[ebbv]

> I have terrible memories of coming to a gamer’s place to spend the afternoon playing Fifa, Street Fighter 4, etc… in all these AAA titles, the guy who owns the game basically beats your ass so hard that all the fun is gone.

This is not a failure of those games, this is a failure of the person who owns the game to not be a dickhead.

Street Fighter 4, for example, has handicapping. You can tilt the game wildly in the novice's favor, to the point where if they land a few lucky hits they win.

I've never played FIFA, but I'd be surprised if it didn't have some way to skew the balance of the game in favor of the novice.

[prawks]

The FIFA equivalent (which was how I learned the game with my roommate who was very good at it) is that the more skilled person picks a lower-ranked team and the new player gets their pick of any team. The difference in maneuverability between teams is enough to even most odds, at least after one or two games of getting used to the controls.

[vertex-four]

I find games with friends to be substantially less fun when people have to be handicapped. When I win, it feels like it's because of the handicap, not because I did anything right.

[sanxiyn]

I find this phenomenon very interesting. I mean, obviously, you won because you did right things. You would have lost if you didn't. By definition, handicap should be set so that you have an even chance of winning.

This may be a cultural thing? In Go, handicap is a normal part of the game and everybody (but see below) is fine with using it. In Chess, people seem to detest handicap and insist on even game.

I live in South Korea, and I visited US Go club when I travelled there, and I was extremely surprised to find that some Go players there insisted on even game. Why would they do that? I mean, if you normally need 4 stones handicap in Go, you have exactly zero chance to win without handicap. What fun is that?

[ritchiea]

The chess/go difference in accepting handicaps may be due to chess's culture of memorization & opening study. Also since in chess all the pieces begin the game on the board (rather than players alternating placing stones) if you it's hard to reconcile that any deviation from the standard game (e.g. removing pieces as a handicap) "doesn't look like chess."

[sanxiyn]

Well, handicap also destroys Go's standard opening theory, which is very extensive. (Start with 4-volume Dictionary of Basic Fuseki: while far from comprehensive, it covers basics well.)

But! Handicap is common enough in Go that there is opening theory for handicapped games! This may not apply to Chess directly, but my point is that if handicap is a normal part of the game, you will have opening theory for handicapped games. This is kind of obvious if you think about it.

[mst]

I've always loved handicap systems in any game; if I'm playing a stronger player in a game that doesn't have one, I set my own mental victory bar as 'lose less badly than previously'.

I suspect it's a psychological function of valuing absolute victory over valuing progress in your abilities, and which of the two you consider more important - and while this is entirely subjective, I feel like Go plays better to the latter set of values and Chess to the former.

[SahAssar]

This is why certain games hide the "handicap" from the users, such as mario kart. It has quite a lot of rubberbanding but since it's hidden and unnoticeable for most players they don't mind.

[twic]

Generally, yes. But sometimes you can turn the handicap into something interesting.

Back in the day, some friends and i used to play a lot of Goldeneye on the N64. Like, a lot. We used to turn our health down to minimum to make it more exciting - a single hit with almost any weapon would kill you.

Sometimes, one of my friends' girlfriend was around, and we wanted her to join in. But she wasn't a gamer, much less a Goldeneye hotshot like us. So we gave her a handicap - she got maximum health, loads more than you'd get even in a normal game, and she played as Oddjob, who is half the size of any other character, and so harder to hit.

This still left game play a bit imbalanced; she could soak up huge amounts of damage, but wasn't aware or accurate enough to really take part in the highly mobile cut and thrust of deathmatch. So we played 3 vs 1, with our fragile ninjas darting around her indestructible, lumbering tank, desperately trying to get enough shots on target to take her down, while she spewed various flavours of death from her tiny bowler-hatted form. We called it Hunt the Freak, and we'd ham it up with an over-the-top commentary about the horrifying scenes of destruction wrought by the unstoppable Freak. All four of us found it highly entertaining, and often hysterically funny. It was so good, we ended up playing it even when she wasn't around.

[joshdance]

Disagree. There are certain games that you have to be 'good' at for it to be fun. My friends can't play Fifa. No matter how easy I am on them, or what team I pick, they just run around and shoot the ball every time. But they LOVE Hidden In Plain Sight. We have played it for hours.

[muyuu]

Then they mash the buttons away and win almost half of the time.

He's right, these games are meant to be played by people with about the same experience, or at least a decent amount of experience and then a bit of handicap.

They're not exactly Mario Party.

[ZeroGravitas]

Talking of Mario, Mario Kart is famous for it's "rubber banding" where if you fall behind you are showered with powerups that can put you right back in the game, while those in the lead get less powerups and get targetted by the blue shell.

[muyuu]

Yeah, but still it's a skill game for the most part, except some particular versions like Mario Kart 64 which IMO is piss poor.

That's why Diddy Kong Racing was such a massive success. The truly good party racing game for the N64.