I think the most natural definitions are that early game is the part you have memorized, end game is where you can compute to the end (still doing pruning), and mid game is the rest. So eg in Scrabble the end game is where there are no tiles or few enough tiles in the bag that you can think through all (relevant) combinations of bags.
I think perhaps the phases of a 4X game.
Explore: gain information that is relevant for what plan to execute
Expand: Investment phase, you take actions that maximise your growth
Exploit: You slowly start depriotizing growth as the time remaining grows shorter.
The “early game is what you have memorized” makes sense for literal games, but doesn’t actually help much with my current use-case, which is “and this translates into real life.” (when I’m thinking about these in game-form, I’m generally thinking about one-shot gaming, where you’re trying hard to win your first time playing a game, such that figuring out the early game is part of the challenge)
I think you mix up translating into real life with translating into one-shot gaming.
For most real-world problems there’s a series of things people who are good at solving those problems do in the beginning when faced with the problem. If you want to fix a computer issue, “Reboot your computer” is an early game move.
Sure, but those areas aren’t the ones that have me interested in gaming metaphors to figure out how to solve my problems.
‘Found a startup’ is a bit more of an established process that ‘counts’ for my purposes here. There’s a lot of reading and learning I can do before getting started. (Compared to ‘build a functioning alignment community’). But even there I think it’s less like playing a game I’ve already studied such that the early game is memorized, and more like sitting down to play a multiplayer game for the first time, which shares structure with other games but is still involved a lot of learning on the fly. (I bet this is still reasonably true on your second or third startup, though maybe not if you literally are running Y Combinator). though interested in hearing from people who have run multiple to see if they think that tracks.
Sorry I see now that i lost half a sentence in the middle.
I agree that the notions of early/mid/late game doesn’t map well to real life, and I don’t think there is a good way to do so.
I then (meant to) propose the stages of a 4X game as perhaps mapping more cleanly onto one-shot games
I think the most natural definitions are that early game is the part you have memorized, end game is where you can compute to the end (still doing pruning), and mid game is the rest.
So eg in Scrabble the end game is where there are no tiles or few enough tiles in the bag that you can think through all (relevant) combinations of bags.
I think perhaps the phases of a 4X game.
Explore: gain information that is relevant for what plan to execute
Expand: Investment phase, you take actions that maximise your growth
Exploit: You slowly start depriotizing growth as the time remaining grows shorter.
Exterminate: You go for your win condition
The “early game is what you have memorized” makes sense for literal games, but doesn’t actually help much with my current use-case, which is “and this translates into real life.” (when I’m thinking about these in game-form, I’m generally thinking about one-shot gaming, where you’re trying hard to win your first time playing a game, such that figuring out the early game is part of the challenge)
I think you mix up translating into real life with translating into one-shot gaming.
For most real-world problems there’s a series of things people who are good at solving those problems do in the beginning when faced with the problem. If you want to fix a computer issue, “Reboot your computer” is an early game move.
Sure, but those areas aren’t the ones that have me interested in gaming metaphors to figure out how to solve my problems.
‘Found a startup’ is a bit more of an established process that ‘counts’ for my purposes here. There’s a lot of reading and learning I can do before getting started. (Compared to ‘build a functioning alignment community’). But even there I think it’s less like playing a game I’ve already studied such that the early game is memorized, and more like sitting down to play a multiplayer game for the first time, which shares structure with other games but is still involved a lot of learning on the fly. (I bet this is still reasonably true on your second or third startup, though maybe not if you literally are running Y Combinator). though interested in hearing from people who have run multiple to see if they think that tracks.
Sorry I see now that i lost half a sentence in the middle. I agree that the notions of early/mid/late game doesn’t map well to real life, and I don’t think there is a good way to do so. I then (meant to) propose the stages of a 4X game as perhaps mapping more cleanly onto one-shot games