I think it’s fair to say none of the Florida Derby participants will make a good showing over the Churchill Downs track come the first Saturday of May, and I doubt we’ll see many of them. Pleasant Prince does get better race by race but this was a slow stretch in the Florida Derby and I have to think the elite horses will carry the day and not any from this group.

Superfected is a blog dedicated to those dreams we pursue — both sharred and personal, important and frivolous, attainable or not — as we all strike up for a better world. That being said (any girlfriend will tell you “that being said” is one of my catch phrases), I intend to post all kinds of good stuff on here that relates to my life… since most of my life is a series of pursuits. I hope you enjoy following along.

My name is Charley and thanks for reading.

Whiffle Hurling? Bag Tag? Hey, It’s Art

Nice to see mainstream press picking up on the other side of athletic competition and non-digital game design. Now would be time for me to plug the Come Out & Play Festival in NYC which is coming up in June.

Now we’re off to the Preakness, we’re the drama of the sport has caught the mainstream sports world. The Femme Fatale, aka Rachel Alexandra, is crashing this party and plans to strut her Secretariat like stuff against the boys. Is she really that good? Let’s not forget there are about 9 other quality horses in this race and I’ll simply be rooting for whatever is best for the sport: maybe a duel between the Derby and Oaks winners?

My Life on the Court, by Stanley Fish

When Losing Leads to Winning, by Justin Wolfers

The No-Stats All-Star, by Michael Lewis

March gives us many things, but to me… it’s the month that gives me college basketball at its best. The culmination of another season boils down to the greatest climax any American sport has to offer: the field of 64 (cough, 65). Having lived in places like Boston and even New York, I’ve been surrounded by people who don’t care, who don’t hang on every shot on a typical March Thursday around 12noon when the first tournament game tips off. Having also lived in Kentucky, and knowing how life stops when the Wildcats, Cardinals, Hilltoppers, Racers, or Colonels play… I carry that with me, and this year when I nestle up to a near empty Brooklyn bar to catch those early games on that Thursday afternoon, bracket in hand, I’ll be a kid in a car headed to the toy store. The anticipation is the best part: every team and every fan holding the belief that this might be the year to win six games in a row. And the moment Kentucky’s hopes are dashed, that car to the toy store will swerve violently off a bridge leaving me — and my mom — remorseful, a bit angry, envious of team’s still alive, but like the Spring — as our 08-09 team passes, the anticipation for next year blooms nearly after the last shot falls. I’ll continue to watch the tournament and enjoy watching my bracket of predictions fall apart. But all the while, I’ll be thinking about UK recruits and returning players and wondering if this will be us marching to the holy land known as the Final Four…

Finally, a quick tip for those prognosticators filling out the bracket for the office pool: never underestimate the importance of a good point guard and how far this player can carry a team in March. You’ll do well if you pinpoint these players and their teams and pencil them deep into the tourney. Soon I’ll repost a piece I wrote about game design and the office pool.

You’ll never play the same game twice: that was how my mom sold me on trying Bridge. It might have been the same line when my dad talked me into Chess. And come to think of it, pretty much any great game of deep strategy shares this quality, digital or not. Yet Chess only maintains this quality through the game play of your opponent. Same with Bridge, but there it also depends on the cards you’re dealt. Now consider games and sports where you will never play the same game twice and the reason behind this is the altering of the context of the game. I’m talking playing surfaces, environments, and general pregame shenanigans.

I’m watching a Swiss by the name of Federer, first name Roger, come from behind to win the first set of a tennis matches in the semifinals of the French Open. I love European championship tennis for two reasons: it’s really good, and it’s on live television in the morning. I’m talking Wimbledon along with this tourney, and watching Federer — perhaps the most dominating tennis player ever — can be a religious experience. Don’t take it from me, take it from David Foster Wallace. But since an article about Federer has already been done, I’ll write one about the second coolest thing in tennis: the surfaces.

Back in the day, and when I say “day” I’m talking seventh grade, my parents recognized my budding interest in the sport of tennis and got me a coach so I’d learn the “right” techniques instead of teaching myself all of the wrong ones. That summer that I was coached (at a country club mind you and my family didn’t even belong), I developed a wicked serve and not much else. But that serve — which is really only effective from the right side since I was right handed and needed maximum hook/spin on the ball — was good enough to walk through every country club tourney I entered that summer. It was great: taking the trophies from all the country club kids week after week. To this day, I have no backhand, a weak forehand, and make general rallying between a friend a pretty miserable experience. But ask me to serve from the right side… I dare you.

