![]() Additional padding only means it takes longer before players can meet each other on equal ground to get to where the best bits are: outsmarting your opponent. Sirlin’s next game, Fantasy Strike, will be a hyper-minimal fighting game, with less than a dozen moves per character. ![]() In fact, I would argue that most games don’t really need all that many possibilities. Pokemon, now with 802 different characters, has perhaps too much. Rock-Paper-Scissors doesn’t have enough of this ‘padding’, and therefore gets tiresome quickly. By padding, I mean the possibilities in a game. With time I’ve come to realize that games built on interactivity with opponents are simply yomi with different amounts of padding. Yomi is a relatively new term, often coined by David Sirlin, which Urban Dictionary states as ‘knowing the mind of the opponent’. So far, I have only found one, and it has been at the core of the competitive games I love the most: Yomi. ![]() This realization has often had me ponder if there were traits in games that were perfectly mental. But even then, when training mental skills, the best of the best find themselves bound by physical limits: reaction time, memory, perception, button-press speed, timing/dexterity, calculation, concentration, etc. Video games do an even better job at selling this dream than sports, since the physicality of sports will often exclude a great portion of the population. I once heard the proverb: “You can be anything you want as long as you want it more than anybody else.” Games often adhere well to this truism, especially compared to the fickleness and randomness of real life. This is fantastic, as they’ll find the will to continue under the belief that if they just spend more time honing their skills, they will eventually get further than others. Mostly, these traits can be practiced alone, which gives competitors a sense of progress. In competitions, certain traits will turn out to be more valuable than others. There are many traits that define a player. But I do hope that reading this will bring new perspectives into what creates excellence in gaming. And no, I honestly don’t expect you to find a version of this game, a multi-tap, a working PlayStation, a CRT television, and three other friends willing to join in. To understand why, I’ll have to explain two theories. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.First person shooters are a dime a dozen, and here’s me telling you to try a console port of a twenty year old 3D-shooting game. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. ![]() If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.
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