Author: Jesper

Readings: Game Studies #5; War as a game; The Puzzle Instinct

Some readings:

The new Game Studies issue #5 is out, with pieces by Edward Castronova, Gonzalo Frasca, Shuen-shing Lee, Laurie Taylor, and Jan Van Looy. I haven’t been that active in relation to GS lately, having been engaged in other business, but I am working on getting the reviews up and running again.

A somewhat old link, James Der Derian’s article on the description of war as a game in relation to the Iraq war.
My game definition also discusses this very briefly – I think Der Derian overstates the case a bit, but it’s certainly possible to explain why war is often described as a game: Because it shares 5 of the 6 features of my game definition: 1) Rules, 2) Variable and quantifiable Outcome, 3) Value assigned to outcomes, 4) Player Effort, 5) Player attached to Outcome. But NOT 6) Negotiable/optional consequences.

And a somewhat overlooked book, Marcel Danesi’s The Puzzle Instinct discusses the history of puzzles from ancient Egypt to the present day. I would have wished that it mentioned video games, but it’s a valuable book anyway.

255,168 ways of playing Tic Tac Toe

Tic Tac Toe (noughts and crosses) is always such a nice example.

I was thinking about strategies and decided to implement a program that plays Tic Tac Toe according to John von Neumann’s minimax. This is a kind of meta-strategy that can be used for playing any game: Always chose the move that will minimize the maximum damage that your opponent can do to you.

The algorithm works recursively by looking for the move that will let an optimally playing opponent inflict the least damage. The opponent’s strategy is calculated by way of the same algorithm, and so on. This means that on the first move, the computer investigates the entire game tree – it considers every single possible Tic Tac Toe game and then choses randomly among the best (least dangerous) moves.

Have a go at http://www.half-real.net/tictactoe/

    • Here’s a document with every single game of Tic Tac Toe. It gives the following numbers.
    • 255,168 unique games of Tic Tac Toe to be played. Of these, 131,184 are won by the first player, 77,904 are won by the second player, and 46,080 are drawn.
    • This supports the intuition that it is an advantage to begin the game.
    • These numbers do not take similar board positions into account – rotating the board, mirroring it and so on. It does not matter which corner you place the first piece in, but this is not taken into account here.
    • If neither player makes a mistake, the game is drawn (but we knew that already).

 

  • This is an exercise in examining the objective properties of a game. There are two interesting sides to this:
  • 1) The objective properties of Tic Tac Toe really matter for our enjoyment of it: It is a boring game because there are so relatively few combinations.
  • 2) On the other hand, humans clearly play the game in a different way than the computer. The computer’s playing style lets us make some observations about how humans play games.
  • To the computer, the first move is the most complicated (takes around a second on my 2ghz machine). This is unlike human players who seldomly have any problem deciding what to do on the first move.
  • The program assumes that the opponent does not make any mistakes. Humans do make mistakes, of course, so adding some amount of randomness in algorithm would probably make it a better player against human opponents.
  • The number of possible unique games is larger than I would have guessed, but this indicates how we humans are very good at identifying patterns. Faced with the huge number of variations in a game like this, we simply identify some general properties of Tic Tac Toe: Beginning in the middle is a good thing; if your opponent begins in the middle, you must pick the corner; a good way of winning is to threaten two squares simultaneously.
  • We think about games like this in fuzzy and chaotic ways – this gives us a lot of flexibility.
  • It is the same fuzziness that leads us into making stupid mistakes.
  • On some level, it is our fuzzy way of playing games that allows us to have fun. If we simply played with the unimaginative brute force strategy that the computer uses, it would definitely be work rather than play – and nobody would have any fun playing against us, for that matter.

Emergent gameplay in real life

Everybody’s talking about emergent gameplay. This is usually taken to mean something like “creative player actions that weren’t anticipated or explicitly designed by the creators of the game”.

Without getting into a technical discussion, it occurs to me that many non-game situations contain something that could be seen as emergent gameplay.

Biology: For example, (most) spices add to our experience of food without actually adding nutritional value. Though evolution does not have an intention, our sense of taste is evolved due to its capability of distinguishing between poisonous, nutritious and non-nutritious food, but we have figured out how to use spices to “tickle” this sense in order to experience pleasure when eating. This is emergent gameplay in relation to our own biology.

Culture: In culture, laws or technology are usually designed with an intention, but that intention can often be subverted by clever people. Tax loopholes are a prime example of emergent gameplay in culture.