So all bragging aside, the real story here is about how that country club offered two different surfaces to play tennis on: hard court and clay. Now you could say a hard court is a hard court is a hard court, but when you play on public courts — more often than not — each hard court comes with it’s own special blend of cracks and divets, all of which must be considered as part of the game. As John Updike would say, it’s the blemishes that make us special… and in tennis on the hard court, it’s the cracks that give the flavor. And what about clay? That’s the surface Federer is playing on right now at the French Open — and the great thing about this is clay seems to be this superman’s kryptonite. Federer is unbeatable on every other surface. But on clay he is mortal. It’s because tennis on clay is a different game than on concrete. Or on grass for that matter, the surface of Wimbledon. And my summer at the country club taught me this full well.

What exactly is clay? It’s sort of like a dirt but more sandy. When it rains, it gets sort of muddy. But basically it’s like a packed dirt surface covered in sand. In France it looks red. What I played on was more black. There is little traction on clay and this is the key element. Not only do your feet suffer as you dart and slide all over the place, but that un-returnable serve from the right side with the hook/spin doesn’t quite cut like it would on a hard surface. And the seventh grade hot shot is quickly humbled as shot after shot is returned to his backhand.

Now I don’t have all day to write about the different games that employ different environments to alter the course of gaming… but to name two of my favorites, think about golf — where the essence of the sport is in the unique design of each course, each hole for that matter — and baseball. Home field advantage is never more apparent than in baseball where on top of a cheering crowd there is the unique design of the field. The home team’s roster is actually crafted to compose of players whose game will benefit from the design of the ballpark they play in. Take a look at Fenway Park in Boston, and then look at whatever corporate name they are calling the San Francisco Giants’ stadium in the bay.

Going back to the deep strategy games, think about ones where “surface” changes game to game and, through this, player advantage changes. I can’t think of any, can you? I mean, there is MarioKart where you can pick your race track. But not exactly deep strategy, really just a digital sport. I guess sim games, like SimCity might qualify… but that’s single player and it’s a sim. Civilization type games are probably the closest thing out there where armies are built for different environments to fight against another, but in my experience with games of this nature it’s less about strategy and more about dedicating effort to simply build the bigger army. I mean the Litmus Test here would be to take the same two armies, fight them in different environments, and find if there can be different outcomes based on how the environment affected them. In other words, does Napoleon have his clay court? Tennis anyone?

This past Saturday was Cinco de Mayo. For those of you who are not fluent in Spanish, I think that means “you sunk my mayonnaise” which probably can be further interpreted to correspond with a Mexican version of the game Battleship. I’m still checking my sources on that.

Saturday was also relevant to another non-digital game: the Kentucky Derby. The first Saturday in May always serves as the day when 3 year old horses run for the roses and millions upon millions are wagered on their brittle legs and empty bladders. Customary for any ex-commonwealthian (not a real word), I embedded (not only a real word, but the OED’s 2006 word of the year) myself into a frenzied atmosphere of others celebrating the race complete with hat and mint julep. Charles Pratt and Thomas Duc joined me for said festivities and it was suggested I write up a report on this sport of Kings for the blog in reference to the gaming aspects of horse racing. Consider it done.
But first, why should it be done? I mean, why consider non-digital games in this blog? Well I’d argue — and I believe this is why Charles encouraged me — that sport offer game designers extremely rich moments to consider and hopefully borrow from in creating digital games. I just read a great article about considering newly developed sporting games and what is offered to game designers from watching, playing, developing such games. The article is from Wired and is called Aesthletics: Game Designers Should Create More New Sports.

Now, back to our previously featured blog entry. I’ve grown up with horse racing and learned to handicap (what an odd word to use to describe betting) at the early age of 12. This is what happens growing up in Louisville. Your entire boy scout troop is taken to Churchill Downs so that the fathers can gamble. For me, these early lessons begot a love affair. And the first Saturday in May is the holy moment when I celebrate my Kentucky heritage and the beauty of an animal running because it loves to run. And of course also celebrating the chance to gamble large sums of money in the hopes of winning larger sums of money.

