MrIndigo said:
What it means, though, is that the strategy arises only out of what you don't know. The more you memorise about the game, the better you are. That's not strategy.
Memorization is a huge part of learning Chess, which most people can probably agree is a bad thing. To suggest that Pokemon requires more critical thinking just because it tends to be more "spontaneous" is suspect, though. If the spontaneous decisions that
do occur in Chess are really interesting and challenging, which, I mean,
they are, it could easily be significantly more intellectually stimulating than Pokemon (or require more critical thinking or whatever other vague metric we're talking about). It would have a lot of "extra baggage" that bothers people and serves as an annoying barrier to entry for would-be competitive players, but that's neither here nor there.
In another post you add "experience" to your claim; as in, "the more you memorize, oh, and also
experience, the better you'll be at Chess." This is a much different position than when you were only talking about memorization. It is pretty irritating to have a game that is memorization-based because you can literally read books on Chess and get just hugely, hugely better based on that alone. Like, I am utterly worthless at Chess compared to my theoretical "read a bunch of books and memorized openings" counterpart. And his "read even more books; memorized even more openings" counterpart would probably make him look like crap by comparison, too (I haven't played enough Chess to know just how much of this stuff there is to actually memorize, but I don't think this is an exaggeration considering that there
are books on Chess openings, and I often hear people talking about doing "drills" and stuff to improve, which is mildly insane to me), without even having played a game. So memorization is pretty bad (a game can still be great and have a lot of memorization, it's just that normal people will be really bored during the memorization parts, waiting for the "actual game" to start), okay.
But "experience" is a really broad term. It can encompass boring stuff like memorization, but the interesting mid-game intuition stuff is there too. I mean, you're kind of attacking the whole concept of "learning," and the basis of competitive gaming itself. That includes Pokemon and its double-blind decisionmaking, though prediction is obviously an interesting sort of skill that we should differentiate from anything found in Chess.
Now if by "experience" you just mean "hours of time put into the game," and you're talking about us literally being able to look at an expert-level match and distill the cause of victory to "player 1 has put 100 more hours into the game than player 2," then it makes a lot more sense to be annoyed by a game that rewards that sort of "skill." But that's an absurd situation that only exists in weird RPG-like games (like Wi-fi Pokemon, if one player beats the other by having better IVs). There's no way it applies to Chess. In Chess (and most competitive games), if you won "by having more experience," that's basically a slightly conniving way of saying that they're a better learner. Both are insanely complex statements to make and say laughably little about who "deserved" the win, was "more skilled," or whether the game required more or less "critical thinking" than some other game.
undisputed said:
it is pretty close to impossible to make a Pokemon AI.
Even if this were true, which I'm really sure it isn't, what would it have to do with the issue at hand? Double-blind decisions are probably difficult for AI, okay. That really has nothing to do with human play, where double-blind decisions are obviously much more intuitive.