Slackful Thoughts
21 December, 2002:
What is a "Real" Game?
What I mean by this is: What qualities distinguish an actual game from a pastime, or even a waste of time? I can pretty much sum up my opinion in two statements.
A Game must take skill.
You should be able to play based on your previous experience. The more you play a game, the better you should be at playing it. If some random guy can walk in, learn the rules and in 5 minutes can win as often as a seasoned veteran, it ain't a real game. Usually the more complicated a game is, the more skill it takes.
Another way to look at it is that you must be able to make decisions that affect your odds of winning. Think of War, the card game. You and your opponent turn over the cards in your deck one at a time. The person with the higher card gets the lower card. If you tie, you deal out a tie breaker. Lather, rinse, repeat. You don't actually have to make any decisions at all. A trained monkey could play this.
"Games" without skill:
War (with cards)
Lotto
Bingo
Roulette
Once when I was playing roulette at a casino, a drunken man kept trying to "teach" me how to play. He swore up and down that his "method" was effective. It involved tracking past results and choosing numbers in dead zones where the ball had not landed recently. I tried to explain to him that the future had no relationship to the past in a truly random system. It didn't matter which number he chose, the odds were identical. And if the wheel was not truly random, he'd win more by picking the numbers that came up most frequently. Needless to say, he didn't get it.
A Game must involve chance.
There needs to be some unknown quantity, some element of risk. Perhaps the roll of a die or the fact you don't know what cards your opponent is holding. You must be forced to make decisions where you do not know the final outcome. Another way to state this is that a game should not be solvable. There shouldn't be a predetermined set of moves that guarantees victory or a draw 100% of the time.
Remember when you first learned to play tic-tac-toe? (I learned largely on foggy car windows). The first few times you play it is exciting and fun. Eventually you learn there are no winners between experienced opponents. It's always a draw. Then you stop playing.
For this same reason, chess is not a game. It is a cleverly disguised version of tic-tac-toe. Sure it has tons more complexity but at its core it remains the same. One day some supercomputer will finally solve the age old question of whether white wins or it's a stalemate, and chess will finally be put to rest.
"Games" without chance:
Tic-tac-toe
Checkers
Chess
Global Thermonuclear War
Real games
Poker is an excellent and familiar example of what I call a real game. Dealing out cards adds the element of chance. You don't know what cards you will get next and you don't know which cards your opponents are holding. The skill comes in when you read your opponents and determine how to bet. You never know for sure when someone's bluffing or actually has a good hand, but you might have a fair guess based on their past behavior.
Note that in the previously listed "games", those that involve chance take no skill, and those that take skill involve no chance. I'm hard pressed to come up with a something with neither. Maybe watching TV. However, some of these non games can become real ones with proper tweaking. Cheating, for example, adds an element of skill to any game. Just don't do it in Vegas.
~ Cory Loewen