The Keen Gamer

So, this week has been really really weird. We entered it in the middle of a twitter shit storm over Zoe Quinn, and then Feminist Frequency released her newest video, women as background decoration, part 2.

(Warning for anyone who might watch that, it’s full of graphic depictions of violence against women.)

Anyways, that sparked off yet another tidal wave of internet bile, leading to her staying with friends after a particularly credible rape/death threat, and then something really interesting started to happen. Big names in video games started standing up against this trash. The counter push was on, but the overwhelming narrative I got was that “this is what gamers are.”

That made me sad. I’ve said a couple times on this blog in the past month that I identify as a gamer, to the point that I feel trapped by that identification. Heck, I just realized I put the stupid label in my brand. And I’ve been kicking around what that means for me and my identity.

Growing up

Yesterday I went on Omegle to chat with strangers about video games. It’s a guilty pleasure of mine, but I like the random chats that sometime sprout up in that environment. I would typically ask what games they played. I kept getting responses of Call of Duty: Ghosts, or GTA 5. I haven’t played a Call of Duty game since modern warfare 2, and I haven’t enjoyed a GTA game ever. It got me thinking, maybe I’m less of a gamer than I think.

This led me to look at other media. There may have been at one point a universal culture that existed around movie goers, but that is not the case now. All of my friends have at least some movie they like, and some of my friends like movies enough that they want to be more invested, but those movie buffs tend to have genres, or subcultures within movies they subscribe to.

Maybe that’s the way we’re going with video games. Gamer is too ubiquitous to be valuable now. Heck, just today Destiny announced a newsweek magazine for the game.

We’ve seen figures from the mainstream insert themselves into the gaming conversation. Games are growing and they are becoming accepted and that’s what we should be so happy for. But as I watch, I have to prepare my identity for the new shifts that this will bring.

Belghast talked about this in his blog today, but our identities are going to be diverging. I might wear the label of “Games Blogger”, or “MMO Gamer”, or more likely “Indie Gamer”. I’m probably going to find myself looking for the arthouse style games, trolling the humble bundle sites for those great little morsels. This thought gives me new life, as I watch the old label consumed in a fire of hate, knowing that there is at least a path forward.

So this week’s Extra Credits did a great discussion on First Turn Advantage in turn based games. It’s pretty solid and you should definitely check it out.

Today I’m going to talk about this issue as it presents in the My Little Pony card game.

Presenting the problem

So the win condition of the My Little Pony card game is to be the first player to reach 15 points. There are a number of ways to do this but the most straight forward is by confronting problems. There are at any given time two problems available on the board. The problems require you to play friends to those problems in certain quantities in order to score points.

That card in the middle is the problem. On my side it tells me I need 2 Orange and 2 Purple power to confront. On the other side it tells my opponent he needs 6 total power to confront. On our turn, when we have this power threshold met, at the end of the turn we score 1 point. If we are the first player to confront that problem, we score additional bonus points, in this case 2 points.

You play friends to these problems by using action tokens. Action tokens trickle in at a steady rate at the start of your turn. This is sort of the core issue with the game. At the start of the game, the start player gets to play with a board state where they are 2 Action tokens ahead of their opponent. The next turn, his opponent is playing in a board state where he has the equal number of action tokens. For the rest of this game, the start player has effectively 2 bonus resource tokens on their turn and the initiative. This is pretty huge.

That said, at the GenCon nationals, the advantage was definitely with the second player.

Explaining the contradiction

So in ponies, for the most part you can score points in small increments. Whenever you do a move that scores a large amount of points, it typically changes the board state to a position where your opponent is able to easily counter that large gain. This leads to a lot of standoffs where neither player is doing much out of fear that a big play will cost them the game.

In close games like this usually come down to a single faceoff for all the marbles. However, at a tournament if the game goes to time, the second player is granted a massive advantage. If I am the start player and time is called, my options for gaining points is still limited, because whatever big move I make will allow my opponent to counter. However, if I am the second player, since the game must end with my turn, I am able to act freely without concern that my opponent will be able to take advantage of the amazing board position I open up by whatever I do on the last turn.

This means that if I am a control deck, and I have locked my opponent out, I can spend my last turn clearing my villain (scoring 2 points), double confronting (scoring 2 more points) and then winning that faceoff (for another 1-3 points). In a normal turn I would never do this, because I am score 5-7 points and opening my opponent up for a juicy 10 point turn, but in the weird ‘player 2 ends the game’ I am free to get as many points as I can.

So I guess what I’m saying is that first turn will typically have an advantage, but if a game does not always end with a decisive victory, and the second player is ensured the last word, second turn may be more valuable than one thinks.

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