Worse yet, in their attempts to use random items to create a rubberbanding effect, they have actually clouded what constitutes "good play." In fact, it may be the case that staying out of first place is optimal, until the very end. Perhaps staying in second place is best, to avoid the terrible draws of items? Creating this kind of confusion about something so fundamental to the game is almost certainly an unwanted side-effect of its items system.

One defense of the modern random-items approach would be something like, "well, if you don't like the effect that items have on a game, you can just turn them off!" This is true in some cases. In Super Smash Bros., tournament play almost always has items set to off, and the game works great. In fact, you might even say that the game is a bit strange with the items on, for the same reason that the items are strange in Mario Kart: they are great exceptions to the flow of the game.

However, there's at least one example I can cite of a situation where, even if you could turn items off, the damage was already done. Super Mario Strikers, a soccer game for the Gamecube, is a generally solid, deterministic game based loosely on the rules of real life soccer. It has random items, but they can be turned off, which I was pretty quick to do. Now, one huge difference between Strikers and real soccer is that you can freely shoulder-ram other players to take them out of the game for a few seconds.

It's an extremely powerful move that's 100 percent effective and you don't even have to aim the attack; it automatically targets whoever's closest to you when you push the button. It sounds unfair, but there's a counter-balance: if you're shoulder-rammed, you draw a random item. So, by turning the random items off, I had actually unwittingly turned the shoulder ram into a clear, optimal strategy. What ensued was some of the most violent (and broken) games of soccer ever witnessed.

The lesson is that it can actually be difficult to have items be well incorporated into a design, yet also be an option that can be turned on or off. Either the game needs them, or it doesn't. If something doesn't need to be there, it's pretty easy to argue that it shouldn't be there. And generally, things that are "injected" into a system don't need to be there.

I should mention that whenever you point out a problem of randomness or any sort of unfairness in a game system, defenders will often make the following counter-argument: "What are you talking about? This game totally has skill -- the better player wins most of the time." This is a straw man argument. It is of course true that Mario Kart, even on its most random/rubberbandy day, still involves a lot of skill and the better player will win perhaps even most of the time. However, that doesn't refute the arguments being made here: that the win percentage is being pulled towards 50 percent due to randomness and rubberbanding.

Ignorance of the Problem?

Strangely, there exist examples of competitive games that actually create a positive feedback loop for those who exhibit better play. Online FPS games such as Call of Duty have a pattern of heaping rewards on the players who play the best, increasing the already-existing skill deficits. Why do they do this? Why on Earth would they want to make the problem of skill deficits even worse?

The fact could be that they aren't thinking about the problem of skill deficits in this way. Instead, it's likely that they're thinking along the lines of a single-player RPG or other non-competitive, completion-based software. In these types of apps - say, something like Fallout 3 or Final Fantasy VII -- it makes a sense to allow the player's power to exponentially grow in a positive feedback loop. These are systems built around completion, after all, not competition.

However, taking that same mindset to the world of competitive games can be very destructive. While the Call of Duty example is pretty extreme, more subtle examples can be found all over the world of competitive games. Deathmatch in the original Quake, for instance, tended to revolve around hoarding the good armor items and the rocket launcher weapon, both of which existed in a fixed spot on a given level. When one player would kill the other player, he would then establish a position right near these items to prevent the other player from getting them, thereby exacerbating any skill deficit that existed in the first place.

We need to be consciously aware of this kind of power-snowball at work in our games and make sure that we're not actively working to make the problem worse, before we can figure out how to make it better.