A video game is a puzzle and it is fun to watch someone successfully manipulate a puzzle.

Live sports are with people and people don't like watching others be manipulated.

Of course they do, things like juking, tricking other players, etc are well accepted

The problem is that these kinds of strategies are boring to watch, have little counter play, and only interesting the first time around — as soon as it enters the meta, it’s just boring. In this case it’d probably be fine, but if you spent two minutes doing it? It’d be awful.

Exactly the same as it goes in video games — it’s fun to see people exploiting elements the game, when it adds complexity to the match. When it reduces it, like an infinite combo, regardless of how mechanically complex or novel a puzzle solution it might be, it just detracts.

Yeah, for game exploits "haha I can't believe you can do that, that's hilarious, now let's patch it out" is the norm. Exploits that make the game richer and gain wide acceptance are very much the exception.

>Exploits that make the game richer and gain wide acceptance are very much the exception.

Good examples of this are bunny hopping and rollout doomfist.

> Live sports are with people and people don't like watching others be manipulated.

I'm pretty sure I've seen lots of deceptive and misleading strategies and tactics in football and other sports, not to mention multiple forms of "faking." Also a core part of sports like football seems to be putting pressure on the person with the ball - up to and including physical tackling.

Clock/time management also seems to be a thing.

Much of reality tv is basically watching people be manipulated/manipulative too.

Disagree completely, the deke is my favorite play in baseball.

It's not about manipulation. It's that if you die in football, you die in real life. If you do stupid stuff, players can get hurt. Whereas in video games, all that can really happen is a win or a loss. A bizarre play where someone gets hurt is funny in a simulation, and tragic in meatspace.

This is part of why the NASCAR move is so interesting. The driver himself notes that he was putting himself in real actual danger of crashing his car and possibly hurting himself, but he was willing to take that risk.

I would not be surprised to see this outlawed in the very near future before someone can cause a major crash trying it.

Put a more negative way, but perhaps more funny: "Given the opportunity gamers will optimize fun out of a game."

That's only in multiplayer games, which are basically destined to become not fun at all. It's the competition that sucks out the fun. Players optimize for winning, cheaters optimize further more, devs optimize for getting rid of cheaters and for "maximizing engagement" of the rest.

In single-player games, given the opportunity, gamers will optimize for all kinds of cheese and hilarity never expected by the designers. Doubly so with the modern Internet, where sharing videos of your silly play confers social status in relevant on-line groups.

I can agree that multiplayer isn't forever but all of the longest lasting games are multiplayer and thriving, most because of the competition. WoW, CSGO (very competitive, ~1 million players daily), LoL (competitive).

That has little to do with fun, and everything to do with recurring revenue. Multiplayer aligns itself nicely with subscriptions, in a way singleplayer doesn't.

Don't know about current state of WoW, but the other two games you mention, and games like Overwatch or even StarCraft 2, are hollowed out and devoid of substance, because the competitive multiplayer makes everyone focused on meta.

Hey, SC2's still pretty fun. Just look at the sorts of off-meta builds uthermal gets away with: https://www.youtube.com/c/uThermal

I think this is true of all games, where you don't specifically seek out other players choosing to be purposefully weaker.

The transition from elementary school sports to middle school sports is pretty jarring. By the time you get to high school they've started weeding out anyone who enjoys the game versus dominating other people in preparation for college and the few who become pros.

Video games just make this obvious to kids who don't like sports.

Yep, 'speed runs' are all about optimizing whatever you can optimize and are mostly single-player.

The only real distinction between single-player games and multiplayer games in this manor is that in single-player games players can choose the 'category' they are currently playing, whereas in multiplayer it is chosen for them. This let's them pick the categories with environments that are most fun optimized which is where the hilarity comes.

But that was my point: speed runs are fun and often cheesy and score social karma. But only for people who care about them. Every other player can ignore them and focus on their own fun.

> The only real distinction between single-player games and multiplayer games in this manor is that in single-player games players can choose the 'category' they are currently playing, whereas in multiplayer it is chosen for them.

Yes. That's the distinction that matters.

> That's only in multiplayer games

Certainly not true, it's a game design issue that comes up all the time. Even in the context of casual solo play, players will generally be driven by the very human instincts of risk aversion, resource accumulation, and seeking efficiency. It takes good design to make this behaviour be in line with having fun.

If anything, it's multiplayer environments that are easier to steer towards that, and also allow room for just horsing around.

Not really; at the peak of competition, emergent mechanics and exploits are celebrated by some communities: e.g. wavedashing in Melee, K-style in GunZ, not to mention speedrunning.