Game Theory - Marginal Advantage

For me, one of the reasons that the concept of Marginal Advantage is important for game design, is because you have to interact with, or at least react to, your opponent. In the Mancala example, the greedy AI was basically playing a single-player optimization game, and ignoring its opponent. Meanwhile, the clever AI paid attention to what its opponent could do and played around it. The Starcraft example continues the theme: amateurs concentrate on what's best for them in an absolute sense, while the pros consider their opponents.<p>FYI, the author, Sean Plott, is better known as Day[9], one of the top-ranked Starcraft players in the United States. Also a mathematician, as it turns out. His podcasts on the SCII beta are really insightful.

I've had a really hard time finding writing of this quality and insight into good game design.<p>There's lots of fluffy, high level stuff at one end of the spectrum and then lots of stuff that discusses the details of specific well trodden genres ad nauseum.<p>There's not so much that's of direct use when you sit down and try and design an orginal type of game by applying principals like this it seems to me.<p>I don't know how much of that is because the people with such insight haven't written it down, or they really just do it by feel and trial and error rather than by applying easy to describe techniques.<p>Does anyone have any other recommendations like this?

I cannot help but think that these examples share a different commonality -- that they are war simulations where the winners in these examples were the ones who did not overextend and instead fortified or played a better numbers game. This is not marginal advantage; it is fortification and resource consolidation. I forget the word for it... where you are trying to reduce your opponent's resources before yours... but that resource management skill is what makes good players good. Viewed that way, what is really going on is much less mystical.

Insightful: all reasonably designed competitive games share three basic traits: 1. ambiguity of optimal play 2. diversity of play 3. allowance for skill

<i>Third, a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the element of chance or luck. Ideally, the probability of a weak player defeating a good player should be as close to zero as possible. </i><p>I'd disagree that this is the ideal. Personally, I enjoy games that mix luck and skill. Take Cribbage, for example-- the weaker player will still win about 45% of the time, by virtue of having been dealt better cards-- which is why tournaments consist of a number of games, to even out the luck.<p>I think it's great if weaker players can defeat stronger players, on occasion. It helps keep the game interesting for everybody.<p>Put another way: when I play chess with my children, I have to handicap myself-- otherwise, they'd lose every time, and quickly lose interest. When I play cribbage with them, they still win often enough to keep things interesting.

If you're interested in game theory and strategy and looking for a non-technical introduction, I'd heavily recommend the book Thinking Strategically by Dixit and Nalebuff ( <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310353" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393310353</a> ). I'd been exposed to a lot of the concepts before, but they hadn't completely clicked until reading their engaging examples.

Marginal Advantage implies looking one turn ahead, to determine how the opponent can react to your move. The Greedy approach doesn't have to look ahead at all. The difference is that simple - the more moves you look ahead, the better you play. Chess programs became "expert level" when there was enough CPU horsepower to look 6 moves ahead.