So Elon is against the concept of an even playing field :thonk:
Ironically, the theoretical limitations of chess are what make it so complex in practice.
Compared to a game like Starcraft, which has all the things Elon lists, the possibilities in a game of chess are rather finite. In any given game position, there are only so many viable moves for a competent player, and both players can see each other's positions at all times.
This makes it possible for really good players to exactly predict several turns in advance, something which is practically impossible in more "complex" games.
In Starcraft, you can only make predictions like "at around the 8 minute mark I expect an attack from around that area, so I'll put some defenses there to minimize losses, after that I will hopefully be in an advantageous position for a counter-attack."
In chess, you can predict the exact moves your opponent will make, exactly what tools you will have at your disposal and exactly what your position will be, for several turns in advance and for multiple different scenarios. And this in turn means that at the top, this is required of you.
tl;dr Chess being more limited and more predictable means in practice that chess grandmasters need to play 10 turns ahead at any given moment, which is what makes it so complex.
Chess ain't even a smart person activity. It's a board game. The best chess players on earth all started as children and got chess playing imprinted on their neurons. The hardest part of it is pattern recognition of previous positions and how they played out since finding useful novelties in a combinatorially large space is basically futile.
I wouldn't say its just pattern recognition though, another extremely important skill is objectivity, which is how you analyse a position without bias. During a game your emotions and past experiences will cloud your view of the position and flat out misjudgment will cause you to lose. Even if you were a computer and you could predict everything 30+ moves ahead you still need to judge the position objectively otherwise you'll just pick the wrong move/plan.
Top players talk about objectivity all the time, it is one of the most important skills and IMO it is definitely something that can be trained but also correlates with intelligence.
One of my biggest hangups in mobas is having a tendency to over extend even when I know it's a bad idea.
Me too, and especially the social aspect of that. If I objectively know the correct decision is to fall back, but I know that teammates are committing anyway, when is it right to go in with them and limit the damage? 5 players fully committing to a mediocre plan is sometimes better than 3 players half-committing to a good plan.
And also just, like, peer pressure. I've made decisions I knew were dumb because the alternative was getting flamed by a teammate
I only play Pokemon Unite anymore and I never would have agreed before trying it that having to opt into chat with other players is a blessing, some people manage to be passive aggressive with the preset alert messages but it's relatively rare.
I enjoyed Unite for a bit, but I find that, coming from League, I just don't find it as satisfying.
Even with all the flaming in League that actively pushed me out of playing the game, I still prefer it somehow lmao
This is also what makes chess hard for humans, but easy for computers. Once the hardware is there, you can just brute force the entire problem space.
Damn this man has never not looked unsettling, even when he was younger than me he looked older than me
microtransaction cartoon game
Lol he doesn't like chess because you can't pay to win.
this is just the Radovid chess scene from Witcher 3
anyways, love going to the massive warehouse where I store all of my 4096x4096 chess mega-grids, rolling 17 dice to randomly select one of them, and then setting it up on a field I own, where I'll have to walk hundreds of meters every time I take a turn to manually move one of the thousands of pieces on the board (or probably send a servant to do it)
Like dude, these "limitations" are not because John Chessman, the designer of chess, was an idiot, they're there because it's a physical board game, and as such is limited by actually having to take up a reasonable amount of space and have games that don't take weeks to complete. Obviously a computer game's going to lack these limitations. And it's not as if you're playing fucking War in the East and having to micromanage the entire Red Army, this is just some mobile game.
Sure, there are limitations granted by being a physical boardgame, but maybe chess should be more like The Campaign for North Africa .
Average playing time 20 - 1000 hours
I knew about this game, but I didn't know it was that bad.
IIRC it was made largely as a joke and never playtested. The company policy if someone ever complained about the rules being unbalanced was to say "we think you must have made some mistake while playing the game, try playing it again".
Fun fact: Italy needs more water than other armies to cook-a da pasta.
There are some really complicated board games (particularly wargames) which are actually meant to be played by mail, because turns take so long you can't really conveniently play them with another person (unless you live together I guess). This later got developed into playing by email for computer games, a lot of early 4X strategy games had features supporting that.
With a game like that, you could conceivably have a really long campaign, although you'd probably need to be really into it in order to not lose interest.
