So what sort of player do you tend to balance for?

I like to balance for the highest level play only. Unrelated to that, I also want to get rid of all the pointless dexterity tests that stop beginners from being able to play the "real game." I guess that can result in some characters/sides/races/whatever requiring some skill you don't have, if you want to be really effective, but I think that whole problem is pretty minimized if you go along with my approach.

But couldn't there be an issue there that the amateur game may be, in extreme circumstances, incredibly unbalanced? There's certainly some entry-level of skill required for pretty much every game.

I think anyone doing it the opposite of how I'm saying runs a much bigger risk of making the beginner game unbalanced than my method does. The traditional way is to have tons of stuff in your game that is physically hard to execute, so it means the beginners aren't even playing the same game. If you try to make your game easy to play and get rid of the stuff that's hard for no real reason, it should work out okay, though. Look at link combos in a fighting game - that's where you do a move, let it finish (don't cancel it) and the very first frame you can do your next move, you do it. If a character needs to do some hard link combo to be viable, and is garbage if you can't do it, then I'd have to ask why this thing is so hard in the first place. The actual decision - the strategy - is how to get into a situation where you can do this combo. That's the part that involves two player interaction, which is the thing a competitive game is, I'd hope, supposed to test. Once you do that, if you can only do this combo - in our example, one that's necessary to even compete with this character - by spending dozens of hours in training mode, practising it by yourself, then I have to wonder why that skill is being tested. I hear gamers refer to that sort of thing as "depth," but that is not depth at all. That is not what that word means.

I agree. I suspect it's largely to do with the skill that's seen in being able to do it. If it's difficult to do, then it's clearly only for high-end players. And if it's something that's only for high-end players, it's deep, presumably. I'd argue it's more an illusion of depth rather than actual depth, though.

Yeah, it's a skill. No debating that. There are lots of skills in the world, though, and we don't test most of them in competitive multiplayer games. For example, we don't test the skill of juggling five balls. If you had to juggle five balls between each move in chess, it would add to the "skill" of the game, in that the number of skills being tested increases - but it adds a skill that no one should care about in the context of a chess match! If someone has amazing execution skills in a game, then okay, I guess I can see that being rewarded, but not to the degree that we see in today's competitive games. It seems out of place with the concept of competition as a way of interacting with the opponent.

Considering we're talking about the difficulty of execution - where do you think the Smash Bros. games fit into this?

Perhaps you saw my Nintendo-sponsored series of tutorial videos on Smash? Smash's basic moves are very easy to execute, because it's just direction + button for special moves, which is great for beginners. That said, it also has a lot of really difficult stuff. Melee more than Brawl, even. One strange example of this is L-cancelling, which is a technique that lets you recover instantly when you land after doing an air move. The decision tree works like this: always L-cancel. There is no depth whatsoever to this mechanic, but for some reason, Smash players hold it up as an amazing skill. Now, you could say that the game is better with the effect of L-cancelling - that is, a game where you can move instantly when you land is a better game. Actually, have you heard of Brawl+? It's a player-made hacked version of Smash. They're editing hex code or something to try and "fix" the game for competitive play. I heard - and sorry if I heard wrong, Smash community! - that they decided to put L-cancelling in this game because they like the gameplay effect. To their credit, it happens automatically, so there's no need to execute the non-decision cancel manually. It just always happens, which means that everyone can play "the same game" so to speak... which I guess is an ironic statement given that they're creating something that isn't the same game as Brawl. (Laughs)

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