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Games Entertainment

Behind the Moralgorithm 47

Posted by Zonk from the go-little-man-go dept.
LA Weekly has up an editorial about quantifying the intangible in video games. He discusses NBA Live's attmempt to incorporate the ineffable something that makes winning teams win. From the article: "...I'd occasionally seen the moralgorithm needle hit the red; that every so often the game goes supernatural. Like one matchup, where I was playing the Sonics against the Heat on Xbox Live, and I could tell something really clicked for me when Jerome James, my oafish center, hit two three-pointers. Then Vladimir Radmanovic, whose little polygonal computer face seemed to look as surprised as I was, stole the ball from 10 feet away and passed to Antonio Daniels on a fast break that drew so much moralgorithmic momentum, I swear Ray Allen levitated up court for the most improbable alley-oop of all time."
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Behind the Moralgorithm More

Behind the Moralgorithm

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  • The word for today is 'moralgorithm'... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @07:38AM (#12940434)

    From TFA:
    There must be some kind of algorithm that generates morale, I suggested, a moralgorithm -- and my team's was off.
    Setting aside for a moment the sheer loser-ness of this statement....right up there with 'my controller isn't working' and 'I wasn't ready', it seems that Josh is attempting to coin a new term for the gaming lexicon. It's a pretty heavy-handed attempt...the word 'moralgorithm' shows up seven times in the article (including the title).

    Please, do your part for the gaming community and never use this 'word'...let's try to give this thing a clean, quick death.
  • I would've thought the swings of a teams morale were the kind of things preferably left without simulation. For one, I am entirely uninterested in the happiness of my players and would rather like my wins to be based more upon my skills and/or my morale at the time. Such things are best left to the Sims or Nintendogs.

    p.s. Moral-gorithm? Initial reaction included `... * -3.5[kittens_flipped_off] * ...'
    • Seriously! It's not like you've invited the Bulls and the Spurs over to your house to play a little Xbox and they shot you down, claiming they had to help their moms with yardwork.

      Also, all the calls you've made to join your favorite team for some hoop time end with vague excuses about the coach not liking strange friends hanging around. All this ambiguity amongst your friends in the NBA, and you, will all disappear in the off season when you can hang out like you did back in the day, drinkin' 40s and sho

  • Since at least NHL 2001, there's been a morale meter, and when you get it full (by scoring more goals), it seems everyone's stats go up by about 50%. If your bar goes below 25% full (usually hovering between 40 and 60%, peaking at 100% maybe five times in an average game), when the opposing team scores a bunch of goals and body checks, your team loses about 25% of their regular stats.

    This is nothing new.
    • That's the momentum meter, and it's not the same thing. Additionally, they dropped it after 2002 IIRC. (maybe 2k4).

      Morale does exist in the dynasty, but its effect is much less pronounced than the momentum meter was, only swinging your team about 10 points tops. (and is impacted by your practice schedule between games)

      My only beef is NHL 2005 - it takes like 75 hours of negotiations just to unlock play. Horseshit.

    • They did this is NCAA Football 2001, too. Unfortunately, it was fatally flawed. Any time you made a turnover, the meter completely flipped, even if you were up by 50. I also really liked how any time the other team punted, your momentum went down, even if they decided to do it on 4th and inches (indicating that they didn't think they could get a foot of yardage on your defense). They tried to make the concept of mental state in NCAA 2005, but I never noticed a difference between my clutch quarterback an

  • W (Hat)? (Score:3, Informative)

    by happypizzaguy ( 325415 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @08:05AM (#12940571)
    I can't be the only one who has absolutley no clue what the quote from the article means.
  • ... I think my IQ dropped five points. And I didn't have that much to spare in the first place...

  • Little? (Score:4, Funny)

    by kryogen1x ( 838672 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @08:07AM (#12940580)
    From TFA:

    How the little black box knew the Spurs would (probably) win the NBA Finals

    Yeah, sure, the XBox is little. So are blue whales, Hummer H2's and Boeing 747's.

  • Better than catch-up AI (Score:3, Informative)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @08:13AM (#12940613)
    It's at least nice to know that programmers are trying to capture some of the phenomena of how the real game seems to work instead of adding some moronic catch-up AI that I've seen in more than a few games.

