agregador de notícias
Infinite City - Alderac Entertainment Group
Alea Analysis #9: Puerto Rico (Large Box #7)
2009-07-03: A fun interview about Dogs in the Vineyard
Dogs in the Vineyard (Atomic Array 026)
By Vincent Baker in anyway. Filed under rpglink curious. 2009-07-03
New PDF Bundle at DTR
Chris Pramas Dragon Age Interview on gameplaywright.net
Ghost Corp: Improvements and updates!
35th Annual Origins Awards Announced
Convention Preview News: Spiel 09 Preview Update
The Spiel 09 preview has been updated as follows:
• Cwali
Alley-Oop – Added
Factory Fun Expansion – Added
Gipsy King Expansion – Added
Powerboats Expansion – Updated
To reach the Spiel preview, head to one of the publisher links: A-D, E-M, N-R or S-Z.
Jason Matthews - Campaign Manager 2008
Jay Bloodworth: Complexity in Games
[Editor’s note: I asked Jay about reprinting this article prior to the winner of the 2009 Spiel des Jahres being announced. As we all know by now, Dominion took home the prize.]
A popular comment since the 2009 Spiel des Jahres nominees were announced in late May has been that Dominion is “too complex” to win. That may well be so, but a degree in computer science and ten years of teaching math have taught me that complexity is a tricky thing. If one mind can easily follow a procedure or solve a problem while another can’t, the question I always want to answer is how the computations carried out by the two minds differ.
Disappointingly, neither my classroom experiences nor the reading I’ve done on cognitive science have offered much in the way of definitive answers when it comes to adolescent minds doing algebra. Nonetheless, while I probably only have just enough knowledge to be dangerous, I’d like to offer a few thoughts about what it means for a game to be “complex”. I’m going to mostly restrict my examples to Finca, Pandemic, and Dominion; I have not played Fauna, and while Fits certainly gives some people fits, I don’t think the cognitive challenges it presents are akin to the ones I want to talk about.
Working Memory
A reasonably well known meme from neuroscience is that the human mind can hold about seven “chunks” of information at once, plus or minus about three, depending on the individual. Games that push up against this limit are likely to be perceived as complex. I think this is where Dominion takes the biggest hit. Every turn you need one chunk each for the number of actions, buys, and dollars you have at your disposal. Certain action cards give you other things to keep track of, and skillful play probably demands several additional chunks: what you intend to buy this turn, where you are in your long term strategy, maybe a note or two about what your opponents are up to.
Some may protest that it’s easy to organize your thoughts so it doesn’t feel like so much to remember. Easy for you, maybe, but saying it’s easy for everyone is begging the question of how minds differ. Maybe the ten chunk memory is just a four chunk memory with a good compression ratio.
With that in mind, consider humble Finca, a game I haven’t heard anyone describe as too complex for the SdJ. But for a mind with a bad “chunker”, it might be. In a four-player game, you have three meeples to move on the windmill. Assuming all are on different blades, you have to keep track of several things for each: how far it can move, how many fruit of which type it can obtain, and whether or not it can claim a donkey. I don’t claim that people generally treat each of these as a single chunk or if they do that they must store all twelve at once, but do wonder if this sort of accounting explains the “information overload” some intelligent people experience when they play our games.
Intuitiveness
Intuition probably seems like a strange concept for a supposed scientific discussion of cognition in gaming, but the fact is that the mind likes patterns and is a familiarity junkie. It’s good at noting deviations from expectations, too – that’s one of the ways we learn – but the experience of those deviations is at least mildly uncomfortable. So players familiar with other card games may find discarding your hand every turn in Dominion, or replacing the discards on top of the deck in Pandemic unpleasant and hard to remember until repetition ingrains the new pattern.
The Impact of Theme
Responding to an earlier draft of this piece, Wei-Hwa Huang suggested that effective integration of theme and mechanics can mitigate the perceived complexity of a game. His example is the infection cards in Pandemic; he says that when he points out how this models the tendency of a real infection to intensify in a city where it already has a foothold, the rule is no longer a problem. At first I didn’t entirely agree with this example – while the infection deck mechanism in Pandemic is clever, it has never struck me as particularly mnemonic – but as I have reflected further on my experience learning the game, there was a moment where realizing the thematic rational behind the rule relieved a quantum of stress; it no longer felt like “another damn rule” to remember.
