Issue: Lots of players have immense trouble wrapping their head around non-zero-sum games.
I’ve discussed the idea of non-zero-sum games a bunch of times on various Internet forums. Some people seem to find it interesting. A lot of people seem to find it confusing. Some people are openly hostile to entire concept.
My current model is that most people have defined their mental category of “game” in such a way that “zero-sum” is part of the definition. If you hand them a game-like object that is not zero-sum, they will either tell you that the game is defective, or they will “auto-correct” the game to “what you probably meant” and then have a very confusing conversation where they think you don’t understand how your own game is played.
Several people have gotten very zealous, and claimed that they are being virtuous by refusing to follow a non-zero-sum goal. (Because the goal of ANY game is to win, you see, and “winning” can ONLY mean beating the other players.)
One person—who had a technical background and seemed both intelligent and reasonable in my other interactions with them—read my example of a rule that might appear in a hypothetical non-zero-sum game, and told me they felt like the hypothetical rulebook was trying to trick them about the goal of the game.
I’ve had several conversations with game designers where someone says “I like trading games, but all my favorite trading games only work with 3+ players, can you help me make one that works with only 2 players?” and I say “it would have to be non-zero-sum” and then either they refuse and keep holding out for some other option or they find some way of confusing themselves into thinking they’ve made the game non-zero-sum while still keeping the MostPointsWins rule.
I find this immensely frustrating.
The rise of cooperative games over the last ~15 years suggests it’s possible to push the boundaries on this, but it seems like almost everyone has responded by creating a special distinct category only for pure cooperative games, and almost no one has made the mathematical generalization that game theorists use. I’ve had arguments where people say “the game has to do X or it’s not even a game!” and I say “cooperative games don’t do X” and they say “cooperative games are different, we’re not talking about them.”
(And cooperative games are probably one of the easiest possible cases, since you can fudge them into the zero-sum frame by imagining the game system as an opponent.)
I’d love to see you expand popular notions of what goals a game can have.
I predict that is going to be extremely difficult.
I find this response quite odd, because my experience playing complicated board games is that usually only about half the players are actually trying to win, and everyone else has set themselves some weird other goals.
For example, in a big complicated civilization development game I played a while ago I remember one point where one person made a “dumb move” which obviously cost them points on the basis “but I have been collecting these science cards for 2 hours and I am more invested in finishing the set that than the game itself”, meanwhile their is a war negotiation happening over the table where one player is saying “can we just stop attacking eachother, these fights aren’t even helping you” and the other one says “Nah, I just want to defeat you in a war, not so bothered about how the rest of the game goes”. In any sufficiently complex world players actually pick their own objectives, and track score only half-heartedly at best.
It can lead to arguments. Their is a game called “Lords of Xidit” which has a really interesting score system. Their are 3 different mini-games. At game start a random order is determined. At the end of the game you go through the three mini-games in that determined order, and for each one eliminate the remaining player who is lowest in that category. So eventually just one of the 4 player remains to be crowned. The reason this game leads to arguments is that, the rules tell you that you either win or loose, so are presumably supposed to aim to win, however—players (rightfully in my mind) can see that one person came second, the last to be eliminated. The problem is that as soon as one person gives up on first and starts playing for second, they can completely ignore one of the three mini-games, which gives them a lot of extra umph to throw around the other two. If someone aims for second: they get it, and in doing so they very likely change which of the other players comes first. Leading to the person who was doing well to get annoyed that a player pursuing a non-victory goal is hurting them.
Very long comment now. But I am certain that, despite what rulebooks say, only a minority of players at a board game table at any one time are actually trying to win. Some of them decided to pursue something weird when they saw themselves falling behind, but others just picked a weird character or civilisation or whatever before turn 1 because they thought it was cool, even though they knew that by picking that one they were already hurting their chances of victory.
Both are examples of players ignoring the official goal of the game to do something else; the fact that some describe the something-else as “winning” and others describe the something-else as “not winning” might be a red herring. Just because a player is willing to chase some weird goal they made up themselves doesn’t mean they’re willing to chase some weird goal that the game assigned to them.
Alternately, if you’re seeing half the players don’t care about winning and I’m seeing 10% of the players piously declare their loyalty to “winning” (regardless of actual rules), well, that only adds up to 60%; we could both be accurately describing different sub-populations. (Don’t put any faith in that 10% number; my actual data is “nearly every discussion thread on this topic has at least one person advocate this position” and I have no reliable way to turn that into a percentage of all players.)
I mostly think these are different sub-populations, but I don’t believe the sub-population you’re describing is as large as 50% of the market; I suspect you self-selected to write a comment about them because they’re over-represented in your play group. Also I suspect many of those players only act like that in certain types of games.
From a sales perspective, I’m more concerned about the larger subgroup of players who are confused by weird goals than the smaller but more vehement subgroup who outright defy them. Nonetheless the second group may be a bigger problem than their numbers suggest, because they might ruin a peacewagers game for everyone else at the table. If peacewagers becomes popular then players will eventually solve that problem by segregating themselves, but while it’s a weird new thing that no one has experience with, those players may be randomly mixed in and if (say) 10% of players are game-ruiners then they will ruin much more than 10% of games.
