Comment by taeric
3 years ago
This feels like you are trying to explain common card game semantics of instants versus turn plays. With the twist that you are arguing that instants are the correct and more efficient mechanism.
But here is the thing. Not everyone is well versed in how those semantics play out. And even those that are, have well agreed "cards" that can be done in different situations. To argue that all things should be "instant" playable is a tough sell.
I don't know about instant/turn play semantics so can't follow the tradeoffs there.
> Not everyone is well versed in how those semantics play out
I would argue that this is not necessary: just watch younger people who are friendly with each other discuss something: what I'm describing is a natural mode of communication. AFAICT it's just overridden in certain cases when people are taught "never interrupt someone speaking" or something along those lines.
But I would be curious if you could lay out the tradeoffs with instant plays in the card game semantics you mentioned.
> I don't know about instant/turn play semantics so can't follow the tradeoffs there.
Magic: The Gathering works like a computer (quite literally it's Turing complete). When you play a card or ability, it is put on a stack. After you're done, you need to yield - then the other player may play things on the stack too (but, they can only play "instants" - most other cards can only be played if the stack is empty). Then they must yield, and so on.
(In the 90s, instants meant to interrupt other spells were called "interrupts", but this name was dropped)
After everyone is done, things are popped from the stack in the reverse order they were played (like any stack). So if your opponent played something in response to what you played, their card resolves first, then yours. But if you played something in response to their response, your card resolves first, then theirs, then yours.
This would be very tedious, but in fact most decks have few instants and little interaction with the stack, so most of time you play a card I will just wait it to resolve and generally wait my turn to play. And famously, no card of MtG is allowed to mention the stack in their printed text: while the concept itself is intuitive, talking about the stack is a sure way to make a card overly complicated.
> Magic: The Gathering works like a computer (quite literally it's Turing complete). When you play a card or ability, it is put on a stack. After you're done, you need to yield - then the other player may play things on the stack too (but, they can only play "instants" - most other cards can only be played if the stack is empty). Then they must yield, and so on.
This is actually my single least favorite part of magic compared to yugioh, and I've played both a ton. Instead of a stack, yugioh has a similar first-in-first-out concept called the chain, with two major differences:
1) Every time you place a card on the stack, you yield to your opponent, who can either play a response or yield back to you, and this goes on forever until both of you have yielded without taking an action
2) cards have "spell speeds" of 1, 2, or 3 , where you can only chain an equivalent or higher speed card - this means unlike magic, you can pile up multiple sorceries/spell speed 1 cards into the same resolution queue
Both of these encourage a ton of interaction on the stack/chain, and often times yugioh games are won or lost as the result of a resolution or 5 or more cards and effects piling up and resolving, which is a relative rarity in magic outside of a few combo decks or infinites. Conversely, yugioh also presents a lot of powerful defensive options for interrupting degenerate combos, usually at a high cost.
We're getting a little off-topic here, but this is actually the first I'm learning that MtG can't explicitly mention the stack (I follow set releases and read cards casually sometimes, cube once in a blue moon, played standard one summer ever). That's a bit of a shame - one of the other card games I've played (Yu-Gi-Oh) works its equivalent (a "Chain") into card effects and it doesn't have to be complicated. One very good card ("Chain Strike") does damage multiplied by its stack position (chain link) so the later in the stack (chain) it appears, the more damage it does. That's not too crazy. Would've loved that either to attempt the inevitable degenerate combos or just splash it into RDW. There is also a balancing mechanism where certain effects can only be activated once per stack (chain) which is not as draconian as "per turn" but could otherwise when omitted potentially make cards ingredients in degenerate combos (e.g. "Accumulated Fortune").
Final aside: I used the phrase twice, so it should be clear that the history of said game (again, Yu-Gi-Oh) is plagued with degenerate combos.
EDIT: Editing in this edit to acknowledge that there is a sibling comment with a valid nit that invalidates the reason I responded. In my defense, my slow phone-based composition took me so long I did not see it until this edit. I'm leaving it for the sake of hopefully any nascent game designer getting any insight, I suppose. Or hey, card game players getting their kicks thinking about card game mechanics.
> no card of MtG is allowed to mention the stack in their printed text
Nit: The Split Second keyword ability is usually accompanied by reminder text which mentions the stack
> Split second (As long as this spell is on the stack, players can't cast spells or activate abilities that aren't mana abilities.)
https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...
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Tangentially, this is why I've often found it a bit easier to teach MTG to friends who also are programmers than in general; being able to tell a fellow programmer "instants are put on a stack when cast, and then are popped off the stack when they resolve" ("instant" is the term that MTG ended up standardizing on now that "interrupts" are no longer a card type) is a quick shortcut that they always end up understanding. When teaching someone who doesn't already have a mental concept of a stack data structure, I can explain how the analogy of a "stack" works, but it often takes a bit of playing and seeing it in action for them to fully internalize how it works.
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You just blew my mind a little bit, realizing MTG gameplay was based on CS concepts, and made me fee old since interrupts is what we called them (way before I knew about processor interrupts).
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Great explanation, thanks. I actually played MtG a bit when I was a kid and have a vague recollection of interrupts but don't think I understood the stack dynamics too clearly. Insightful design decision to disallow stack referencing lol.
Forming a hierarchy of leadership and follower is also fairly common among children. Probably fairly common among people, period. In that, you quickly start to form boundaries on who can interrupt what and why. And, in all cases, you almost always need someone that cannot be interrupted.
The article does cover this. They have moderators that would keep things on track. Most of your interactions on a daily basis don't have moderators.
This is an interesting additional aspect to the situation. I wouldn't deny at all that what you're describing happens, but whether it's a problem or a solution is debatable imo ;) Is it always better to have an enforced equality of priority among speakers, or do these emergent hierarchies serve as effective regulators of group communication?
However, I'd also argue that in most cases these social group hierarchical roles aren't going to end up having a large influence on communication style: typically it's only if there's something pressing going on. (Or, as I've already described elsewhere, if someone is unfairly taking advantage, the negation of which is a condition for cooperative interrupting to work.)
The post you're responding to this qualified it with "as long as both participants are willing to yield to interrupt-denies and counter-interrupts when interrupting" - that addresses your point. This doesn't necessarily work well in a context where people are unfamiliar, but with close friends/colleagues/family who are all on board with this conversation paradigm and familiar with each other's interruptive style, it works very well.
That's a good addition: if the participants do not trust one another, the interrupt-denies and counter-interrupts are not going to work.
As far the actual signaling goes, AFAICT it's pretty built-in (though I can imagine in other countries for instance there are likely enough differences that you'd have to take time to learn specific signals): I can go into this style of conversation immediately with strangers as long as we're at least giving each other a little benefit of the doubt.
Role play a policemen and a minority in this form of communication to see an easy way it can fall flat. Disastrously.
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It really doesn't, though. For one, it is recursive. Can I interrupt a counter? What if it is already in a counter? Does it depend on why I'm interrupting?
That is, this all only works if you know what "plays" each side can do, and you agree on when each one can be played. Card games with instants captures this remarkably well. In that you have a finite number of "interrupt" cards, and are often limited to how many times you can play each one.
The rules (although I'll argue none are needed, see below) really are quite simple: yes, what I described above works recursively: there is no difference between a counter-interrupt and a counter-counter-interrupt.
All of this hinges on and ends up being managed by each person giving the other a certain amount of benefit of the doubt, that any of these interrupt-related actions are being done out of a genuine desire to communicate effectively (vs someone trying to make some kind of power play). With that trust in place you don't need to know any "rules", this all emerges quite naturally.
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