I was musing about this over the past couple of days and some thoughts stuck with me.
1. Is the current meta strategy that preferences rookie QBs on less cap consuming contracts something fans collectively want to be the seemingly more optimal strategy? Why or why not?
2. What weighting would you, a fan, assign to things you want to have importance in the outcome game? Anything and everything could qualify here but to give a breadcrumb - Do you want coordinator tactics and coaching strategy to be the most important factor in outcome over player personnel and team building or another factor? Compare and contrast to how you enjoy college football.
These are the two specific ones that stuck with me but it opens to a bigger question pertaining to game and league design.
With some games like Chess, which is Player versus Player, the outcomes are determined mostly by the cognitive abilities of two opponents with near equal tools at their disposal. To most this would be called a 'fair game' since the only advantage a player enjoys over the other is the capability with which they can play the game.
But within Chess, there are still multiple ways to accomplish a win. What differentiates Chess from other games with multiple tactical methods to win is that for the most part, the access to those tactics is not bound to the pieces in play before the game starts, access to those tactics are determined by the state of the game once it starts and involves a risk/reward heuristic in each players mind. In addition Chess doesn't rely on a mechanic of imperfect information except future possible moves which is near equal for both participants.
Still there are ways to goose a Chess match to put it in your favor - selecting opponents who have a clearly inferior rating to yours so that while you might not climb in ELO you also don't risk the chance of a straight up loss nearly as frequently.
So using Chess as one pole of game type, lets look at another. Games that have multiple ways to achieve victory, that aren't evenly distributed to each participant by design, and require some sort of pre contest selection to not only differentiate participants from one another but test each participants ability to navigate their specific situation better than their opponents. Think Poker for example. It isn't just a test of cognitive abilities vis a vis risk/reward functions, crunching the probabilities of hitting the nut hand, it also involves reading imperfect information appropriately, and doing so in excess of your opponents. Poker isn't really a polar opposite of Chess though especially as fans of the game interact with it.
For that I give you modern video games where there are multiple 'types' or 'styles' or 'characters'. You select this before the game starts (Kirby in Smash Brothers for example) based on the strategic advantage you think it will convey to yourself over your opponents. Fans of these types of games are enthralled with the various possible combinations you could use to win but are constantly pissed off that there really are only a handful of 'optimal' 'types, styles or characters' that win the tournaments.
The paradox of a game that promises many ways to win is that only is conditionally true in the absence of experience and people seeking to 'solve' or 'win' with tools selected before the game even begins. Once people get a feel for what tools are best to win, it quickly becomes apparent there aren't THAT many ways to win and that some tools are better than others and the game starts going towards optimization by participants. This is why people who play video games that promise that kind of dynamic and diverse strategic/tactical means to win are always complaining about things being nerfed, buffed, OP, UP etc etc.
Tying this back to the NFL and a much larger question - Do you feel that the rules in the NFL, as they stand, give preference to certain styles or types of football over others and by extension, do you think there should be a greater variety in viable offensive and defensive tactics? If not, do you think measuring teams by how close they achieve an optimized solution over their peers is another viable way to measure football teams?
I know that I'm leaving a lot out of the discussion vis a vis football because football is a very complex game with distributed responsibilities and actions across several layers. I wanted to avoid gumming up the general point about games with optimized solutions versus games without optimized solutions with specifics of football because drawing clear lines to optimized in football is fraught with variance and coincidental and causative factors. Football doesn't have hard coded parameters of what can and can't be done and discrete probabilities but has more generalities like "Across the league X is successful Y amount of times, for Participant Z, X is successful A amount of times while for Participant C, X is successful B amount of times". I don't want to pretend like the game of football has been solved but by the same token I don't want to disallow the possibility that some things are better than others tactically in football.
The bottom line question here: Is the NFL set up in a way that conforms with your idea of 'fair' or 'interesting'?
