I'm gonna try a more serious (wall of text) post on the topic. This is the origin of the "slippery slope" discussion, AFAIK:
http://www.sirlin.net/archive/slippery- ... -comeback/
This guy is a pretty enthusiastic supporter of the play-to-win mentality, as opposed to the typical casual gamer wanting to have fun mentality. I personally think either way is as valid and take joy both. I have played lots of dwarf fortress, single player TBS games, RTS sp campaigns, WOW, RPGs... all casual gaming with no serious beating of opponents in sight. But I also enjoy watching korean starcraft progamers play and play some starcraft to try and imitate them, but at a very low level (my apm is 120 at best, usually around 100). I play with random hackers, n00bs and other lowlife scum on battlenet, but I do play to win as best I can and improve my skills a bit. You could say I suck personally, as I'm not really serious about it, but I do get and enjoy the concept of good players duking it out with no bars or holds. What I'm trying to illustrate with this is that I don't think either casual or competitive is wrong, like so many others sitting in once camp, but that I find both fundamentally legit.
I think that the design goals of a casual and competitive game are very much different. In a casual game, the goal is to provide as much of things like eye candy, story, feel, immersion, "epicness". In a singleplayer game this is easy to see, but with multiplayer you do unavoidably have human opponents that have to fight each other somehow which clouds the skies so to speak. I think that a casual game would try to take the edge off the competitive nature, to try and make it more into a form of theatrical play that the players participate in. Team games, for example, can typically feel much more comfortable since you're just one of many players, and you don't have to feel so much pressure to loose, since you are really just one in the team loosing, not the Loser of a 1v1.
Slippery slope could be an element to look at in casual contexts, in the way that it might help take the edge off to reduce it, or reverse even. I'm not really interested in going to deep with casual game design tough.
This brings me to where I wanted to start off my actual discussion, slippery slopes in a game meant to be competitive. The Sirlin article is written in this context, if you didn't notice. His idea is that slippery slope is inherently bad game design. The view is that games such as CHESS and starcraft are worse off then they would be designed with less of it. This is where I think the weak point of the argument is. I think that slippery slope is actually to be desired. I will try to explain carefully exactly why.
The reason why slippery slope is seen as bad is that, by definition, disadvantages compound over the course of the game. When a player starts loosing, it feels as if the game is already decided prematurely. Instead it is felt that the games conclusion should stay indefinite until the very end. Who wants to know the books ending before the last page so to speak? And we want comebacks, everyone loves comebacks right, the twist in the plot? So the more comebacks, the better.
I'm going to argue against the above paragraph and the position outlined in it in several parts.
First, the idea that the game is prematurely decided and over with too soon. For example, a handful of peons killed at the start of the game. Elegantly this would apply to both chess and starcraft, in chess loosing even one pawn or worse a knight/bishop is usually seen as an almost fatal disadvantage that puts the loosing player on the backfoot for the rest of the game. If you loose a few SCVs, drones or probes at the start of an starcraft game you can easily find yourself economically behind to desperatly fight a loosing battle as the opponent soon has more units then you do due to the exponential nature of the starting economy in starcraft. In TA terms loosing your first 3 mexes to a weasel rush on comet catcher is a clear sign your about to be pwned hard.
It's easy to argue that this is of course bad, the game has barely started and there has certainly not been any epic battles yet or some heroic comabacks for us to enjoy. At best we got to enjoy some minor skirmish with a handful of peons
To be specific, lets pick a proffesional starcraft best of 5 important matchup between two star players in an epic final. At first it might seem like loosing a few peons is just a random occurance, something that just randomly happens at any time to anyone, even such progamers.
wrong. The player who got in to his opponents base and killed off a few of these crucial peons has carefully studied his opponents previous games. He has analysed the patterns and behaviours of his opponent, discovered that his opponent has a penchant for greedy builds on this map. He has practiced for several days a rush opener, an alternative opener incase the previous 2 games would go in such a way that he would feel like changing his game plan. At the beginning of the game, he has to scout his opponent, perfectly pull off a build order specially tuned with building placement on the map to try and avoid the opponents scouting efforts. He then has to sneak past his opponents well practiced anti-rush tactics, and finally potentially outmicro the opponents efforts to save his peons.
My point is that the decisive moment, even if it happens early, is not just some random occurance that "just happens". It's the culmination of everything that happened in that game sofar. It's part of a whole. I find this much more beautiful then long drawn out games of battles back and forth, it's simple, to the point. Like a samurai opting to do his best to finish off his opponent in one quick decisive blow. The opponent did have his chance, he could have done a hundred things to avoid his untimely demise. And he has 5 games in a series to do it.
The comeback. Comebacks are good, their exciting. You thought you knew what was going to happen, but it turned out the other way! How delightful to be wrong. The problem is that the glory in the comeback is in it's unlikelyness. If you force comebacks into the game, they pale. A comeback is awesome since you
didn't expect it.
There's this idea that the game should be left undecided until the very last moment, preferably after at least some time. I would like to say that the outcome is decided even before the game in a way. The better player will win. It's just that we don't really know, who is the better at this moment? But one is, his preparations where better, but we don't know so yet. We want to see the better player win trough a well executed gameplan, not the two players battle it out for a long time back and forth until one player finally comes out on top. A few such games are okay, variaton is always nice. But ultimately, if the game just flows back and forth in an eternal comeback cycle, it stops mattering what plans the player set out with. What they did in the initial stages of the game gets wiped out like drawings in sand. At the end, it's mostly just luck that decides which way the pendulum finally swings all the way, if both players had a real chance at winning multiple times. You get a fractured game, with dozens of little battles that are not connected, you can't speak of a game where this player pulled this awesome stunt and won, it was just a long drawn out game of this, that, then this and this and that.
Finally, the dreaded undead part of the game where a victor is felt to be assured and there's no point continueing to play according to consensus. The loosing player has only a very slim chance of comeback, what to do? Of course, this is so simple, the looser GG:s, resigns, or in TA:spring language, ragequits.
