Good evening. You're all listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zackney. With me tonight are two of my regular panel. First, we have Three Moves Ahead founder, Troy Goodfellow. Troy, welcome to the show. Hello, everyone. We are also joined by Julian Rabbit Murdoch. Hello, hello. Long time no C. haven't seen you since Pax. uh that's true and you know since this is the first time we've been back together since Pax, I thought it was only fitting that we invite our pal John Schaefer from Stardock.

Hi again.

He was almost a regular by now. It's looking to beat Sorin Johnson's record.

Yeah, Sarin was up to like eight or nine.

Something like that.

Yeah, it's going to be, that's going to be tough to top, but I'll do my best.

So what I want to talk about tonight is the idea of a fair challenge in strategy games.

And I'll admit up front, this is kind of triggered by a piece I wrote recently for GameSpy,

just regarding like how people, you know,

sometimes use save games and how some games even encourage, like, save game abuse.

But what came out of that was a lot of people talking about, you know, the circumstances

under which they'll start, like, save-spamming their way through a game.

And there's a, I noticed a

real divergence of opinion about like when games crossed the line and kind of deserved to be

tricked or cheated or abused. And I really just kind of want to talk to you guys about the idea of

what is a, what is a fair challenge in a game and are we kind of lying to ourselves

when we say we want a game to be really challenging? So I thought I'd, you know, just kick it off

just to start with someone. I'll just grab your name out of the hat, Troy, and, you know,

ask you to start with, do gamers, for single-player games at least,

do players really want a game to play fair?

I don't want to speak for all gamers.

I don't know what gamers in general want.

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