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...

 Dice Rolls are Suspect

It is true that every aspect of the role of dice may be suspect: the dice themselves, the form and texture of the surface, the person throwing them. If we push the analysis to its extreme, we may even wonder what chance has to do with it at all. Neither the course of the dice nor their rebounds rely on chance; they are governed by the strict determinism of rational mechanics. Billiards is based on the same principles, and it has never been considered a game of chance. So in the final analysis...

 Competitive and Addictive Gaming VS Gaming for Play

The compulsive games-player, of course, is another universal phenomenon, particularly where gambling is a part of the game. The compulsive gambler is not made in a day: he descends an increasingly slippery path, eventually falling into a psychological trap from which escape is rare. The Chinese god of gambhng, Tu Chieng Kui, represents a man who spent his hfe gambling until he died, deeply in debt. Traditionally, statuettes made of him - known as 'a devil gambhng for cash' - show a figure in ...

 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...

 Three Kinds of Chauvinists

VEDANTAM: She says she divided the men who had stereotypes about her into three categories. DUKE: One was the flirting chauvinists, and that person was really viewing me in a way that was sexual. VEDANTAM: With the guys who were like that, Annie could make nice. DUKE: I never did go out on a date with any of them, but you know, it was kind of flirtatious at the table. And I could use that to my advantage. VEDANTAM: And then there was the disrespecting chauvinist. Annie says these players ...

 The Supercollider Was an Unreasonable Gamble`

Now particle physics in the United States is struggling to survive the d isaster of the Supercond ucting Supercollid er. The Supercollid er was a gigantic particle accelerator project that was canceled in 1 993 after about 3 billion d ollars had alread y been spent on it. The cancellation was a personal traged y for many of my friend s who had d evoted the best years of their lives to the project. But when I speak of the d isaster of the Supercond ucting Supercollid er, I d o not mean the can...

 China to Rate Online Behaviour in Social Credit System

Chinese internet firms are definitely interested, as Ant Financial, a subsidiary of ecommercegiant Alibaba, recently showed. To its popular app Alipay it added a new service which rated a person's credit worthiness on a scale of 350 to 950 points. This score is not only determined by one's lending behavior, but also by hobbies and friends. If friends have a poor lending reputation, this reflects badly on the person, just as prolonged playing of video games. Buying diapers indicates responsibi...

 RPG as Collaborative Creation

Playing D&D is an exercise in collaborative creation. You and your friends create epic stories filled with tension and memorable drama. You create silly in-jokes that make you laugh years later. The dice will be cruel to you, but you will soldier on. Your collective creativity will build stories that you will tell again and again, ranging from the utterly absurd to the stuff o f legend.

 RPG as a Game of Imagination

It's a game of your imagination, where you get to tell storeis by taking on the roles of the main chractes-characters you create. It's a game that offers a multitude of choices-more choices than even the most sophisticated computer game, because the only limit to what you can do is what you can imagine. The story unfolds like a movie, except all of the action takes place in your imagination. There's no script to follow, other than a rough outline used by the Gamemaster (GM): you decide what ...

 RPG as Group Exercise

A roleplaying game (or RPG, for short) is part noémprovisational theater, part storytelling, and part game. A single person (the gamemaster) runs the game for a group of players that pretend to be characters in a fictitious world. The world could be a mystery game set in the 1920s that takes you adventuring around the globe, a fantasy realm inhabited by dragons and trolls and sword-wielding barbarians, or a science fiction setting with aliens and spaceships and world-crushing weaponry. The p...