BlindFire

Don’t worry. The kid’s Asian, he probably knows Kung-Fu.

So this Malcolm Gladwell article on Davids vs. Goliaths is typical Gladwell. Stupidly fun to read. To sum it up quickly yet unsuccinctly (which should totally be a word, btw), people who are underdogs can win by working harder and/or smarter than their opponent. So for example, David beat Goliath not by out-muscling him, but by making the fight a long-range vs. short-range attack. Advantage: rock-slinger.

It is not that Davids break the rules; they merely break the tradition or perhaps the spirit of the rules.

So perhaps when people cheat in online FPSes (like people shooting from underground in COD:WaW), they think that if the machine is capable of doing this trick, then it’s within the set of rules?

So at the end of Gladwell’s article, the referee is kind of like the video game company patching a game to make it more fair. Well, fair to the people who are playing the way it’s “supposed” to be played.

This is the first dunk in women’s college basketball.

In the 40s or whenever the first slam dunk occurred in basketball, I wonder if people playing with the dude were like, “Hey! WTF are you doing??” Imagine if they had rewritten the laws of basketball to say No Jumping Higher than the Hoop Allowed. Now that would be weird.

All this reminded me of this chapter in Naruto, you know, the one with the annoyingly voiced ninja kid, where all the kid ninjas had to take an impossible writing test where the only way to pass was to cheat without being detected for cheating using their ninja skills (I still think this is the most ingenious thing ever to come out of manga (however, the YouTube clip of it is a lot less cool than it seemed in my imagination)).

So, I finally ask: have there been any games where the only way to win is to cheat, or play in a way the game didn’t intend you to play?

I can’t remember any game that specifically required you to break the rules of the game to beat it. If I could make video games (nevermind the shooting and puzzle games I made in Flash a year ago), I’d make one like that. Though if it’s designed to be cheated, then it isn’t cheating… or is it? Now I’m just confused.