Learning to Love the Handicap

Game-players these days tend to have a knee-jerk groaning instinct towards the idea of handicaps. To suggest that a match should perhaps be played with a handicap is considered an insult, even if it's well known that one player is vastly outmatched. While it's certainly not the case that handicaps are the only way that skill deficits can be tackled, for competitive games, we are doing ourselves a gargantuan disservice by not embracing them.

Handicaps have been a part of games throughout their history. From Sumo to Squash, from Go to Chess, most of the world's most famous and beloved games have had a long history involving some form of handicap.

Obviously, the handicap has a downside, which we're all intuitively aware of: they aren't "fair." The sense of victory or defeat associated with winning or losing, respectively, is diminished. You didn't "really" win if you won with a handicap, and your opponent didn't "really" lose.

I argue that while this is a legitimate sentiment, it's in our interests to move beyond this way of thinking. It helps to remember that when you enter a match of a game, it is based on "agreement on a set of rules." People house-rule and alter those sets of rules all the time, and handicaps can be thought of as a house-ruling. If we both agreed to a game of Go where I start with three stones down, then that's what we've agreed to, and the outcome of that match is completely legitimate.

It also helps to remember that in many cases, the game would simply be boring -- arguably broken -- without the existence of handicaps. If you are playing against someone who's vastly better than you, you simply are not going to win (a possible exception if the game is heavily random. If that's the case, though, are you really earning that victory anyway?) If you are not going to win, then the contest is not functioning and your decisions (input) do not matter.

Essentially, the argument against handicaps can be phrased as "handicaps cause games to do a poor job of reflecting who is better at the true, unmodified game". Sure -- granted! But I'm not arguing that you should never play with handicaps off. You've always got the option to play a vanilla game if accurate true-game measurement becomes more important than playing a good match.

Handicaps as Metagame

In most games that have handicaps, you'll play a number of un-handicapped "placement matches." This is how the system determines what kind of a handicap you will get. What's interesting about this is that your handicap level acts as a sort of RPG-like metagame ladder for you to climb -- often, "rank." Rank provides a very clear illustration of your improvement in games like Go.

Richard Garfield has a nice article in defense of handicaps, wherein he writes about this effect:

"It became an appealing metagame to improve my handicap, and gave me a much more visceral appreciation for my improvement than seeing my win percentage go from 15 percent to 25 percent, which I might not even notice."

This aspect of handicaps is something that digital gamers should love. It's a meaningful metagame that doesn't distract from the core gameplay experience, as some metagame has been known to do; instead, it pushes you further and further on your path of improvement.

Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 has an auto-handicap feature that I quite like, and often use. Players all start at "5" handicap, which is balanced. As you win matches, that might start moving downward, which means that you're knocked back further from attacks, and your attacks are less powerful.

I have a reputation for being vastly better at the game than any of my friends, to the point where they all refused to play it with me. With auto-handicap on, however, that has changed. Over the course of numerous matches, my friends will compete with each other to see which of them can get the lowest handicap -- and best of all: Instead of winning 100 percent of the matches by a massive landslide, I now win somewhere around 50-60 percent of them. Matches are exciting again!