I think he has completely missed the boat here. In point of fact, people generally are quite good at evaluating our chances of success or failure at various activities. We understand interpersonal relationships keenly, and sense very subtle nuances. People _do_ minimax successfully and correctly all the time. BUT our minimaxing is far far different from that in games. And here's why (read on, if you care to -- I _do_ relate this to gaming in the last part).
Martin Laurie
> This used to baffle me because I could never understand how anyone
> playing couldn't and wouldn't use everything in the world to their
> advantage if they could. After all who doesn't in real life?
No one does. Real life is more complicated than a game and for almost _everything_ you do, there is a penalty and a value decision to be made. Is it better to have kids, or not? Is it better to be married or stay single? Since being a game designer is more fun than being an accountant, why are there still accountants? Why do I eat food that costs more than the bare minimum? I would be just as well-fed on fish-sticks and cheese sandwiches as I am on oyster stew and Mu Shu pork. Certainly many _characters_ try to get by with only buying the cheapest type of food in the game. Why should I waste a good chunk of my life playing RPGs or posting rantings about an imaginary subject (i.e., Glorantha) on the net? Why the hell did I read that biography of Cardinal Richelieu? I'm never going to meet him. Why don't I have sex with every woman I lust after? Because I believe it would harm my soul (and hers!), and because my wife trusts me. All three are reasons that wouldn't matter in a minimaxing campaigns -- the character has no soul (he's just a PC), the woman doesn't matter (she's an NPC), and in which characters are almost never married.
Now, in what way does this apply to gaming? IMO. The complexity of the real world means that _everything_has a cost and a payoff. Almost any activity you name that anyone might perform, from committing suicide to blowing up the Oklahoma govt bldg, to giving millions of dollars to charity, to devoting your life to administer to lepers, has a trade-off. A perceived good in exchange for another perceived good. Even disturbed teenage girl who scarifies her arms with broken lightbulbs is getting a pay-off for her actions, but because her perceptions are defective, her attempt to get attention is aberrant.
The more complex and "realistic" a game world is, the more a minimaxer is thwarted. Or rather, the more he is forced to _play_, rather than just follow his formulae. Let's take the crudest example possible. In the very first ancient D&D games we played, we never considered any social mores at all. When you beat the monsters in a fight, they were all dead. When the monsters beat you, _you_ were all dead. It didn't occur to us for quite a while how weird this was -- we were helped in this mindset by D&D itself, in which the losers of a fight generally _are_ dead, HP reduced to 0. But when we started playing RQ, suddenly players could be knocked out of a fight _without_ being dead. Now players were saddled with the problem of what to do with captured enemies. In a very simplistic campaign, a minimaxer would just kill them. But if all you add to your campaign is the nigh-trivial ability for NPCs to have memories of previous actions (this is a major leap forward from my earliest D&D games, trust me), suddenly the PCs face a trade-off -- a decision.
MINDLESS MINIMAXER: Okay, time to cut all the prisoners' throats.
PLAYER WITH HALF A BRAIN: Wait. If we do that, we'll get a reputation as never taking prisoners.
MM: So? PLAYER: So if _we_ ever lose a fight, won't anyone who's heard of us just slaughter us out of hand? MM (the light dawns): You mean ... things that we do now... could make a difference in _other_ people's choices? Wow! (retires to think about this)
As another example, in one of the old-fashioned campaigns in which PCs have no family, no cultural background, and boast names like "Bill's Cleric" -- where they meet in the local bar, then set off cross-country to adventure, a minimaxer is _rewarded_ when he ambushes and loots a merchant's caravan. Some bleeding-heart-liberal wimp player (probably a woman, too) might leave that money and goods untouched, but not he. In a simple campaign, he'd be right.
In a more complex campaign, the merchant was presumably going to trade with someone in town, or else was traveling _from_ the town, suddenly there is a trade-off. "Isn't this the owner of the Player-Character Tavern in town?"
These are really trivial examples, but I'm sure you can all see my point. If your campaign includes family members ("Please don't get drunk at the feast tonight, you'll embarrass me."), _trusted_ religious leaders as opposed to cardboard spellteaching NPCs, and bad guys with their own culture, motivations, families, and friends, then more and more PC activities become value decisions, rather than being simple calculations.
A minimaxer who refrains from attacking the caravan does so because he has concluded that the odds of being beaten by the caravan guards exceeds the potential rewards. Once the PCs pass into the realm of thinking about what they do, instead of totting up chances, you can achieve true roleplaying.
Sandy P.
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