One time we were playing RC2, a lot of people started going houndeye. We all know how maddening it is to hear that chargeup sound and know that we only have a few precious seconds to find and kill the houndeye before that green beam stabs out from a wall and kills us. In this game, people discovered that the houndeye is immune to its own attacks, both the green overcharge beam and the short-range sonic wave. So what did they do after being killed once too many by that beam? Go houndeye themselves!
Soon, out of eight people playing, six of them were houndeyes. Green beams were shooting everywhere, trying to find and gib the last remaining normal players. I expected it to be only a matter of time before they, too, would go houndeye in an effort to avoid dying all the time. This would have resulted in the game coming to a complete halt, since nobody was able to kill anybody else anymore. Of course, everybody would then agree to stop using houndeyes for a while and the game would proceed normally. And it was then that I came to realize that this closely mirrored a phenomena that arose in an old game I knew: RoboWar.
This old game for the Macintosh (a slightly different Windows version going under the name RoboWar 2 can be found
here) had people programming a robot (in a custom-made, easy-to-learn inverse syntax programming language) to fight autonomously against the robots of other players. Tournaments were held at regular intervals, with contestants sending their robots to the creators of the game via email or on a floppy disk. The scoring system was straightforward: Kill your opponent and you score a point. There were two kinds of matches, duels (1 on 1) and group matches (6 robot last-man-standing game). The scoring quickly turned out to be flawed when one of the creators of the game cooked up a little robot that was capable of nuking the entire arena in a single chronon (the time unit used in the game), killing every other robot. This meant that the robot itself ended up with its energy being somewhere around -600 or so. One game rule dictated that if a robot has below -150 energy at the start of a chronon, it self-destructed. So this robot basically xenocided, but won every round because of the scoring system.
So the scoring system was changed:
Survive a match and you score a point. The mass nukers would now never score because they died every round. Their opponents wouldn't score either in those matches, but they'd score in other matches against more conventional robots. So the mass nukers ended up at the bottom of the tournament ladder and were soon forgotten. Several sucessful tournaments were held with this new scoring system, until the advent of what one player called "the Alliance of Pacifist Scum".
Disclaimer: I don't say there's anything wrong with pacifism in general, but this was a competitive game. Robots that wouldn't compete had no place in this game, period.With that out of the way, let me explain: What were the pacifists? These were robots that were programmed not to make any aggressive moves unless the opponent initiated hostilities. This meant that if two pacifist squared off against each other, they would simply not fight. This meant that the match would go on until the 15000 chronon limit, at which point it was declared a draw. Since both robots survived the match, they both scored a point. The message was clear: Join us or lose. A pacifist robot stood significantly better chances of winning than a "warrior". Even worse, "warriors" couldn't really use their own aggressive stance to any advantage, since the pacifists had just as computer-quick reflexes as the warriors themselves. And there was nothing in the game that made a pacifist, once "triggered", a worse fighter than a "warrior". So pacifists ruled supreme.
Eventually, to encourage real competition, the scoring system was changed to one that discouraged pacifism (and incidentally gave nukers a short comeback until a little change in the system brought their proliferance to a screeching halt).
The last two players in the aforementioned RC2 game ended up being too stubborn to go houndeye (just like some people never built pacifists), so a stalemate was never achieved. The map then switched, and all was back to normal again the next round, with screaming scientists once again flying everywhere. If you fail to get the point in this little story, don't worry - I wasn't trying too hard to make one.
But I find it interesting that players can be driven to taking a peaceful stance if the rules encourage it. Why doesn't this happen in the real world? I think we all agree that peace is better than war, both for economy, personal freedom and pretty much anything else. How come the earth is not a peaceful place to live? Do we have to turn everyone into houndeyes first?
Topic: The Houndeye Alliance (Read 6375 times)
