The Boundaries of a Game Versus Boundaries of Other Kinds...

What does it mean to say that games take place within set boundaries established by the act of play? Is this really true? Is there really such a distinct boundary? In fact there is. Compare, for example, the informal play of a toy with the more formal play of a game. A child approaching a doll, for example, can slowly and gradually enter into a play relationship with the doll. The child might look at the doll from across the room and shoot it a playful glance. Later, the child might pick it u...

 The Magic Circle

The term magic circle is appropriate because there is in fact something genuinely magical that happens when a game begins. A fancy Backgammon set sitting all alone might be a pretty decoration on the coffee table. If this is the function that the game is serving-decoration-it doesn't really matter how the game pieces are arranged, if some of them are out of place, or even missing. However, once you sit down with a friend to play a game of Backgammon, the arrangement of the pieces suddenly bec...

 Break the Rules of a Game to Improve it

In The Well-Played Game, Bernard DeKoven advocates a fundamental adjustment in players' attitudes towards the rules of a game: You're not changing the game for the sake of changing it. You're changing it for the sake of finding a game that works. Once this freedom is established, once we have established why we want to change a game and how we go about it, a remarkable thing happens to us: We become the authorities. No matter what game we create, no matter how well we are able to play it,...

 Rules are the Persistent Identity of a Game Across Cultur...

There are at least two senses in which the RULES schemas offer a "formal" way of looking at games. First, the term formal is used in the sense of "form": rules constitute the inner form or organization of games. In other words, rules are the inner, essential structures that constitute the real-world objects known as games. For example, consider two games of Go that differ in a variety of ways. They might differ in terms of: Material: one version is played with stones on a wooden board; the o...

 Constituative Rules of Chutes and Ladders

Players all begin with a value of zero. Players alternate turns adding a random number of 1–6 to their current value. The first player to reach a value of exactly 100 wins (if adding the random number to a player's total would make the total exceed 100, do not add the random number this turn). When a player's total exactly reaches certain numbers, the total changes. For example, if a player reaches exactly 9, her total becomes 31. If a player reaches exactly 49, her total becomes 11.(This r...

 Complexity in Systems

On the far left are fixed systems that remain unchanging.hand, a screen that is full of random static would be completely The relationships between their elements are always the chaotic, with the color of a dot at one moment having nothing same. The black, unchanging TV screen is a good image for this kind of system. To the right of fixed systems in the chart are periodic ones. Periodic systems are simple systems that repeat the same patterns endlessly. The simple two-building version of the...

 Emergence in Board Games

Emergence is above all a product of coupled, context-dependent interactions. Technically these interactions, and the resulting system, are nonlinear: The behavior of the overall system cannot be obtained by summing the behaviors of its constituent parts. We can no more truly understand strategies in a board game by compiling statistics of the movements of its pieces than we can understand the behavior of an ant colony in terms of averages. Under these conditions, the whole is indeed more tha...

 Probability is Truth-Resembling

The study of mathematical uncertainty is called probability. According to Richard Epstein, "The word 'probability' stems from the Latin probabilis, meaning 'truth-resembling'; thus the word itself literally invites semantic misinterpretation." [1]What Epstein means by "semantic misinterpretation" is that if something is "truthresembling," then it isn't actually truthful; at the same time, the truth is exactly what the something does resemble.

 A Computer Algorithm for Randomization

Back in the early days of computers, one of the more popular methods of generating a sequence of random numbers was to employ the following scheme: 1. Choose a starting number between 0 and 1. 2. Multiply the starting number by 4 ("stretch" it). Subtract 4 times the square of the starting number from the quantity obtained in step 2 ("fold" the interval back on itself in order to keep the final result in the same range). 3.Given a starting number between 0 and 1, we can use the proce-dureâ€...

 Controlling Randomness in Rhyming Games

Specific Rhyme Repertory: This straightforward strategy requires the counter to select a rhyme of a specific length that will achieve the desired result. Extension of Rhyme: The counting-out rhymes are modular and extendable, and if the rhyme is about to end on someone that the counter does not want to be selected, the counter can spontaneously add an additional phrase or rhyme of the proper length to achieve a different result. Skipping Regular Counts: The counter simply skips himself or h...

