A New Kind of Baseball Game from Legendary Big League Manager Tony La Russa and Pioneering Designer Don Daglow
How does a Manager design a Baseball game?
Tony La Russa knows how to manage in real life – he’s won more games than any other manager in the last century. But he’s not an engineer and he doesn’t code. How does he “design” a game?
Starting with the best-selling Tony La Russa Baseball series over 20 years ago, Don Daglow has been charting Tony’s approach to Baseball in the same way that major league scouts track managers’ patterns, then reviewing the results with Tony. This allows us to convert Tony’s philosophical approach to the game to mathematical formulas, and that’s how we create the “artificial intelligence” that guides the AI’s baseball decisions.
Like all of us, managers grow and change over time. Tony managed differently in St. Louis than he did in Oakland, so there’s lots of new work to be done.
Once the core gameplay is functional we have extensive meetings with Tony to tune the experience, then re-validate the results with him during testing to ensure it feels like he’s “managing inside the machine.”
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. charityslave is thinking about baseball Posted: November 19, 2012 at 05:38 PM (#4306235)HAL would have just re-written the rules.
Anyway Earl Weaver baseball from nearly 30 years ago is still probably the best computer baseball game ever* so if they can reproduce that, it would be great.
*OK, I've probably only played 6-7 computer baseball games but I'm still willing to take my chances on EWB.
In skimming TFE I read this as "drug testing". Weird.
I'm picturing a velodrome with 4 corners and lots of negro leaguers going 'round and 'round.
But I doubt that answers your question.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main