Issue: Lots of players have immense trouble wrapping their head around non-zero-sum games.
I’ve discussed the idea of non-zero-sum games a bunch of times on various Internet forums. Some people seem to find it interesting. A lot of people seem to find it confusing. Some people are openly hostile to entire concept.
My current model is that most people have defined their mental category of “game” in such a way that “zero-sum” is part of the definition. If you hand them a game-like object that is not zero-sum, they will either tell you that the game is defective, or they will “auto-correct” the game to “what you probably meant” and then have a very confusing conversation where they think you don’t understand how your own game is played.
Several people have gotten very zealous, and claimed that they are being virtuous by refusing to follow a non-zero-sum goal. (Because the goal of ANY game is to win, you see, and “winning” can ONLY mean beating the other players.)
One person—who had a technical background and seemed both intelligent and reasonable in my other interactions with them—read my example of a rule that might appear in a hypothetical non-zero-sum game, and told me they felt like the hypothetical rulebook was trying to trick them about the goal of the game.
I’ve had several conversations with game designers where someone says “I like trading games, but all my favorite trading games only work with 3+ players, can you help me make one that works with only 2 players?” and I say “it would have to be non-zero-sum” and then either they refuse and keep holding out for some other option or they find some way of confusing themselves into thinking they’ve made the game non-zero-sum while still keeping the MostPointsWins rule.
I find this immensely frustrating.
The rise of cooperative games over the last ~15 years suggests it’s possible to push the boundaries on this, but it seems like almost everyone has responded by creating a special distinct category only for pure cooperative games, and almost no one has made the mathematical generalization that game theorists use. I’ve had arguments where people say “the game has to do X or it’s not even a game!” and I say “cooperative games don’t do X” and they say “cooperative games are different, we’re not talking about them.”
(And cooperative games are probably one of the easiest possible cases, since you can fudge them into the zero-sum frame by imagining the game system as an opponent.)
I’d love to see you expand popular notions of what goals a game can have.
I predict that is going to be extremely difficult.
I find this response quite odd, because my experience playing complicated board games is that usually only about half the players are actually trying to win, and everyone else has set themselves some weird other goals.
For example, in a big complicated civilization development game I played a while ago I remember one point where one person made a “dumb move” which obviously cost them points on the basis “but I have been collecting these science cards for 2 hours and I am more invested in finishing the set that than the game itself”, meanwhile their is a war negotiation happening over the table where one player is saying “can we just stop attacking eachother, these fights aren’t even helping you” and the other one says “Nah, I just want to defeat you in a war, not so bothered about how the rest of the game goes”. In any sufficiently complex world players actually pick their own objectives, and track score only half-heartedly at best.
It can lead to arguments. Their is a game called “Lords of Xidit” which has a really interesting score system. Their are 3 different mini-games. At game start a random order is determined. At the end of the game you go through the three mini-games in that determined order, and for each one eliminate the remaining player who is lowest in that category. So eventually just one of the 4 player remains to be crowned. The reason this game leads to arguments is that, the rules tell you that you either win or loose, so are presumably supposed to aim to win, however—players (rightfully in my mind) can see that one person came second, the last to be eliminated. The problem is that as soon as one person gives up on first and starts playing for second, they can completely ignore one of the three mini-games, which gives them a lot of extra umph to throw around the other two. If someone aims for second: they get it, and in doing so they very likely change which of the other players comes first. Leading to the person who was doing well to get annoyed that a player pursuing a non-victory goal is hurting them.
Very long comment now. But I am certain that, despite what rulebooks say, only a minority of players at a board game table at any one time are actually trying to win. Some of them decided to pursue something weird when they saw themselves falling behind, but others just picked a weird character or civilisation or whatever before turn 1 because they thought it was cool, even though they knew that by picking that one they were already hurting their chances of victory.
Our observations aren’t necessarily in conflict.
Both are examples of players ignoring the official goal of the game to do something else; the fact that some describe the something-else as “winning” and others describe the something-else as “not winning” might be a red herring. Just because a player is willing to chase some weird goal they made up themselves doesn’t mean they’re willing to chase some weird goal that the game assigned to them.
Alternately, if you’re seeing half the players don’t care about winning and I’m seeing 10% of the players piously declare their loyalty to “winning” (regardless of actual rules), well, that only adds up to 60%; we could both be accurately describing different sub-populations. (Don’t put any faith in that 10% number; my actual data is “nearly every discussion thread on this topic has at least one person advocate this position” and I have no reliable way to turn that into a percentage of all players.)
I mostly think these are different sub-populations, but I don’t believe the sub-population you’re describing is as large as 50% of the market; I suspect you self-selected to write a comment about them because they’re over-represented in your play group. Also I suspect many of those players only act like that in certain types of games.
From a sales perspective, I’m more concerned about the larger subgroup of players who are confused by weird goals than the smaller but more vehement subgroup who outright defy them. Nonetheless the second group may be a bigger problem than their numbers suggest, because they might ruin a peacewagers game for everyone else at the table. If peacewagers becomes popular then players will eventually solve that problem by segregating themselves, but while it’s a weird new thing that no one has experience with, those players may be randomly mixed in and if (say) 10% of players are game-ruiners then they will ruin much more than 10% of games.