Tag: games

  • Another Game Theory Reflection

    We had an interesting session of Game Theory and Game Design yesterday, but I’ll let Josh tell you about it (if we had trouble getting dice in, I think the materials for Mr. Twist’s favorite game – Kiss the Girls – are going to be even more of an issue). In the meanwhile, here’s another short reflection piece from one of our students.

    S.T.M. writes:*

    When I first came into this “Game Theory” class, I didn’t understand the purpose of teaching such a class. My first impression was “What could they possibly teach a person about the theory of a game such as ‘Tic Tac Toe,’ ‘Checkers,’ or any of the everyday games that people play. Then I started listening to Prof. Levine and Prof. Miller explain the logic and calculation of such “Games of Chance.” Then I had an “AHA moment” and began to see how these “Theories” are actually used in the Judicial system and the Criminal Justice System. One of the theories, “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” is the exact theory they use in the Criminal Justice System to get 65%-75% rate for plea bargaining in most criminal cases. I began to see how even military leaders use these theories to determine “Collateral Damage” prior to reaching their possible objective. It was very interesting and enlightening. It’s amazing how some of the simplest things have such an extraordinary effect on the way things are run in the society or even the world.

    I have to say, the game “Go,” I still don’t see the logic and purpose for it. Maybe if there were some instructions**, but I just don’t get that game. But the game of “Forbidden Island,” this was not only interesting but it was fun. This game changed my whole attitude about competition in a game. It forced me to restrain my drive to be the “King of the Hill” and change it to a team or community mentality. This game helps remove the selfishness that is the center of our present society’s attitude to one of “Cooperation for Survival for All.” I could actually see a society change mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually if this principle was the moral and guiding principle. As much as I hate being punished and suffering for the actions of another person, when I look at the overall picture of this social principle it would be very beneficial to any culture of people who use it.

    Now that I have some insight into the theory of the game, I realized that the “Department of Corrections” is now using this theory as a form of discipline in its system. And it’s working. However, the laws of the “Jungle” still apply, the men of the jungle now apply the “Stop, Think, and Discuss method” before they respond. It has been beneficial for the environment, but they still have to be alert for abuse of power and those who have the authority must remember that it doesn’t take much to wake up the Monster if it’s pushed too far. Overall, I find this class very interesting and look forward to our new game “Diplomacy.”***

    ——-

    * As always, this is a transcription of the student’s writing – I’ve just fixed a couple minor grammatical and typographical issues.

    ** This refers to a problem we had with the Go sets. To get materials that are not books, papers, or other things that obviously belong in a classroom through security clearance, we’re often asked to order things from Amazon and have them shipped directly to the prison library rather than bringing them in ourselves. So, that’s what we did with the Go sets – but we didn’t realize that they showed up without any printed rules in them, and we didn’t think to check the sets for instructions before we sent the guys off to try playing during their “study hall” (we showed them the game and talked about its logic, but by drawing Go problems on the board, rather than with the sets). So, our bad. We did – when we realized this – go over the rules again and write them down with the guys, but it was still a source of understandable frustration.

    *** Sorry, Mr. Shakkir! I’m afraid Diplomacy undoes all the social lessons of Forbidden Island

  • Labyrinth Lord (Games and Game Design, 4/11/14)

    This is a bit belated, as it relates to last Friday’s class (but I thought I should write it up before I leave to teach this Friday’s class).

    Josh has already put together a nice write-up of basically what this class is on about. But he’d asked me to write up our particular experience from last week, in which I facilitated a game of Labyrinth Lord (LL). For those of you not hip to the OSR (that’s the “old school revival” for those of you not hip to it), LL is a “retro-clone” – a fan-made version of an older edition of Dungeons and Dragons made possible by the fact that you can only copyright the particular expression of a game and some proper names of things (so no beholders), but not the rules of the game. For anyone reading who is entirely unfamiliar with role-playing games (RPGs), I’m not going to try to explain them here, but you might want to check out the wikipedia entry, or Epidaiah Ravachol’s excellent micro-game, What is a Roleplaying Game?

    These older editions of D&D are long out of print, but there’s a significant constituency of players for them, motivated by some combination of nostalgia and the fact that the earlier games supported a simpler, more player-skill-focused (that is, it matters more whether you, the player, think to describe your character as twisting that strange carving gently or casually than what number is next to her “find traps” skill on her character sheet), and harder (in the sense of “your character is more likely to die”) experience than some of the newer editions.

    Anyway, for us, we wanted to use LL as a way to segue out of abstract and board games into more story-focused games (there’s a whole long argument about the line between games like D&D or LL and “story games” that, if you are likely to be at all interested, you surely already know about, but whatever). RPGs have some of their roots in wargames (like Diplomacy, which we’d already had them play), and the natural thought that it might be cool to, say, act out what that imaginary fleet commander trying to take Sevastopol is thinking about, rather than just treat it like an abstract token on the board. We decided to start with LL both because it shows its roots in these wargames relatively clearly, it’s pretty complex for folks used to simple board games but pretty simple compared to some of its RPG brethren and sistren, and it’s a clone of the version of D&D most folks of my/Josh’s generation discovered RPGs through back in the 1980s.

