I have several thoughts. I think I’m going to try writing several replies to myself here, so people can discuss (& vote on) them separately. (If you find this objectionable, I’m willing to consolidate. I also considered making each a top-level comment but that feels spammy.)
Idea: If you made this a computer game, you could use leaderboards or XP or something to encourage players to focus on the correct goal.
There’s a risk that players will act as if the MostPointsWins rule is in effect, even if the game says otherwise.
But lots of computer games nowadays have “meta” rewards that accumulate across multiple plays. You could use these to help overcome reticence (or confusion) regarding the game’s intended goal.
Difficulty: If you’re not careful, this may encourage players to play lots of fast careless games rather than putting a lot of effort into a few games.
Difficulty solution: Maybe they only get to play one (scored) game per day. This also makes that game more exciting. They get to decide when to play their scored game (non-scored game might be called “casual”)
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.
Idea: Instead of allowing arbitrary deals, allow only a few specific kinds of deals, then gradually add more kinds of deals in advanced scenarios.
As noted in the post, a system for enforcing arbitrary deals can be used for nasty stuff like precommitment races if players are clever. Conversely, less-advanced players might not even think of the many ways you’d like them to use it. You also risk players making ambiguous deals and then disagreeing about whether they were fulfilled.
If you start with limited deals like “no attacking each other for N turns” or “I’ll pay you X if you do Y” then you can exclude problematic cases, and you can encourage players to experiment with more complex deals (dominant assurance contracts?) when they are “unlocked” because they’ll be a shiny new toy and players won’t need to invent them.
Additionally, this might make it tractable to have a computerized version with AI players, which makes the game much more accessible (and may even help with playtesting/balance if the AIs are sufficiently human-like).
Difficulty: The game becomes much less about players talking with each other (especially for AI).
Difficulty: Players might try to negotiate informal deals to work around the limitations.
You also risk players making ambiguous deals and then disagreeing about whether they were fulfilled.
Personally, so far I’m just looking forward to this. I’ll need to experience it and maybe get bored of it before I’ll want to come up with solutions to it x]
I think fully general contract enforcement might be something I have to leave in, though, discussed in this reply.
I kind of want the lego of legal experimentation. I want to get to a world where laws can be changed by those who live under them as easily as a gridbeam construction. To do that irl, we’re going to first have to reckon with the fact that most of us are not very competent in it yet, we have to become better at setting our laws than the lawyers before we can justify deposing the lawyers
Observation: There are lots of complexities that matter for real life that you could potentially include in the game, but all at the cost of making the game more complex (and therefore harder to create, balance, learn, play, and distribute).
(Some were already mentioned in others’ comments)
Hidden goals (that you can make claims about but can’t prove)
Random events
Partial information
Secret talks and secret deals, with only a subset of players privy to them
Transaction costs on creating/enforcing deals
Deals with lesser penalties for breaching them
Deals that need to be enforced by the players punishing each other, instead of being magically enforced by the game system
Deals where it’s hard to tell whether they were followed or not
...but I think I mostly recommend ignoring these until you have a simpler version working.
Sure. I want to make sure every player experiences a perfect, utterly indisputably mutually agreeable deal, at least once, to find the way, to know that it exists. That requires a simple game.
And then we can add things. I don’t think I know when and how fast to start adding convolutions. There’s a minimum rate, a steady ascent, where players understand every step, which generally feels good to players. I’m not sure whether it’s really optimal for learning.
Idea: Have players play a scenario, then tell them at the end how many points is a “good score” for each role in that scenario
Putting all goals on the same scoring scale helps players understand how well they’re doing, but also creates preconceptions about what trades are “fair” and makes it easy to focus on who has the most points. Additionally, it would be difficult (and perhaps not desirable) to ensure that a given goal is equally easy to achieve in all possible match-ups.
If you put players on different scoring scales, and then tell them at the end of the game which scale they were on, then players still learn about their performance when the game ends, but they’ll still need to figure things out for themselves during the game.