 Types of Information in Games

In The Interactive Book, designer and scholar Celia Pearce presents a different typology for understanding the ways games manifest information. She proposes four scenarios: · Information known to all players: In Chess, this would consist of the rules of the game, board layout, and piece movement parameters. · Information known to only one player: In Gin, this would be the cards in your hand. · Information known to the game only: In Gin, this would be unused cards in deck. In Space Invad...

 Player Types and Rule-Breaking

The Standard Player: This player type is a "standard" and honest game player that plays the game as it was designed to be played, following the rules and respecting their authority. The Dedicated Player: This close cousin of the standard player studies the formal systems of a game in order to master and perfect his or her play of the game, often finding and exploiting unusual strategies in order to win. Examples: professional athletes, hardcore gamers. The Unsportsmanlike Player: This third...

 Degenerate Strategies and Cheating

Why isn't using a degenerate strategy considered cheating? Degenerate strategies take advantage of weaknesses in the rules of a game, but do not actually violate the rules. What kind of player would play in this way? The answer is both a dedicated player, who is overzealously seeking the perfect strategy, and an unsportsmanlike player, who has found a hole in the rules to exploit, even though he understands that he is not playing the game the way it was intended. These two kinds of players ca...

 Defining Play and Transformative Play

Transformative play is a special case of play that occurs when the free movement of play alters the more rigid structure in which it takes shape. The play doesn't just occupy and oppose the interstices of the system, but actually transforms the space as a whole. A cyberfeminist game patch that creates transsexual versions of Lara Croft is an example of transformative play, as is the use of the Quake game engine as a movie-making tool. Although every instance of play involves free movement wi...

 Five Elements of Game Experience

Visual scanning: visual perception, especially scanning the entire screen at once. Auditory discriminations: listening for game events and signals. Motor responses: physical actions a player takes with the game controls. Concentration: intense focus on play. Perceptual patterns of learning: coming to know the structure of the game itself.

 Verbal Tennis

Verbal Tennis is an unusual game in which two players carry on a conversation, taking turns making statements. The only rules are that each statement must be in the form of a question and cannot repeat another statement that has already been made. If a player gets stuck and cannot make a coherent response to the previous statement, he or she loses. A game might begin as follows: PLAYER 1:Are you feeling well today? PLAYER 2:Don't I look well? PLAYER 1:If I knew that, why would I have asked y...

 How Rules Make Games Pleasurable and Encourage Self-Regul...

Picture a child poised excitedly at the starting line of a footrace, ready to run down the track, breathlessly awaiting the starting signal. Rather than giving in to her intense desire to leap from the starting line, she waits for the signal that the race has begun. What's going on here? Why does our player anxiously hold back when she really desires to run? Developmental psychologist L. S. Vygotsky notes that "Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse, i...

 The Pleasure of Entrainment

If entrainment is a form of pleasure, it is a pleasure at once structural and experiential, both mathematically regular and playfully flexible. Entrainment is not a phenomenon completely unique to games, but it does come very close to identifying the curious structural pleasure that all game experiences seem to contain: the meditative patterns of Tetris; the turn-taking, clacking cadence of Billiards; the rhythmic shooting pattern of Space Invaders; the pulsing flow of cards, hits, and chips ...

 The Immersive Fallacy

According to the immersive fallacy, this reality is so complete that ideally the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world. [...] In the case of play, we know that metacommunication is always in operation. A teen kissing another teen in Spin the Bottle or a Gran Turismo player driving a virtual race car each understands that their play references other realities. But the very thing that makes their activity play is that they also know th...

 Metagame

Metagaming refers to the relationship between the game and outside elements, including everything from player attitudes and play styles to social reputations and social contexts in which the game is played. Post-game locker room conversations about the match are metagame interactions. Memorizing words in the Scrabble dictionary is a metagame activity, the honing of in-game skills. The typical playing strategies of a particular Go master are metagame information, useful if you are playing agai...

 Brian-Sutton Smith's Seven Rhetorics of Play

Play as Progress: Play is a way of turning children into adults. Play is valuable because it educates and develops the cognitive capacities of human or animal youth. Examples: All forms of children's play and animal play Play as Fate: Human lives and play are controlled by fate in the form of destiny, gods, atoms, neurons, or luck, but not by free will. Examples: Gambling and games of chance Play as Power: Play is a form of conflict and a way to fortify the status of those who control the p...