    The session was a bit chaotic. We had thirteen students show up. And, since they’ve run into some difficulties with playing unfamiliar games on their own during the “study halls” without an instructor present, we’ve decided to use class time to walk at least partially through games rather than just leave them to figure it out. And after all, very few of us who played RPGs learned our first one by sitting down with the massive rule-book. I know for me, I played D&D in the back of Tom Lopez’ van many times before I ever had the books on my own, and most other folks I know have similar stories of being introduced by older siblings, friends of the family, etc.

    The plan was for me to run the beginning of Dyson Logo’s fun little Goblin Gully adventure, doubling the number of creatures so that there’d be some threat to a party of thirteen characters, and with Josh acting as “caller” to try to corral everyone into having a coherent party decision. It didn’t quite work out.

    After the boring preliminaries (what do all these numbers on the sheet mean?), we went with tradition and started them in a tavern. This led into the traditional questions of “why would we go investigate this maybe monster-infested slave pit on the outskirts of town instead of continuing to drink in the tavern?” and “why is this so dumb?” So, I threw them the “there’s maybe a magic axe”rumor, and that was enough to convince most folks that they should head to the gully.

    We got about as far as the tree with the goblin guards. Under the guidance of a guy who’d played D&D before, they decided to have the thieves try to sneak up – but level 1 thieves are really pretty crummy at sneaking, so they were soon facing a bunch of arrows from goblins in the tree. One thief was immediately cut down, and the other started to run away.

    Interestingly, this caused a bit of a split in the group. Some of the guys wanted to regroup and start shooting things at whatever was in the tree shooting at them. A few decided to run away and look for another way in. One guy declared that he was going to throw his spear at the thief who was running, declaring that he was a coward, and shouldn’t have run away.

    This last was the most interesting to me – as it led to a bit of a conversation about the social contract. On the one hand, “I kill that guy” is probably pretty familiar to a lot of people who played these games when they were tweens or teenagers. It’s a pretty natural response, when you’re told that in this game you can do anything you want (that is within the reasonable fictional powers of your character), to try to push the boundaries a bit – my early D&D games were full of stupidity like “I steal from Lydia’s character,” “I kill the bartender,” and “I moon the dragon.” But the man playing the halfling who threw his spear was a bit more sophisticated than that in his motivations – he wasn’t just trolling, and he tried to make the case to the rest of the group that killing one of their mercenary band who showed cowardice in that way was the appropriate thing to do.

    I’m underselling the chaos of this session more than a bit here to pull out the interesting bit (to me) at the end, and I wouldn’t run a thirteen-player game of LL again anytime soon. It also drove home that while, historically, games like this were many current players’ introductions to the genre, they’re not maybe the easiest access point. Play did stop a few times over things like, “so, it says Paralysis/Petrification 16, and I’m a Magic-User, does that mean I can paralyze people?” But I’m hoping to, next time, use the friendly-fire demise of Mr. Hoppe’s cowardly (or perhaps merely reasonable!) thief to start conversations about social contract issues, genre expectations,  and kinds of fun – after all, if everyone knew we were playing a game about a hard-bitten mercenary band that brooks no cowardice, that could be a cool game.

     

  • Reflections on Forbidden Island from one of our Games and Game Theory Students

    I’m still working on putting together my thoughts on Friday’s class and our chaotic game of Labyrinth Lord, but in the meanwhile, here are some thoughts from one of our students, L.B. (posted with his permission; I am transcribing this from his paper, so any typos are probably mine):

    It was very interesting from a sociological point of view when a group of us played Forbidden Island. Once the rules were explained, the confusion began. One man assumed a leadership role. He was directing the play of everyone else. In the beginning, the individual players permitted this guidance. However, the two men who explained the rules and refereed the play repeatedly intervened with their leadership, when questions arose or an air of confusion permeated the table.

    Finally, when the majority of players grasped the rules individuals assumed responsibility for their turn and the game proceeded rather smoothly. It was intriguing to see how well the men played when someone needed protection. The conversation took on an air of empathy for someone who could be taken off the board and everyone spoke on how best to save said player.

    Such cooperation was eventful in a prison atmosphere. The men shared a common thread of cooperation in order to win the game. Initially the man who assumed the leadership position easily surrendered his self-appointed role in favor of the group dynamic of mutually shared cooperation among all.

    It was with a shout of jubilation when everyone showed each individual player how to move toward the helicopter pad in order to fly off the island. The game was won and smiles and pats on the back were shared.

    I marveled at this game for the group dynamic that was quickly created and could see how much fun the group experienced. It would have been interesting to see how quickly such frivolity would evaporate into consternation if a player had assumed a role to sabotage play to lose the game. I can only surmise that the culprit would have been castigated with rude comments and other players would have been reluctant in the future to play with such a libertine.

    I would give Forbidden Island four out of five stars as a rating. I would have enjoyed playing this game as a child, as it would have helped to foster a cooperative approach to handling problems as they arose later in life instead of the me against the world approach that so many youth of my generation (Baby Boomers of the early 1950s) were taught in the games – win at any cost.