In a May 2009 interview on Eric Burgess’s Boardgame Babylon podcast, designer Dan Verssen said that he develops his games to the point where they are “obvious.” His goal is that a player’s reaction to the rules should be, “Yes, of course. How else would you do that?” Now, I can think of many games that don’t produce this reaction, including many I consider great, so I don’t agree with Dan that “obviousness” should be a mandatory goal in game design. That said, I do think it is a real quality, and that games that possess it are more approachable because their actual or perceived complexity is lowered by the well integrated theme.
Moral Considerations
Compared to my earlier points, this is mere speculation. However, we certainly have a social/moral component to our minds that is brought to bear against some problems but not others. Responding to the impulses of this module, some people choose not to play “take that” games or games with themes of death and destruction. But among those who choose to play such games, I wonder if the social brain doesn’t still subconsciously intrude on and complicate efforts to play dispassionately. Does the life-or-death, real world theme of Pandemic impact the way people play? How much does playing an Attack card in Dominion feel like an attack, even when everyone acknowledges it’s the rational play?
So, what do you think? How do the brains you know best approach games, and which aspects of these games influence the brains’ perception of their complexity?
Bibliography
A number of books have influenced my thinking about thinking, but these are two I referred to while writing this piece:
- Lehrer, Jonah. How We Decide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
- Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought. New York: Viking, 2007.
Want to get something off your chest? Want to tell the world what you think? Boardgame News welcomes your article submissions at contributions@boardgamenews.com
Tales from the Rocket House: Neither Hot nor Cold
Geist Preview for July 1
Review of a dead CCG: SimCity
WordPress 2.8
Ahoy, 
Upgraded…
Everything was returning 404 for a while, there. A little tweak here, some config editting there, and everything is working again…
Phew…
Cheers,
J.
From the Editor: Spiel 09 Preview, and Membership Drive Results
The beginning of July has historically been the launch date for the Boardgame News Spiel preview, and I’m continuing the tradition with today’s unveiling of the Spiel 09 preview, which once again has been divided into four sections to speed downloading times on both your part and mine. In case you can’t wait until the end of this message to check out the pages, here are links to publishers A-D, E-M, N-R and S-Z.
If you visit those pages and see only introductory paragraphs not followed by huge tables showcasing publishers and their promised new releases, then either you’re not logged in or you’re not a BGN member, which makes it impossible to log in! The Spiel preview is available only to BGN members as their financial support allows me to put in as much time on the preview – not to mention the site as a whole – as I do. Some of the extensive game write-ups included in the Spiel preview will be published later on BGN as standalone items, but if you want to see them all now in one place, you can become a member now for the low, low price of $25.
Still not convinced of the awesomeness of the BGN Spiel 09 preview? Then consider this: If printed in its entirety, the Spiel 08 preview would reach 400 pages, and I fully expect the Spiel 09 preview to reach that size by the time Spiel opens on October 22. To fully appreciate the scope of the Spiel 08 preview, you should visit the Convention Previews page, click through to one of the Spiel 08 pages, and start reading. Even I’m amazed when I look over those files – and I’m the one who put it all together!
On another topic, my spring membership drive is over, and the bottom line is that there’s no way I can remove ads from the site. My goal was 400 new members, which would permit me to adopt the Consumer Reports model of relying only on member support, but the count barely crossed 100, with roughly twenty of those payments coming in the weeks prior to the debut of the Spiel preview.
While I appreciate the support of each member, whether new or renewing, those payments on their own aren’t enough to allow me to ditch the ads. Heck, even with the ads my yearly income is less than what I’d earn from writing for magazines and other clients. Thus, the ads will stay in place, and I’ll start adding other writing work to my schedule when possible. If you run a game publishing company and need someone to edit your rules and other material – and I think you do – write me and we’ll work something out.
New products from MicroArtStudio
