhile, it makes them more replayable. But there's a lot to be said for adding it carefully, in places where players can exert some measure of control.

Randomness management is one of the main transferable skills from one game to another. Most good Poker players tend to be able to easily become good at other games with randomness.

For example, in martial arts an important skill for a beginner is recognizing openings in an opponent's defense. However, an experienced fighter has few openings (so the beginner gets less practice) and can often defend against an attack even if they were open (so its difficult for the beginner to recognize when they successfully identified an opening).

At the early stage it's often a better teaching tool for the experienced fighter to purposely use a strategy that tends to create openings (e.g. by using more aggressive strategies rather than counter attacks), to fight with a handicap, or even to purposely leave themselves open and allow the beginner to score a (non-damaging) hit.

It's an excellent system for several reasons. Most obviously, it largely preserves the flow of a "normal" game, whereas something like handicapped chess has completely different opening play. But another major benefit is that it remains a good way to practice for equally-skilled play. The skills used to overcome or capitalize on a handicap transfer effectively to playing out a weak or strong position in a neutral match. There are relatively few handicap-specific strategies to play, and "irrational" play is generally less rewarding in handicapped games than simply mismatched ones.

(I doubt this applies in martial arts, but in many games a heavily-outmatched player is actually rewarded for bad play. If their odds of winning on performance are bad enough, they'll succeed more often by making surprising or high-variance moves and hoping for an error. There's an excellent story from DF Wallace about how as a teen he won local tennis tournaments by simply playing safe and waiting for unforced errors, but actually had less upward potential than the people he beat. When unforced errors became scarce, he had no strong play to fall back on.)

Interestingly, the handicap system could be extended beyond nine stones without losing too much elegance, but by tradition it isn't. It's understood that across any greater skill gap, it's essentially impossible to play a real and educational game. The weaker player won't be able to trace why a move is good or causes them to lose, and so handicapped games should be replaced with either direct lessons, or play tailored to education instead of competition. It sounds a lot like the situation in martial arts, and I suspect holds across a great many other games and competitions.

And you probably aren’t learning valuable lessons just losing to a much better player over and over again straight up. They won’t be the type of positions you’d get against players of your skill level. A much better player is likely getting decisive advantages out of the opening or early middle game, whereas especially at lower levels the middle game and endgame are much more important.

Yes, it does. To them.

Anyone who is driven to get better at a game will be bored with playing with or against clearly worse players very quickly.

The typical approach that I also follow is that when I want to practice some technique I'm not well familiar with, I try it on white belts first, iron the obvious wrinkles out, and then I keep on going up the skill ladder until I'm able to execute it on my equals.

As I practice it against stronger and stronger opponents, I'm correcting increasingly subtle errors (that they're capable of using against me, while I could get away with them against weaker sparing partners).

It would be more difficult to try new stuff against someone of equal skill straight away, it makes much more sense to work your way up gradually.

It's obviously a physical, but still highly technical sport - and I imagine the same may hold true for many competitive activities.

The former one may be more clueless, but offers 100% ferocious defence without attempting any reasonable attacks of his (or her) own.

You can sort of see how progressing to the next step - from white to blue - is an inevitable setback of sorts.

Funnily enough, this phenomenon vaguely makes me think of the "trough of disillusionment / slope of enlightenment" syndrome (the hype cycle)

It's possible to beat weaker players more efficiently, but it requires consciously "playing down" to set simple traps and grab materiel quickly. Otherwise, a clueless opponent will disrupt "sophisticated" plays by accepting losing trades and ignoring threats. It lowers their chances of actually winning compared to a better player, but pushes the game towards a drawn out chase.

And yes, I think there's certainly some truth to the hype cycle comparison. They both remind me of the "four stages of competence", where people in the middle two stages of "conscious" execution can be slower and more uncertain than either trained or untrained instinct.

http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/intrigue/Day90006PlayAgainst...