Now horse racing is pretty simple in terms of game design. The first horse across the finish line wins. The fascination for me lies in the handicapping. 75% of handicapping thoroughbreds for the Derby is taking a deep look at history and biology. The thoroughbred has a better documented genealogy than any human family tree. One of the best magazines on the sport is called Bloodhorse. You can trace a horse’s roots back to the 19th century, see the insane amount of inbreeding (perhaps this is why Kentucky is the home of the industry), and be able to determine a horse’s running style based on what is found in the family tree. This genealogy has its own language, its own math systems (such as dosage and inbred index), and is the single best indicator as to a horse’s future. And because of this, breeding is where the real money is in the sport. If a horse wins the Kentucky Derby it earns a little over $2 million for its owner. BUT, is immediately worth between $150 and $300 million in breeding fees. Now you understand the devastation surrounding Barbaro’s breakdown and eventual euthanasia. Although as you can imagine, these horses are insured. A yearling sells for as much as $16 million dollars — this is a horse that has never raced (google The Green Monkey) but owners expect returns on the horse in the form of being able to sell it back to a breeder after a stellar racing career.

Consider as a game designer the idea of a sport that evolves with the evolving of an animal. So here’s my first real IDEA that comes from horse racing that can and should be applied to a digital game: evolution of characters. What is every time you played a game and died (GAME OVER), your character was some how altered. Perhaps you the user could change attributes of your character to make him or her faster or stronger. I love the idea of never being able to play a game with the same character twice. It would make interacting with the levels never quite the same experience. There are a lot of ways to go with this but I think there is something really rich to the idea of such an evolution. Players perhaps would be encouraged to die so that they could build a better character which would be necessary to win the game.

So back to horse racing… the other aspect I want to speak to is the idea of gambling and how that affects the experience of the user. It’s worth mentioning I lost my voice in the 2 minutes that the Derby was raced. That’s it: 2 minutes from start to finish. And gathered in a bar with about 150 people also screaming, I think it’s fair to say very rarely does any sport offer such sustained commotion because if you think about it, 2 minutes is a really long time to scream. So why the excitement? I think it has something to do with the money on the line. You’re not screaming for the horse to win — you’re screaming for the horse to win for you to win. Understand the difference? Perhaps this is why they call it the most exciting 2 minutes in sports.

For me, it’s a yearly opportunity to chase what I call the albino whale: the superfecta. The superfecta is the bet where you must get the first, the second, the third, and the fourth place finishers in the 20 horse field in exact order. It’s nearly impossible to do. This was the 4th year in a row I’ve chased this bet. And for the second year in a row I got 3 of the 4. In heart breaking fashion I nailed the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. But the horse that ran 4th beat my other horse by about 2 yards. 2 yards away from a payout around $40,000. That’s a semester of tuition at ITP and a new computer. So close yet so far. And while it hurts to think about what could have been, I admit the first Saturday of May and chasing the superfecta is my favorite day of the year for the simple fact of the thrill I get watching those horse run down the stretch — knowing each one inside and out from genealogy to how they’ve been trained — and yelling my head off because I might walk away feeling like a champion. Also a champion researcher I suppose, because that’s all handicapping is: researching. It’s a beautiful thing watching ego-less, honest, pure athletes competing. It’s more fun to watch them with some serious money on the line.

So what can we learn about wagering in game design? Well, it does make things more intense. I’m sure there are obvious ways to incorporate gambling into video games but my suspicions would lead me to think that such an idea would lead to extremely unhealthy practices. What if there was a way to gamble something other than money? Maybe a way to gamble pride? And what if there were games where you worked as a team with other online players, all gambling together instead of against each other, trying to capture a larger payout as a group but also risking loss as a group? Doesn’t this sound like a really rich experience that would encourage bonding through a digital environment?

Well that’s about all I’ve got for now. I hope this was informative. The second leg of the triple crown (the Kentucky Derby was the first) will be in two weeks and it’s called the Preakness. No horse has won all three races in my lifetime. This year’s derby winner, Street Sense, has a legit shot. And that’s worth paying attention to regardless if you’ve got a bet down or not.

What’s the point of starting a blog dedicated to all and everything related to non-digital games, all things strategy, and — in the spring time, the king of sporting events — the Kentucky Derby? Well, I’m just a guy who loves the art of game design and watching those that surround their choosen game exploiting the design to maximize their chances of winning (without cheating, of course). Everyone plays to win their game, it’s the golden rule of being a player. What seperates just any player and a great player, is the ability to recognize the ultimate paths that achieve the best odds that most often deliver victory. It’s the sort of thing Michael Lewis is making a career of writing about. Here, I just hope to make a nice little pastime for myself doing much of the same. And we’re off!