    Blow past a car in a racing game, watch as it magically manages to stay on your tail and pass you back, despite the fact that it's a Ford Focus and you're practically driving an F1 car.

    Score some points in a sports game, watch the computer complete every pass, sink every bucket, or score every goal, while your players seem to be inable to walk and chew gum at the same time.

    Start pounding on the computer in an RTS, watch as it manages to produce enough units to flood the map, or research tech advantages in the blink of an eye to give it an edge.

    While catch-up AI can make the game seem a lot more challenging because it keeps the computer opponent right there with you, it would be a lot nicer to see more programming to simulate things more realistically.

    • I recall playing NBA Jam on the Genesis. My brother and I were pretty good, but the computer would always seem to be able to keep up no matter what. Near the end of the 4th quarter, it was a tie game so we held the ball until there was like one second left, shot, then hit a two pointer to give us a 94-92 lead. Then, with the remaining time, the computer inbounds, heaves a full court three pointer and swishes to win the game. Now, it wouldn't have been so bad if the computer hadn't done the same thing at the
      • That sounds more like something that would happen in the arcade, rather than with a home system.

        Just keep pumping in those quarters!

        Then again, I once blew out the computer so bad with cheat-code "fire" in NBA Jam that my SNES locked up. The score was something like 212-36, with seconds remaining in the 4th.
        • This would actually make more sense if your score were something like 254, rather than 212. Since the Nintendo was 8-bit, in-game quantities (such as the number of rupees in Zelda) were often restricted to between 0 and 255 if it wasn't necessary to have larger or negative numbers.

          A basketball game is probably not expected to have scores in the 200s, so it's conceivable they didn't worry about the overflow problem. I'm not sure it would cause a crash like yours, but it all depends on their code.
          • It wasn't due to score- My NBA Jams record on SNES was 312-9. Of course I picked the best team, gave them the worst, and played with all the settings to do it. And shot nothing but 3s with my best shooter.
      • Heh, the exact same thing happened to me when I owned NBA Jam for the Genesis- I once had a perfect record going through the entire lineup of games- until I played the Lakers (as the Bulls) and lost a game that had been tight throughout on a buzzer-beater 90-footer lobbed underhand. Ugh.

        In situations like that, it's hard to say exactly what the algorithms in place are doing- in original NBA Jam in particular, you have to remember that almost every decent shooter in the game shot like 70 percent from behi

    • Also known as rubber-banding. It's one of the reasons I lose interest in most racing games pretty quickly, most recently Wave Race on the GameCube. If you're in first, there's no reason to use turbo because you won't ever get more than a second ahead no matter what you do. I've set a course record while finishing sixth because I wiped out near the end of the race and the whole pack was right behind me. Absolutely idiotic.
  • "He's on fire!"

    You don't know joy until you're playing as Dikembe Mutumbo and raining 3's on the opponent.
  • I can't seem to get the fish to figure out what language this story is in.
    • I can't seem to get the fish to figure out what language this story is in.

      Marketspeak. No one can translate it, it's a write only language.

      The Babelfish can't understand it because no one can keep one alive long enough around marketing people to translate their brainwaves. They just shrivel up like one of those little peppers you find in your Kung-Pao Chicken only yellow.

  • This goes back even to the old, old versions of NBA Jam that I used to play on emulator. It really didn't matter how skillful you were, because the computer team ended up matching your skill level. If you started dunking and hitting 3s on every possession, then the computer players would start doing it too and your shots would start missing. So basically every single-player game you played had a close score. I can't really say I like this method in a general sense, although I suppose it does cater towar
  • All the things he's talking about happening in the game aren't "features" they're bugs in EA's code, and EA's trying to pass them off as some kind of R&D.

    In NBA Live 2004, I had Karl Malone prepare for a dunk from the side of the basket from 6 feet out. While in mid-air Malone rotated around the hoop and turned his body 180 degress in midair, so he was point towards the other team's basket, 94 feet away. He then proceed to go into his dunk animation, planting the ball squarely into the had of a defen

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