I have my answers somewhat but want a few replies before I go off on another rant
1. Is the current meta strategy that preferences rookie QBs on less cap consuming contracts something fans collectively want to be the seemingly more optimal strategy? Why or why not?
2. What weighting would you, a fan, assign to things you want to have importance in the outcome game? Anything and everything could qualify here but to give a breadcrumb - Do you want coordinator tactics and coaching strategy to be the most important factor in outcome over player personnel and team building or another factor? Compare and contrast to how you enjoy college football.
These are the two specific ones that stuck with me but it opens to a bigger question pertaining to game and league design.
With some games like Chess, which is Player versus Player, the outcomes are determined mostly by the cognitive abilities of two opponents with near equal tools at their disposal. To most this would be called a 'fair game' since the only advantage a player enjoys over the other is the capability with which they can play the game.
But within Chess, there are still multiple ways to accomplish a win. What differentiates Chess from other games with multiple tactical methods to win is that for the most part, the access to those tactics is not bound to the pieces in play before the game starts, access to those tactics are determined by the state of the game once it starts and involves a risk/reward heuristic in each players mind. In addition Chess doesn't rely on a mechanic of imperfect information except future possible moves which is near equal for both participants.
Still there are ways to goose a Chess match to put it in your favor - selecting opponents who have a clearly inferior rating to yours so that while you might not climb in ELO you also don't risk the chance of a straight up loss nearly as frequently.
So using Chess as one pole of game type, lets look at another. Games that have multiple ways to achieve victory, that aren't evenly distributed to each participant by design, and require some sort of pre contest selection to not only differentiate participants from one another but test each participants ability to navigate their specific situation better than their opponents. Think Poker for example. It isn't just a test of cognitive abilities vis a vis risk/reward functions, crunching the probabilities of hitting the nut hand, it also involves reading imperfect information appropriately, and doing so in excess of your opponents. Poker isn't really a polar opposite of Chess though especially as fans of the game interact with it.
For that I give you modern video games where there are multiple 'types' or 'styles' or 'characters'. You select this before the game starts (Kirby in Smash Brothers for example) based on the strategic advantage you think it will convey to yourself over your opponents. Fans of these types of games are enthralled with the various possible combinations you could use to win but are constantly pissed off that there really are only a handful of 'optimal' 'types, styles or characters' that win the tournaments.
The paradox of a game that promises many ways to win is that only is conditionally true in the absence of experience and people seeking to 'solve' or 'win' with tools selected before the game even begins. Once people get a feel for what tools are best to win, it quickly becomes apparent there aren't THAT many ways to win and that some tools are better than others and the game starts going towards optimization by participants. This is why people who play video games that promise that kind of dynamic and diverse strategic/tactical means to win are always complaining about things being nerfed, buffed, OP, UP etc etc.
Tying this back to the NFL and a much larger question - Do you feel that the rules in the NFL, as they stand, give preference to certain styles or types of football over others and by extension, do you think there should be a greater variety in viable offensive and defensive tactics? If not, do you think measuring teams by how close they achieve an optimized solution over their peers is another viable way to measure football teams?
I know that I'm leaving a lot out of the discussion vis a vis football because football is a very complex game with distributed responsibilities and actions across several layers. I wanted to avoid gumming up the general point about games with optimized solutions versus games without optimized solutions with specifics of football because drawing clear lines to optimized in football is fraught with variance and coincidental and causative factors. Football doesn't have hard coded parameters of what can and can't be done and discrete probabilities but has more generalities like "Across the league X is successful Y amount of times, for Participant Z, X is successful A amount of times while for Participant C, X is successful B amount of times". I don't want to pretend like the game of football has been solved but by the same token I don't want to disallow the possibility that some things are better than others tactically in football.
The bottom line question here: Is the NFL set up in a way that conforms with your idea of 'fair' or 'interesting'?
I have my answers somewhat but want a few replies before I go off on another rant