How Games Influence Strategic Culture

Rules define many of the ways a player or team can achieve the primary goal in a given game. For example, because American football requires teams to advance the ball a certain distance over a series of downs or give up the initiative, the game evolves as a series of set-piece plays. Soccer, in contrast, is far more fluid, with virtually continuous activity throughout the game. Soccer and American football do share one common rule in that both last a standardized period (albeit with opportuni...

 Pinball Algorithms

In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever. Pinball developers began to see how they could take advantage of programmable software to monitor, incentivize, and ultimately exploit the players. They had two instruments at their disposal: the score required for a free game, and the match probability. All pinball machines offer a replay to a player who beats some specified score. Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually r...

 How New Games/Releases Impact the Meta

A new series release means more than just updated graphics or different character costumes; sequels can have new rules, or introduce entirely new systems, so everyone was starting more-or-less fresh. Experience and knowledge of previous games in the series help to some extent, but you're still learning the new rules from scratch. Being strong in the previous game means less than learning the new one, so without putting in the required work last year's champion can become this year's scrub. Th...

 Sports are Minimaxed to the Point of Boredom and Predicta...

Outcome maximalization across sports has created "smarter" games with less variety and more all-or-nothing play. The fixation with quantifiable success can lead to a collective flattening of the human experience. Perhaps we need to include more randomness in the game. Each home field or home court should have distinctive features, different playing surfaces, or outdoor elements. Think of how fun the wrigley field ivy is, or the boston green wall. Maybe put a dog or cat on the playing field. ...

 Fruitless Recursion as a Strategy

Luring an opponent into fruitless recursion can be an effective strategy in other games, too. One of the most colorful, bizarre, and fascinating episodes in the history of man-vs.-machine chess came in a 2008 blitz showdown between American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and leading computer chess program Rybka. In a game where each side got just three minutes on the clock to play all of their moves or automatically lose, the advantage surely seemed to be on the side of the computer—capable of e...

 Roots of Toxic Online Game Culture

Streamers behave badly as a way to increase their views and likes, which in turn maximizes their profits and those of their company sponsors. Game companies cannot fully control who plays their games, despite Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) ratings. Younger players play mature games and learn through their interactions with older and often toxic audiences. Cultural stigmatization of gaming leads to a lack of educator involvement in supporting prosocial and educational gaming sp...

 Sirlin's Traits That Make a Gold Medalist Gamer

• Familiarity with tournaments • Deep knowledge of the game at hand • Love of the game • Mental Toughness • Mental attitude toward winning, losing, improving • Technical skill (usually dexterity) • Adaptability • Knowledge/ability in other games of that genre • Yomi • Appraisal

 Variable Ratio Schedule for Getting Kids Addicted to Boar...

In light of the above, here’s a solid Variable Ratio Schedule for playing board games with your kid: the first time you play a particular game, let the kid win. thereafter, let the kid win some of the time. 60% of the time is good to start (you can dial it down slowly as the kid improves if you want). make the sequence of wins and losses as random as possible. critically, make the outcome as close as you can every time, especially when the kid loses. She should always feel like she barely lo...

 A Quantum Game

Bell came up with “nonlocal” games, which require players to be at a distance from each other with no way to communicate. Each player answers a question. The players win or lose based on the compatibility of their answers. One such game is the magic square game. There are two players, Alice and Bob, each with a 3-by-3 grid. A referee tells Alice to fill out one particular row in the grid — say the second row — by putting either a 1 or a 0 in each box, such that the sum of the numbers in tha...

 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...