It’s somewhat of an extreme form of “defensive play”.

What Is Turtling?įor those who don’t know, “turtling” basically refers to a player playing very defensively and waiting for the opponent to make a move. Were the boxers turtling? I’m not sure, but what I read certainly reminded me of some of the issues that similarly loose competitive videogames have struggled with for years. Apparently, some are dissatisfied with the way the match went – people are saying it was defensive, long, unexciting. I don’t follow boxing, but recently there was a very high profile boxing match. This results in a number of problems, but the most visibly apparent one is the problem of turtling. They are loose, still footed too deeply in fantasy simulation, and allow for too much “play” overall. The problem is that even these competitive videogames, all of which do qualify as “games” by my prescriptive definitions, are still operating on a mostly-toy foundation. On the other hand, though, there are some videogames which are almost always played competitively: things like Counter-Strike, League of Legends, Outwitters, or fighting games. In that article, I focused on the “preserving the toy” aspect, which I think developers really need to do for a lot of single-player adventure-y/sandbox-y types of things, like perhaps Grand Theft Auto or The Legend of Zelda.

This both limits the “toy” aspect dramatically and leaves users instead with a thin, weak, unsupported goal. Its general thrust was that most videogames are fundamentally toys with a goal sorta slapped on. A few weeks ago, I wrote an article called Videogames are Broken Toys.

Outwitters replays