Most people don't like to play only against much weaker players, nor only against much stronger players.

That's one data point. But I'm sure valve or blizzard or any company with an online gaming community has stats on retention and knows who people want to play with in aggregate. And generally when you play online you get paired with someone with a similar MMR/ELO.

From this I infer that the statement from the article is generally true.

1. No holds barred. (I always lose, but nearly won once when they were very distracted.)

2. Like no holds barred, except I can take back my previous move && they sometimes offer “Are you sure that was the best move?” when I’ve done something especially wrong.

3. Them vs. them + me, where I have full access to their skills and knowledge. They suggest moves, and I can ask whether a move is/was a good move, what move they would make, etc. This unsurprisingly results in a 50/50 win rate.

This has been very useful for learning because it balances out the learning with just enough “winning” to keep the game fun.

I disagree strongly on that. If stronger players are avoiding complicated pins / forks / checkmates, the weaker player will NEVER experience these positions.

It is far, far, far more educational to play against a stronger player and learn the tricks of the trade. Getting pinned by an expert is a lesson. Getting a "Queen Trap" is a lesson. A Fork is a lesson. Etc. etc.

Watching players stronger than you avoid all those positions is completely, and utterly non-helpful. You need to get those mistakes "beaten out of you" so to speak, if you ever wish to get better at Chess.

--------

Now, observing chess can be helpful with computer-analysis. After downloading the pgn file of a high-level game, play through it yourself vs Stockfish (PC vs SCID is decent freeware to run the Stockfish engine with), and try to discover the traps that the high-level players innately avoided.

I'd rationalise it as creating richer neural connections for the topic you're trying to learn. It seems to embed the knowledge out of your "cache" into some deeper level, without which I tend to run out of ability to keep all these things in my head. In terms of practicing whatever you're learning, it's hard to say whether you should play against weaker, equal, or superior opponents; each have various arguments that can be made against them. I'd probably avoid weaker ones, in order to minimise false positive feedback.

Playing against someone much better than you sharpens your perception, reactions, everything in a way you can't get any other way. Bring it on!

dragontamer's example of Magnus Carlsen is a good one - he was in the top 1000 players in the world when he was 12, and become World Champion at 22. He's intuitively good at chess. The match he played to become World Champion the first time was fascinating because as soon as he could get to the point where the game was outside of what Vishy Anand had experience of he was pretty unstoppable. He's not someone normal players will ever beat. I think most chess players would like to play him because he's famous, but if you met someone unknown with the same level of ability most people just wouldn't play them except to learn. Few people would want to play that sort of person for fun. It just wouldn't be very enjoyable.

Eventually we all die. It's fun to play anyway.

In a less philosophical mood: standing against an overwhelming force can be exhilarating. I've felt something like that windsurfing in strong wind conditions.

Down to the specific question, losing always against someone you can't defeat is very good training for winning over others.

I don't always succeed but the pure thrill of trying to survive what is usually a virtual death sentence is something really powerful and when successful so exhilarating.

My brother-in-law talked about chess for years, I finally agreed to play him, and won both games. He's never brought it up again. It makes no sense to me.

Growing up, I was the youngest, so I generally lost at whatever games we played, and it never made me want to stop playing. When my significantly older brother came back home and stayed with us for awhile, we played chess regularly, and I lost a _lot_. But I kept playing, and when I finally got to the point where I won one out of three, it felt really good.

How much fun would I have missed out on if I hadn't kept playing?

Probably he was just diving in his next obsesion at the time.

And what motivates the better player to be engaged?

We all know that learning and growth happens right at the edge. When one is stretching and that stretch makes a difference. Too far it is frustrating. No stretch no gain. I'm surprised Go was not mentioned so far since it is customary there to balance the strength of the players by giving a few stones advantage to the weaker balancing the play in a manner that both sides are challenged.

But this is Hacker News. So does this apply to the way we work? How are the challenges we face distributed in the team?

