Prediction, Chaos, and Order #

When you play a game, can you predict what's going to happen? I think being able to predict everything makes the game boring. Being able to predict nothing makes winning unrewarding. It becomes a game of chance rather than a game of skill. It's games in between that I'm interested in.

I want skill to be important, so that winning is rewarding, but make each instance of the game different, so that you can play repeatedly. How can you make the game somewhat unpredictable?

  • Multiplayer. If you add other humans, and humans are hard to predict, then we can't predict the outcome of the game. I think however that this isn't sufficient. If the opponent is good and the game predictable, you can predict what the opponent should do. Tic-Tac-Toe is an example of a game that's multiplayer but boring.
  • Complexity. In some games, the game world is so complex that a human cannot accurately predict what will happen, even if everything were known. Chess is an example of a multiplayer game in which the entire game board is known, but it is not possible for a human to determine the best move.
  • Randomness. If some aspects of the game are random (for example, the roll of the dice), the game will be different each time. If there's too much randomness, then the winner is essentially random. If there's too little, then each game will essentially be the same. But if you get it just right, then the player's skill demonstrates how he reacts to the game. There's also randomness in physical games. For example, when playing golf there's some randomness in where the ball goes, just from unpredictable variation in the stroke, and factors like air density and wind.
  • Information Hiding. Some information about the game world can be hidden from the player, and the player's skill can be used to infer aspects of the hidden information. You can hide the initial game world (for example, the cards initially dealt to each player), the opponent's moves (for example, the cards discarded by an opponent), or the result of randomness (for example, the cards drawn from a shuffled deck during the game).

Many games combine more than one of these. For example, Chess combines complexity and multiplayer. Poker combines information hiding, multiplayer, and randomness. Civilization combines all four.

When playing a game that involves randomness, it is important to note that skill is not the only factor; “luck” matters as well. In the NCAA tournaments starting this week, as with all sports games, you cannot conclude that the winner is a better player. You can only conclude that the winner is likely to be a better player. That's why rematches are useful—they let you be more confident in who's better.

My transportation game involves randomness and complexity, and I am undecided about information hiding. It's a single player game, and I am not planning multiplayer. After all, I will be the only player.

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Transportation game, models #

I'm trying to use stocks and flows to create a model for my transportation game. Stocks correspond to nouns and flows correspond to verbs. At first I thought businesses would be stocks and the transportation of goods would correspond to flows. But I could also see the businesses as flows (since they consume and produce things) and the cargo areas and trucks as the stocks. Or maybe both trucks and businesses are flows, and only cargo areas (loading docks) and warehouses are stocks. Or maybe the cargo itself is the stock.

When it comes to a game, the player's decisions (and the AI's decisions) can directly affect flows, but not stocks. You can change the rate of production in Warcraft by hiring more peons, researching technology, etc. Production of gold is a flow. You do not directly change the amount of gold you have (except by buying something, but I think that's an instantaneous flow). Gold is a stock. There's no decision to be made with a stock—it just exists. There is a decision to be made with each flow, because you can throttle it back from its maximum. There are other decisions to make as well, but the basic resource management decisions (for gold, wood, soldiers, etc.) are about flows, not stocks.

In my game, the player controls the movement of trucks and the AI controls the businesses. The decisions are based partly on how much of each resource is available. I'm planning to treat trucks as stocks and the loading/unloading of them as flows. Businesses will be flows, but their cargo areas will be stocks.

The transfer of cargo is not enough to make an interesting game. The player will also need to make decisions about infrastructure and placement of transportation systems. The actual loading and unloading of trucks is boring; it's likely that an AI agent, acting on behalf of the player, will make those decisions. I still don't have a clear idea of where I'm going with this game, but it's already led me to some interesting topics (operations reseach, system dynamics, supply chain management).

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Impolite game: Spellforce 2 #

I no longer play Guild Wars, Black and White 2, or The Movies, so I've been looking for another game to buy. Battle for Middle Earth 2 and Spellforce 2 both looked interesting, so I downloaded their demos.

Spellforce 2 won't start the demo unless I install StarForce. What's the point of copy protecting a demo? And worse, StarForce is awful and I am not buying games with it. So Spellforce 2's demo goes into the recycle bin, and I'm trying out Battle for Middle Earth 2, which looks and sounds nice. It seems to use SafeDisc, which is perhaps not as bad as StarForce, but still annoying. It also has lots of splash screens that can't be aborted by pressing Esc or Enter or Space or by clicking the mouse. Why do games tell you to use NVidia/ATI and Intel/AMD? Do they really want to tell 75% of their audience that they've chosen badly? I haven't found a major commercial game as friendly as Guild Wars. Fortunately Guild Wars is about to release an expansion pack, so perhaps I'll wait for that.

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