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Degenerate Strategies
Dedicated and unsportsmanlike players have particular ways of engaging with the system of a game. One common behavior these player types exhibit is to make use of degenerate strategies or exploits. We first encountered degenerate strategies in Games as Game Theory Systems. A degenerate strategy is a way of playing a game that takes advantage of a weakness in the game design, so that the play strategy guarantees success.
Degenerate strategies often appear in complex games, where the numerous permutations of play sometimes afford shortcuts in the space of possibility. For example, you are playing a real-time strategy game against the computer and you realize that the program's AI does not handle pathfinding well. (Pathfinding refers to the aspects of the program that plot navigational paths for the computer-controlled characters through obstacle-filled terrain.) Whenever the computer-controlled troops move around obstacles, they begin the march in formation but end up disorganized, with individual units trapped in irregularly shaped pockets of the terrain. It is not difficult for you, however, to make the small corrections necessary to keep your units together. If you decided to take advantage of this weakness by strategically leading the computer-controlled opponents into obstacle-filled parts of the map, you would be using a degenerate strategy. Taking advantage of the game's weakness in this way would not exactly constitute cheating, but it does exploit the game's structure as a means of winning. Although games are not designed to be exploited by players, what makes a degenerate strategy degenerate is not just that it goes against the intentions of the designers. Using an exploit is a way of playing that violates the spirit of the game, similar to taking advantage of the implicit rule governing time between Tic-Tac-Toe turns. Degenerate strategies appear in non-digital games as well. In early editions of Magic: The Gathering, certain card combinations were simply too powerful and could destroy a player on the first turn, before a match had a chance to develop. Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of the game, declared certain cards "officially" illegal, most notoriously the Black Lotus card, in order to keep this kind of play experience in check. In regulated tournament play, the outlawed cards were not used. But in more casual games, players continued to include them in their decks for years. Why isn't using a degenerate strategy considered cheating? Degenerate strategies take advantage of weaknesses in the rules of a game, but do not actually violate the rules. What kind of player would play in this way? The answer is both a dedicated player, who is overzealously seeking the perfect strategy, and an unsportsmanlike player, who has found a hole in the rules to exploit, even though he understands that he is not playing the game the way it was intended. These two kinds of players can both make use of degenerate strategies, depending on the context. The difference between a dedicated player and an unsportsmanlike player is the degree to which the player subscribes to the lusory attitude. Dedicated players follow rules on all levels. Unsportsmanlike players follow the operational rules, but they do not follow all of the implicit ones. Dedicated players loyally uphold the magic circle of a game, but unsportsmanlike players fail to do so, occasionally stepping just outside its borders in order to bend the rules. Often, whether or not a degenerate strategy is a "proper" way to play depends on how the game experience is framed. When it was discovered that Pac-Man could be played by memorizing patterns of movement instead of through improvisational moment-to-moment tactics, player reaction fell into two camps. Some frowned on using memorized play patterns as a violation of the spirit of the game. Other players, however, capitalized on patterns in order to get higher scores. These pattern players did not consider themselves to be unsportsmanlike at all: they saw themselves as dedicated players who had simply found a better (and more demanding) way to play the game. One more example: remember the hypothetical fighting game from our earlier investigation of degenerate strategies? The game could be beaten by using one technique over and over, rather than exploring the carefully orchestrated system of fighting moves created by the game's designers. It could be said that the player making use of this degenerate strategy is behaving in an unsportsmanlike manner, improperly playing the game, sacrificing "fun" in exchange for a shortcut to victory. It could also be said, however, that the exploit was being used by a dedicated player who had "solved" the fighting game like a puzzle. As with the Pac-Man pattern players, instead of playing the game the way it was designed to be played, the dedicated player simply invented a new method of interaction. This is arguably an example of transformative play, an important game phenomena we will investigate in chapters to come.
Whether or not a particular degenerate strategy is considered proper is often contextual. For example, the use of the single-technique exploit to beat all of the computer opponents in our hypothetical fighting game might be admired by a group of players for its elegance. On the other hand, if the degenerate strategy were used against other human players, fighting bouts would devolve into uninteresting games, with both players relying on the one exploitable technique again and again. In this social context, the exploit would be frowned upon as unsportsmanlike behavior, a violation of the implicit rules and the enjoyable spirit of the game. The meaning of a game action, even if the action is the selection of a general strategy, is always influenced by the context in which it occurs. In a social context, the exploit unbalances the level playing field of conflict and shrinks the space of possibility to a very narrow range, threatening the meaningful play of the game.