So here are some examples of emergent gameplay in real life:

Biology
Music (arguably)
Writing
Computers
Telephones
Houses
Clothes
Spices
Masturbation
Contraception
Games
Jogging, fitness
Perfume
Robberies at gunpoint

Culture
Tax loopholes
Fake ID cards
Lying
Spam
Video games
Bad video games based on film licenses
Making a living doing video game theory
Frivolous lawsuits
World Wide Web (in relation to the internet)
Churches demanding that you pay them money in order to get into heaven

(Harvey Smith on emergent gameplay here and here. I also wrote something about it here.)

Any other examples?

Games and MMORPGs – a clarification.

I guess the previous post wasn’t quite clear, but the point was simply that there is a historically dominant way of creating “games” – this includes a final, quantifiable outcome. MMORPGs deviate from this classic game model in that there is no final outcome. The following statement is therefore true:

MMORPGs deviate from the classic way of making games. Whether we want to call them “games” depends on whether we want to keep the word “game” as is or expand it in order to include “games” that do not have final outcomes.

There is no remotely objective way of making this decision, and this is why I made a game definition that I call “the classic game model” because it is a historically dominant way of creating “games”, but a model that is now being challenged by things such as MMORPGs. By doing this I hoped to shift the focus from the sequence of letters “g-a-m-e” to a question of what we mean by “game”.

That was the idea, anway.

Who owns the word “game”? (A definition of definition)

At the State of Play conference, Eric Zimmerman described MMORPGs as borderline games since they have no (quantifiable) outcomes (you can continue playing). My game definition also describes MMORPGs as borderline games for the very same reason. In his blog, Greg Costikyan disagrees strongly. There are really two issues here: 1) how to define “game”, 2) why is it so important to be a game or not? “Game” is just a word, isn’t it?
Here’s Greg’s conclusion:

[…] from my perspective, if you produce a definition of “game” that excludes things that most people call “games,” either your definition is clearly wrong, or you need to make a strong argument for why the excluded entities aren’t really games. Simply saying “they don’t come to quantifiable outcomes” is circular, since it is saying “This is my definition of games, these don’t fit, they aren’t games, QED”.

Greg is of course right that Zimmerman’s definition is tautological, but all game definitions are: When you attempt to define something like games, your definition will necessarily be designed to match an a priori idea of what should be included or excluded in the definition. Costikyan even points to the fact that his own game definition comes from his own RPG background. So the cornerstone in Costikyan’s argument will be this one:

They certainly fit my definition of “the game,” but it’s clear to me that they should also fit any reasonable definition of “game.”

Which is of course no better than any other argument here: A reasonable definition of games should include MMORGPs because that’s what a reasonable definition of games would include.

So what’s a poor theorist to do? Why, appeal to something external to the definition, of course!

For example: If we had been discussing whether a whale was a fish or not, one side of the argument would state that whales are fish because they swim in the sea; the other side would counter that whales are mammals because they have lungs and give birth rather than lay eggs. The issue is most easily resolved by using evolution as the measure of all things, showing that whales evolutionarily speaking are mammals etc.

But human culture is always stranger than that, so there are a number of things we can appeal to in order to prove that our personal game definition is the right one:

• We can appeal to consensus: Most people will agree that “game” should be defined like I am doing it here.

• We can appeal to consensus of the enlightened: Knowledgeable game scholars agree that games should be defined like I am doing it here.

• We an appeal to empirical factors: Many “game” stores carry RPGs, hence RPGs are games.

• Or we can (drum roll) include a sense of history in our definition: I called my game definition “The Classic Game model” because it describes a model for games that has been dominant from 3000 BC to approximately 1970 AD. And during that historical period, nearly all “games” had outcomes. MMORPGs differ from the classic game model in that they do not have outcomes, but they do belong to a broader family of games. This does not give us a simple yes/no result, but it gives us a qualified answer that is open about its premises. So there.

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Another thing of interest is that half of the world seems intent on describing their obviously game-like projects as being non-game – “it’s not a game, it’s an interactive narrative”, while the other half of the world is bent on describing their borderline projects as games.

Is the label “game” something to be avoided or something to be sought at all cost? My feeling is that “game” is moving towards hipness – in a few years time, perhaps people will be using the word “game” as indiscriminately as the words “interactive” and “narrative” have been used lately … And we will be victims of our own success.

The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness

Here’s the printed text of my keynote at the Level Up conference in Utrecht: The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness.
It’s a small piece that tries to explain everything: What games are, what relates computer/video games to games, how games can move between media; what happens on the borders of games, and how games have changed historically.

And the slides from the presentation.