Video Game Development at the University of Michigan

Halo is certainly not a newbie-friendly game. Although, I think the way the tournament was set up exacerbated the problem. A few things I noticed: 1) Nobody on my team had ever played the game before, including myself. Pitting 4 newbies against 4 veterans is not going to be much of a match, no matter what skill level is required to learn the game. 2) The maps that were chosen to play on were also not very conducive to newbie survival. Most of the maps (particularly Lockout) had many, many places where a slight mis-move meant falling to your death. Using maps without those kinds of drops would be much more helpful, and would have at least prevented my team from finishing one round with a negative number of points. (Midship, Battle Creek, Zanzibar, Turf, Coagulation... there are lots of maps to choose from that would have been more beginner-friendly.) 3) Could we have a Forza or Gran Turismo tournament? I forgot to write that down at the tourney...

I think you got most of the arguement right. The key to any good game is a good learning curve. Even if I know how to play Halo 2 from Halo 1, Halo 2 should still teach a new person how to play it. And it should gradually get more difficult along the way. I think Nintendo's idea is to try to use the controller to put more different and "fun" situations into the hands of people who are turned off by your average controller based game. I don't think they can ever guarantee, nor can any other company, a fully fair game for new and old. Simply, a game has to have rules. Simpler rules will entice new players, but it won't keep them around long enough to make them more experienced, it will get too boring if it's too shallow. But if not, the new players, knowing all the nuances of the game will trounce a new person. What is needed in between is perhaps a good learning curve for the new player to learn along the way. That or a handicap. I don't care how bad the person I'm playing at Halo 1 is. If we play shotguns where the more he dies, the faster he goes, he doesn't mind dying 25 times in a row to me, because then he's running 3 times as fast as me, and we're both still having fun. Hussain