Game (designers') glossary

The links seem to be broken. I can't brink up either.

I think it looked good. Can't say that I know the subject well enough to immediately spot any words that are missing. I liked how different types of games were considered.

Just some minor things that I reacted to (from two rather quick readings):

Agent, since the topic also include computer games, I expected something more similar to how the word is used in computer science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent) which you often run into if you read about programming game ai. I think that definition, if any, would make more sense.

Analog How many readers will know/remember what a slide rule is? :)

Art Not sure if this debate makes for a good entry in a glossary. Maybe just to say that it isn't really important anyway...

Cards Not sure how relevant or correct the comments on hidden information etc is. Lots of board games have hidden information of some kind and many card games do not, even if there is probably more common in card games, but I don't feel the difference is important (at least not worth mentionign in the glossary).

Chrome Saying that this increases complexity is a generalization that you don't really need to include. You can add chrome without adding complexity.

Contest, surely this word also refers to non-race (not timed) sports?

Ideas Just wanted to say this was very well written. This probably deserves a chapter of its own in the book as well (IIRC this is more or less what Chris Crawford did in his book On Game Design :) ).

Miniatures Games To be fair it seems quite common to play skirmish games with very few units. DBA is a very popular system as well and isn't there something like 16 units per side in that game? There is probably something more interesting and correct to say than that "large numbers" of minis are used.

Puzzle: I don't think it is correct to include "no rules" in the definition. I believe most puzzles have very strong rules actulally. Isn't Rules pretty much what separates a Puzzle from a Toy? I would say so. The difference between a puzzle and a solitaire game is much more difficult to specify (competition can exist in the game world, and in the player's head, even without an actual opponent).

Zero-Sum, hmm, I can think of lots of mechanics in games that are zero-sum. Diplomacy though, as a game, isn't zero sum, is it? I've never played it, but isn't units eliminated from combat? So after a combat one player will have lost a unit, while the winners did not gain a unit? The production center part of the game is probably zero-sum as you say, but that doesn't make the entire game zero-sum. Maybe there are no non-trivial games that are actually zero-sum, but the word still has a meaning when discussing isolated parts of games?

Chess isn't zero-sum for instance. One player loses a piece, the other doesn't gain one in the process. One player can grab a part of the board that no player controlled, also not zero-sum.

Saying that "one player wins, the other loses" isn't helping much. In that way of course any game would be zero-sum, but that is far from the way the expression is used in other fields, and I would be surprised if that mis-use was common in the field of game design. If we keep the original intention of the word instead, it can be useful to describe certain aspects of games, but very few if any complete games (I can't think of any good example of a game that is 100 % zero-sum right now).

Looking at the decision-tree isn't helpful. Of course one player will win the game in the end. Of course every move in the game will go down a branch of the decision-tree (and ALL board games have a decision-tree) leading to a specific player winning, while this might not yet be obvious to all players (the player that just lost a city might in fact win in the end, and thus the move was to his advantage, if you look at the decision-tree).

What is interesting is that some aspects of games, such as the production centers of victory points in A&A can be zero-sum, while other aspecs, such as the loss of units in A&A, are not zero-sum. That's what would be helpful to have in the glossary.

Trading is the classic example of non-zero-sum (it usually have multiple winners), and trading in games would be great example of something non-zero-sum in board games. Of course if you draw up the decision tree you will see that every trade brings one player closer to victory at the expense of the other players, but again that isn't meaningful to analyze the game.

This all becomes a bit confusing to reason about because of the two different meanings of the word "game" used in game theory vs game design.

pelle has at last hit upon the problem. We must be careful about the meaning of the words we use. Game design is indebted to game theory both historically and in current practice. One only need to look at the academic background of significant designers in the field to realize the highly abstract and mathematical mindset that takes shape behind game design. Now, you don't need to know game theory to make a game, nor does game theory make a good game. But, if we are talking about terms like "complete games" and "zero-sum" we cannot simply ignore the historical predicate meaning of these terms in game theory. The term "zero-sum" occurs often in the literatures of economics, politics, sociology and, heck, even biology, by formal theoretical models of inter-agent behavior, frequently juxtaposed with the term "variable-sum". And, as pelle has said, trade is typically seen as a compelling example of variable sum games. Based upon the underlying logic of sub-division of labor and commercial exchange... two people who trade can both be better off than each would be independently.

