"Debunking Asymmetry" by game developer Keith Burgun

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
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Well, when I say limiting, I’m speaking about limiting ways in which the player interacts with the game as opposed to limiting the results or outcomes of a choice. You’re correct in saying that placing a Go piece on one part of the board means you can’t also place another somewhere else simultaneously. This is more in the category of game flow, right, so your piece placement is a tactical decision. A forced choice limiting the way you interact with the game would probably be some off-kilter rules in chess (that doesn’t exist) that said once you moved your rook to a certain tile, you can’t use rooks anymore until the game is over. That’s something far more forced and for no real reason–am I saying the author thinks character selection is that severe in terms of limiting gameplay? Maybe my example wasn’t tame enough, but the limits are real, I think.

Now I try to word these thoughts about the author’s work appropriately, so I wouldn’t say I’ve just been throwing around things like “skew” when describing things because, in truth, I’ve only been hoping to discuss these issues with readers who, whether they agree with the author or not, have digested the article from the appropriate point of view. I have taken great strides to make sure that I haven’t put my personal opinion on this topic out here either way and certainly wouldn’t make any personal claims without providing some sort of explanation. What I’m posting are paraphrased (as accurate as I can get them) ideas that I understood from the article and trying to put them in such a way that those who can’t exactly see why he’s making the claims he’s making (because they’re mostly not looking from a design point of view) can get a better grasp on that viewpoint and then choose to agree or disagree from there instead of disagreeing right off the bat simply because the player point of view is often the polar opposite of the designer’s point of view. That said, in short, I’m not making any claims (at least I don’t think I am) other than what the author has made (again, as accurately as I can paraphrase these ideas) and you can refer to his work for his justifications (or lack thereof). Am I doing it 100% right? Maybe not, but it’s as best I can.

Hmmm, how about…this. What if I told you that instead of picking a character based on how you want to play, that the author could conceptualize a game (whether he can or can’t, this is just for the sake of example) where you just pick a character and you can play how you want to play with that character instead of having to pick from a character or group of characters to based on how you want to play. To me, it seems that the author is saying, “Hey, asymmetry does things like make you pick characters to play in certain ways. With symmetry, you could just pick whatever and play in the style you desired regardless.” Again, I don’t think the author is saying asymmetry or the suggested limitations it imposes are bad or lame, just that symmetry can offer many of the same things asymmetry can without the suggested limitations.

One anecdote I have that I can use to relate to this particular point with the author while remaining neutral to the issue at hand is that whenever I introduce a new game to my local community or to just a new player, when they ask which character they should pick to learn the game with (which may or may not be problematic in itself for game design, but that’s for another post I suppose), I try not to show them the “regular guy” characters. Instead, I try to teach them the basics and mechanics of the game while they learn a character by directing them to the character that has the most everything. If the game has a mechanic that a character can use, I show them the character that employs the most of those mechanics. With this, when they learn the basics of the game and are ready to branch out to pick whichever character they want, they can jump into that character and explore without having to relearn how maybe a flight mechanic or a certain cancel mechanic works–they would have gotten as much exposure to the different kids of mechanics that the game has to offer as possible up front.

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There are plenty of decisions you can make in symmetrical games that limit the way you interact with the game, in the future, though. To take your chess example, if you move your rook to a certain tile (one threatened by another piece) you actually might not be able to use that rook for the rest of the game. It’s even a forced choice in several relatively common situations, such as sacrificing a piece to defend the king or having to choose between two threatened pieces. How is choosing whether to let your opponent capture a knight or a bishop different from choosing one set of moves and losing another? I’m not even saying I disagree with him, really, since I think there is something to a lot of what he says, I just think that a lot of the lines he draws aren’t so clear-cut as he makes them.

Sorry, my wording probably made that come across more aggressive than I meant it to; my point was that I was less concerned with the phrasing of his points than the fact that he didn’t justify them, for the most part. Regardless of whether he used skewed or another word, I took issue with the fact that he doesn’t explain what about character selection is [whatever word he chose to use]; I meant “throwing around” in the sense that he just tosses out a lot of terms and qualitative assessments without backing them up or even explaining exactly what he means. For instance, saying that SFII’s engine wasn’t adequately “elastic,” doesn’t actually tell the reader much. I mean, for all I know, maybe it wasn’t, but I’m not even really sure in what sense he’s using the word.

I would argue that allowing a certain play-style isn’t necessarily the same as facilitating it. I think he often generalizes and conflates without explanation, the same way he divides without it. In other words, to take his Starcraft example, the fact that someone playing the Terran can rush isn’t the same as the design facilitating that, the way the current Zerg design does. This is countered by his example of choosing heroes as “emergent asymmetry,” but then we’re back to questioning why he thinks choosing a character/civilization later in the game is different than choosing one earlier in the game, which he never explains.

I guess I don’t really see how this would actually be different in a symmetrical game, provided it had the same diversity of options. Since a player still theoretically has to learn and understand every single option to play effectively, the only difference between learning one character and learning forty is whether or not the player has to return to the character select screen.

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Burgun has been making topics that annoy people over at Sirlin’s forums for a pretty long time. I find that comment quite accurate.
The core symptom, though, is a person looking for Truth in a place where Truth doesn’t exist, only people’s tastes. He’s essentially trying to figure out how to make The One True Ice Cream Flavour.

Also, we could just look at and contemplate the sheer insanity of these:

“The only remaining answer is “to support the theme/fantasy” – to make it feel like that scene from Starship Troopers. Obviously, this is not a game design motivation, so it can’t be used to defend asymmetry’s role in ideal game design.”

" I suppose I could see it happening a bit for a player in two games that are similar, like if they went from Street Fighter to Super Smash Brothers or something, but hopefully going forward, fewer games will be so similar to each other."

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Oh, sweet, so I guess we’re both looking at this more or less the same way.

He’s on to some things.

Doesn’t back them up very well, sometimes appealing directly to emotion to get his point across.

Glad I didn’t give up and kept responding, LOL. I mostly enjoyed the way you approached this discussion.

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Reminds me of a quote that Sirlin added in his book by Bill Hartston on Dr. Emmanuel Lasker.

“For Lasker understood better than anyone that the true nature of the struggle in chess was not an objective search for the truth, but a psychological battle against both oneself and the opponent in conditions of extreme uncertainty.”

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Okay here’s my simplified interpretation of his article

If we compare fighting games/rts to a symmetrical board game

The author interprets

Race/Characters = Pieces with differences

If I’m getting what he’s saying.

While I interpret

Race/Characters selection = Your first move

Like Chess has counters for particular openings, fighting games/RTS have counterpicks for characters.

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I think one of the first steps to “Ideal game design” is stop comparing video games to board games, they’re not the same.

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How would a symmetrical game evolve in a fighting game without a character select screen anyway?

You get hit in the thigh and can’t sweep anymore?

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Mortal Kombat II could work as a symmetrical game. Both players would just start as Shang Tsung.

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I don’t play Ryu very well. A fighting game in which Ryu is the only selectable character would see my win rate drop off. People who are naturally good at playing Ryu would be given an advantage and people who are naturally amazing at playing Dudley (such as myself) would be disadvantaged.

Besides. Fighting games are already symmetrical. You can choose any of the 500+ (conservative estimate) available characters in SSF4 AE 2012, same as your opponent. That’s what blind picks are for.

Picking a character is a conscious gameplay decision. You’re thinking “Even though this matchup is officially bad, I’m actually going to counter pick with this low tier character because they have a tool that specifically exploits my opponent’s one bad habit.”

The character select screen is a game in itself. It is poker.

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No its no like poker its like fighting games arrrg lol.