If the difference in skill is too high you won't learn anything from playing with them. What's worse - you might ingrain bad habits that let you occasionally win(that happened to me with one fighting game)

>Skill is an infinite treadmill: you can continuously get better at pretty much any subject from now till the end of time. Deciding when to get off the treadmill is just as important as deciding to stay on.

Agreed, but the speed in which you progress varies case by case basis.

>My inability to defeat the greatest players of a subject does NOT make the game less appealing. Indeed, I often times seek out the challenge of stronger players, especially when I'm explicitly trying to get better at the game.

if opponents are better than you, but not overwhelmingly so ,it is indeed one of better ways to train. It is a matter of mindset - you are playing to deliberately "git gud", but not necessarily win.

>Losing constantly by playing vs players who are better than you provides a learning experience. You should find other players you can win against of course: you'll never learn to win if you keep losing. But losing teaches you what bad-habits you've formed from playing vs weaker players.

This depends on aforementioned difference in skill, too high is prohibitive to learning. The latter part depends on how good game is proving feedback. Some games are great at that(chess, soulsborne), other are horrible(all blizzard games come to mind, DotA, Go). It is very hard to improve in latter group of games without deliberately analysing your past games. For example in Go your mistake might be made really far back into the game, but you are seeing it's effect just now. In chess - it is way simpler to just walk back the history of moves in memory to find the mistake, or at least start spotting the wrong decisions.

>I think that's the key: losing all the time is unfun. But I can definitely take "losing for a whole week" or "losing for a whole month" in a row, especially if its for training. Finding players of lower skill, equal skill, and higher skill, is important.

Agreed, but there is one exception - games with randomness built into them - this includes matchmade team games. With randomness, losing when you are really ahead feels way more punishing, and in team games it is sometimes impossible to carry your team to win - even if you are literally the best player in the match by overwhelming margin.

if you train in something, you aren't playing. Training is actually the total opposite of play; you need to do things that are not fun but are beneficial for your goal, and it sucks. You have to do a lot of tedious study and memorization to get better at chess beyond a point, or spend a lot of time in a fighting game's training mode just to be able to consistently do moves and combos on demand.

I think with videogames one of the worries I have is people are now viewing them as work they have to train for; we are creating a professional class of gamers, and whenever we do so eventually players become spectators instead

Things like that are fun for a subset of people. I played competitive smash bros. melee for years. I always had a separate crt tv in my room ready to go, and I would put on music, or a podcast, etc, and just practice things. It was relaxing after a long day and that practice eventually made me much better in real matches- winning matches is a huge high.

Chess is different but also the same. I'm slowly learning theory, openings, etc, and it's quite fascinating.

> or spend a lot of time in a fighting game's training mode just to be able to consistently do moves and combos on demand.

That's -why- these games are fun to play and spectate. What separates bad from decent from good players is how consistently they can apply technical skill under nerve-wracking situations, such as being 1 game in a set away from getting knocked out of a tournament. Stuff like daigo's parry at EVO 2004 was exhilarating precisely because of the technical skill required, and the fact that he had to practice things like that.

I find training to be fun and engaging - i find bettering myself to be fun! There is a difference between going into practice mode and grinding combos, and just dueling someone with intent of 'i'll try to block each low mixup this game', or 'i'll try to pushing each wakeup'.

You are having fun, with a small extra goal added, and you don't mind losing - as long as you don't fail your extra goal.

The best players I know, and the fastest improving players I know, all review their gameplay and take notes on the mistakes they made. They watch other high skill / pro players and take notes on what they do. They practice PERFECTLY, over and over and over (i.e. executing a combo flawlessly 20 times in a row, if you make a mistake, start over. Now do something else for an hour, then flawlessly do the combo 20 times in a row again). They find good players to play with in high stakes situations, such as tournaments or money matches.

Most people don't improve very much because they aren't actively trying to improve. I know many people who are at roughly where they were a year ago, or just marginally higher.