We should bring back playing games by email, why'd that ever go away?
Part of the reason for it being implemented via email specifically was unreliable and slow internet in the early days - properly connecting both players might not be viable in a lot of cases, but just sending along the data of the game state, and having players take their turn on their own, would be a lot easier. These days, most game companies operate on the assumption that everyone has a perfect connection (even if this isn't necessarily true, especially depending on where you live), which has also been used to justify the lack of LAN functionality in a lot of games, something which used to be pretty much standard for PC games (the actual reason probably has more to do with anti-piracy measures, but "surely you have good internet, you don't need LAN" is the publicly given reason at least).
Play-by-email itself is rather niche, since it's only really suitable for turn-based games, so that probably didn't do it any favors. You could likely improvise it in a lot of cases though, by just passing along save files manually (which these days is at least a lot easier to do, there's plenty of services for you to upload files to, and saves wouldn't really exceed size limits in most cases).
It seems like it'd be really nice for long turn based games, not having to text people that you've done your turn on constantly checking a program/website would be very convenient. It'd also be nice at work.
the fucking Polytopia call-out is the best part about this. It's like a Civ-style game got hit in the head by a rock, it's 2 steps above those fucking auto clicker games in complexity. Imagine being over-awed by the sheer strategic depth of Bloons
I like polytopia... I also like chess... But uh ya polytopia is hardly about to melt your mind with deep thoughts. It's why I play it while "working"
I looked it up just to see what he was talking about and had a laugh when I saw it was originally marketed for mobile.
but what about 5-dimensional chess with multiverse time travel?
:galaxy-brain:
That sounds exactly like something you'd expect from a 12 year old trying to prove to themselves how much smarter than everyone else they are, only to come across the quote again a few years later and have a good-natured laugh at how tryhard-y they used to be. Except Elon is 51.
lol if this loser tried to play a real wargame like Flashpoint Campaigns, he'd be neck-deep in T-72s before the timer was halfway out
Loser never played Fire Emblem, the game for REAL strategists
It's like chess, but half of the time your strategy is focused on arranging your own pieces so that they fall in love.
love is its own war
JUST LET ME SHIP THE TALL SWORD LADY AND THE AXE LADY NINTENDO
I'm trying to figure out if this is a specific ship, but every game has the same templated characters lmao.
FKSJDOKFJEONIFSLDHFAOISJFIKESJFLKJ
YES BUT DUE TO @Cromalin this is centered around the fact that I ENTIRELY SHIP EDELGARD AND BYLETH (female of course get that heteronormativity outta here)
that one is canon! nintendo is cool with it. there are 6 gay s ranks, 3 male and 3 female. also some of them can end up in gay relationships with each other and not with you
there are also 2 same sex s ranks for each byleth that are weird that i don't want to talk about
NO FUCKING WAY
IM PLAYING THOSE GAMES NOW
YOU DID THIS TO ME
thanks for more gay ships
an eagle among lions is afaict entirely canon compliant up til the inciting incident! (barring some stuff from three hopes because it was almost entirely written before that)
Being cautious to avoid mild spoilers, but:
spoiler
If you play Three Houses, the Black Eagles route has a big fork. Make sure you don't set yourself up for a bad time!
I am choosing the Edelgard route first, but I will choose them at a later point, the story seems so interesting! I CAN'T WAIT TO ACCIDENTALLY KILL EVERYONE!
You get to pick the house - Black Eagles (Edelgard), Blue Lions (Dimitri), or Golden Deer (Claude). However on Black Eagles:
spoiler
There's a fork that you default to fighting against Edelgard unless you make some choices to specifically fight on her side. It's not too hard to miss, but if you don't pay attention at a few key points you could mess up your run!
"Yes, I only played Edelgard's route, and of course I only ship the tall mommy teacher gf with her angry short commie gf, how could you tell?" :gigachad:
Fuckin exactly :gigachad:
edit: I am obligated to inform you that your comment is my favorite on the entire internet and will be quoted word-for-word on my gravestone
arranging your own pieces so that they fall in love.
You don't do that in chess?
chess is more of trying to get the pawns to revolt against the monarchs
Don't forget resetting and losing an hour of progress because an enemy got a lucky crit!