But, I think what keeps getting ignored in this discussion is the competitive element of games. In the world, my happiness and material well-being can be better off irregardless of yours. We are not necessarily in a competition. But, when we talk about zero-sum environments, we talk about situations under which there is strict competition... which is to say: in order for me to be better off, you must be worse off. Theft, re-allocation of ownership of property, territorial conquest. All of these activities represent a zero sum of gain and loss... and as such are criticized by economists and progressive political scientists for doing nothing to increase the material well-being of the whole. But, you do not necessarily need the beneficiary to be the one who actually takes the object from the victim for an environment to be zero-sum. In fact, such crude understandings of gain/loss are vilified by almost all in society. Those are trivial situations. What is far more interesting to economists, political scientist and game designers, are how complex structures and rules can create a zero-sum environment, fairly or unfairly. Now, in the process of re-allocation of value throughout society, the total amount of material may increase and thus the 'zero-sum' allocation of the structure at any given time may represent an acceptable 'variable-sum' outcome through time. But, that is because human beings like things like improvement of living standards and more as opposed to less material goods.

When did you last hear comments from everyone around the table at end of a game like Ticket to Ride, or Power Grid or Puerto Rico to the effect: "Boy, I'm so happy we connected Europe with trains" or "I feel so good that Portugal now has wind power" or "Thank god for colonial plantation ownership... otherwise there would be no universities in the Caribbean"? At the end of a competitive game, it does not really matter how many victory points the victor has, but that he has more than anyone else. People don't say, "Gee... I started off with one planet in Race for the Galaxy and now I have 8, I really won! Thank god for variable-sums." It doesn't matter whether you start off with a lot more pieces than you end up with (A&A, Chess) or you finish with a dozen sheep in your hand (Settlers of Catan)... what matters at the end of a competitive game, from a competitive point of view, is that you obtained what you needed for victory. And, as long as it is a competition, then that resource (winning) is zero-sum.

This point is important. Winning is the resource that cannot be shared. And, to trivialize it impacts how you design games. You cannot count on certain situations to produce definitive (or desired) outcomes if the overall environment is zero-sum. Monopoly, Illuminati (without Cthulthu), and Diplomacy are all theoretically endless games. They can (and should) be played forever if people understand the full implications of all their actions because they are all multiplayer environments with exclusive win conditions where the clock (the condition that ends the game) is correlated to the victory condition. Since a player cannot win if someone else does, he has an incentive to thwart the other player's ability to do so no matter what turn it is. As a result, optimal play (without deception, nagging, ignorance) will result in a perpetual balance of power that prevents the victory conditions from being reached. I have seen all of these games end on account of time, boredom, frustration and acrimony more than I have seen them end by the victory conditions. So, yes... understanding that EVERY COMPETITION IS A ZERO-SUM ENVIRONMENT is extremely important in game design. Somehow, you must create boundaries to action, otherwise any multiplayer game where everyone begins with equal opportunity will go on forever. In Euro games, that is usually done with the wholesale elimination of aggressive action. You cannot take from other people, so you can only out-build them. But, Chess, Magic and Axis & Allies do it with a mechanic that creates irrecoverable resources. So, eventually someone will be too weak to continue.

I think you are confusing "game" in "game theory" with "game" as in "board game" too much here, and (roughly what I said above) the term is useful in it's original meaning when you discuss parts of a "board game" (like owning cities on the map, or the number of armies each player have, or the bidding subsystem; those are good examples of game models in the game theory sense of the word) but it isn't very useful to look at the entire game and say it is zero sum. I don't either see why we would want to redefine the word.

Maybe it would have been better if the economists had used a different word from game though, since it causes confusion when people confuse it with the kind of games that are discussed in the field of game design.

Zero-sum is important enough in both respects to include both definitions/usages in a glossary, no? "In game design, systems can be called zero-sum if..." and "Whereas in game theory, zero-sum means..."

PS - in fact, it might be useful to have an entry for "game theory" to educate those novice game designers who might not be aware of game theory/economics vs "theory of game design"...