I've been playing Apple's Texas Hold'em poker game on my iPhone quite a lot recently which features an impressively glossy interface and a host of virtual opponents.
There are two possible views of the game in progress depending on how you hold your iPhone. Hold it horizontally and you get a stylised overhead perspective showing the whole table with current bets, but hold it vertically and you get a full screen view of the player whose turn it is to bet.
The virtual players are clearly actors filmed against a green screen and then transplanted into the virtual world of the poker game to create as realistic an environment as possible.
Apple have tried hard to create a range of distinctive (if somewhat stereotypical) characters for the player to 'interact' with. There's the cowboy-hatted good ol' boy, the wraparound shades-wearing hoodie, the wealthy housewife, the heavily-tattooed biker dude, the cute college chick, etc. etc.
It seems that the actors chosen to play each of these complex, multi-layered personalities was asked to perform a small range of standard poker actions: look at the cards, fold the cards, place a bet, be disappointed at poor cards, be excited at a win, and so on.
The problem is that the range of behaviour and emotion for each character is really quite limited and soon becomes repetitive and sometimes pretty ridiculous.
For instance, one of the characters, a pretty college girl, has a little "stirring two bowls with invisible spoons" victory dance which comes into play whenever she wins a hand. However the same jubilant routine is trotted out regardless of the size of the win and so she'll do it as readily for having a $10 stake returned when everyone folds as she will for a $10,000 win.
Even more comical is the fact that each character has an individual “tell” which betrays when they are bluffing and another for when they are holding a particularly good hand. This is clearly supposed to add to the realism of the game.
The issue here is that once you've spotted someone's tell, it's exactly the same every time and so you then know with 100% certainty when they are fibbing. I now try to ignore these as far as I can because it does give you a pretty unfair advantage.
And to compound things, some of the tells are not particularly subtle. One player actually pulls a pair of shades out of his pocket and puts them on before making a big bet on a rubbish hand. When he gets dealt a good hand I'm surprised he doesn't strap on a drum, stand on the table and do a one man band rendition of “Winner Takes It All”.
To keep players on their toes I think it would be good to change the tells in future versions of Texas Hold'em, so here are some suggestions for the game designers:
- After being dealt a strong hand the cowboy could ride round and round the table on his horse shouting “yee ha!“ and firing his guns in the air
- When bluffing, the hoodie could pull down his hood to reveal a snake's head with forked tongue
- When dealt top pair the college girl could lift up her T-shirt and show the other players her own top pair in a Girls Gone Wild stylee.
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