Unfortunately this still requires the designer to figure out what score actually IS a good score for every role in every scenario, which is probably a lot of work.
I approve of this.
I have several thoughts. I think I’m going to try writing several replies to myself here, so people can discuss (& vote on) them separately. (If you find this objectionable, I’m willing to consolidate. I also considered making each a top-level comment but that feels spammy.)
Idea: If you made this a computer game, you could use leaderboards or XP or something to encourage players to focus on the correct goal.
There’s a risk that players will act as if the MostPointsWins rule is in effect, even if the game says otherwise.
But lots of computer games nowadays have “meta” rewards that accumulate across multiple plays. You could use these to help overcome reticence (or confusion) regarding the game’s intended goal.
Difficulty: If you’re not careful, this may encourage players to play lots of fast careless games rather than putting a lot of effort into a few games.
Difficulty solution: Maybe they only get to play one (scored) game per day. This also makes that game more exciting. They get to decide when to play their scored game (non-scored game might be called “casual”)
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.
Idea: Instead of allowing arbitrary deals, allow only a few specific kinds of deals, then gradually add more kinds of deals in advanced scenarios.
As noted in the post, a system for enforcing arbitrary deals can be used for nasty stuff like precommitment races if players are clever. Conversely, less-advanced players might not even think of the many ways you’d like them to use it. You also risk players making ambiguous deals and then disagreeing about whether they were fulfilled.
If you start with limited deals like “no attacking each other for N turns” or “I’ll pay you X if you do Y” then you can exclude problematic cases, and you can encourage players to experiment with more complex deals (dominant assurance contracts?) when they are “unlocked” because they’ll be a shiny new toy and players won’t need to invent them.
Additionally, this might make it tractable to have a computerized version with AI players, which makes the game much more accessible (and may even help with playtesting/balance if the AIs are sufficiently human-like).
Difficulty: The game becomes much less about players talking with each other (especially for AI).
Difficulty: Players might try to negotiate informal deals to work around the limitations.
Personally, so far I’m just looking forward to this. I’ll need to experience it and maybe get bored of it before I’ll want to come up with solutions to it x]
I think fully general contract enforcement might be something I have to leave in, though, discussed in this reply.
Observation: There are lots of complexities that matter for real life that you could potentially include in the game, but all at the cost of making the game more complex (and therefore harder to create, balance, learn, play, and distribute).
(Some were already mentioned in others’ comments)
Hidden goals (that you can make claims about but can’t prove)
Random events
Partial information
Secret talks and secret deals, with only a subset of players privy to them
Transaction costs on creating/enforcing deals
Deals with lesser penalties for breaching them
Deals that need to be enforced by the players punishing each other, instead of being magically enforced by the game system
Deals where it’s hard to tell whether they were followed or not
...but I think I mostly recommend ignoring these until you have a simpler version working.
Sure. I want to make sure every player experiences a perfect, utterly indisputably mutually agreeable deal, at least once, to find the way, to know that it exists. That requires a simple game.
And then we can add things. I don’t think I know when and how fast to start adding convolutions. There’s a minimum rate, a steady ascent, where players understand every step, which generally feels good to players. I’m not sure whether it’s really optimal for learning.
Idea: Have players play a scenario, then tell them at the end how many points is a “good score” for each role in that scenario
Putting all goals on the same scoring scale helps players understand how well they’re doing, but also creates preconceptions about what trades are “fair” and makes it easy to focus on who has the most points. Additionally, it would be difficult (and perhaps not desirable) to ensure that a given goal is equally easy to achieve in all possible match-ups.
If you put players on different scoring scales, and then tell them at the end of the game which scale they were on, then players still learn about their performance when the game ends, but they’ll still need to figure things out for themselves during the game.
Unfortunately this still requires the designer to figure out what score actually IS a good score for every role in every scenario, which is probably a lot of work.