| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Thursday 8 April 2004: |
| A division of game-flavour that just struck me; I think of it as the thermochemistry of the game. Most popular games, I think, are exothermic - like an exothermic chemical reaction, once the gamestate has started reacting to the players, the reaction will tend to accelerate until the fuel is consumed and the game is over. The game that triggered the whole observation is Babel, where once a player has started to win, the game utterly collapses in favour of that player. The same thing, to a degree, happens with many popular games. Consider Chess or Stratego - if you lose a powerful piece, the rest of your pieces pretty much inevitably follow. In Go or Abalone, if your opponent gets a firm grip of the board, your score plummets, and as your score plummets your grip on the board weakens, and it gets easier and easier for your opponent to maintain or even increase their lead. Monopoly is perhaps one of the most obviously exothermic games there is. Risk is quite exothermic, though that your greater number of units are spread more widely dissipates the effect somewhat. Magic:TG is mostly quite exothermic, which is lessened a little by the "erase everything" cards. To a lesser degree, Shogi and Rithmomachia are exothermic, but their design is such that reversing the 'reaction' is much more feasible. An endothermic game, then, is one where as you get closer to winning, it gets more difficult to maintain your lead. This is the case with many games where more than two players are involved, especially where trading is a factor. In Settlers of Catan, for example, people will generally refuse to trade with a player who is close to winning, or at least require a better exchange rate from them. I'm not sure Settlers is endothermic, though, since a player in a winning position generally has more income and options from the game itself, enough to make up for the reduced trading options. Icehouse has potential for a similar 'trade' handicap against whoever seems to be winning, and has no comparable exothermic tendencies. Canasta and Cheat are both endothermic, Canasta because the winning player has a more difficult time entering a round, and Cheat because the winning player has fewer options for play and less complete information to work with. Splat is mostly neither, but has slight endothermic tendencies when a player gets close to victory - it is possible for their opponent to bring the game almost back to parity by winning a single 'endgame' round. Then there's my favourite flavour - the games that are neither exothermic nor endothermic. Scrabble is a fine example - it's no easier to get more points when you're winning than it is to get points when you're losing. Same goes for Alphabetix, Carcassonne, 6 Nimmt, Boggle, Ricochet Robots and Set. Note, that's not to say that you're just as likely to win when you're losing - the person with the lead is always more likely to win - but rather that the chance of increasing a lead is always the same as the chance of closing that lead (given equally competent opponents). With some of these games it's still possible, despite the lack of distortion, for a game to be a foregone conclusion - in Set, for example, once a player scores their thirteenth or fourteenth point there aren't enough points left in the game for the result to be turned around. The difference from an exothermic game, though, is that when the player has twelve points, even if the other player has none, there's still a perfectly good chance of losing even without playing ineptly, if the opponent plays well. My preference, then, is towards games that are not at all thermochemical; failing that, I prefer a game to be endothermic rather than exothermic. Exothermic games are so often a completely foregone conclusion a few turns in, but still require playing out 'just in case', and the playing out is often extremely tedious and pointless. To illustrate this point, imagine two world-class chess players, playing chess, but with one of their rooks taken away at the beginning - it's just not worth playing the game at all with the handicap. With two world-class Set players on the other hand (if such a thing existed), one given a five point handicap (which is more than equivalent to a rook handicap), there's no reason to assume that the advantaged player will win. You'd still bet on them, though. To further clarify, this isn't necessarily the effect of a random factor - none of Set, Ricochet Robots or Boggle has a random factor per-se (there are random factors but the two players are always on a precisely even playing field). [09:20] |
| Maxor |
| Raven, on scrabble I tend to feel it is slightly exo-thermic..... toward the end of a game when there aren't alot of spac on the board left or many high value letters the lack of easy points makes it much easier for the leader person to maintain their advantage. This is more of a case of the game as a whole being exothermic in that it has finite resources but it is definately exothermic. |
| RavenBlack |
| Not really exothermic, that - the leader can't *increase* their advantage more easily than the opponent can close it. Both players face the same handicap towards the end of the game. Finite resources isn't exothermic - that's the same as Set or Ricochet Robots, that if you're sufficiently far ahead then you've already effectively won. It's not the same as "the more ahead you are, the easier it is to maintain the lead". If you were to get 300 points in the first 3 turns of Scrabble, that wouldn't make it any (well, much; you'll have used up the tiles you used) harder for the opponent to get 300 points in 3 turns too. |
| AttackOfTheSpam |
| There's a game at Shockwave.com called Bookworn that's of your 'favourite flavour,' as you said - you get a puzzle of letters and you have to hook them together into words. It's a bit like scrabble, only not. |
| RavenBlack |
| Meh, single-player games can't be thermic at all, really. Pretty much all single player games have to be endothermic if anything - they get harder as you go on. Otherwise they end up going on forever. In the case of Bookworm this only happens if you go on for about a million years, since until then it's painfully easy and dull. |
| AttackOfTheSpam |
| Hmm. I like it anyway, I guess. Then something occurred to me. Why are you thinking about the thermochemistry of games at all? It's an odd thing to match with games. |
| Soli |
| I wouldn't call Magic exothermic. The classic (and most common) type of Magic game, at least with two players that know what they're doing, is Control vs Aggro. Some of the great theorists of the game (such as Mike Flores) have gone as far as to state that if you don't play the game having correctly identified which of these roles you play, you will have little hope of winning. The Aggro player's job is to kill the opponent fast. As the opponent's life total drops, he races to get it to 0 quickly. The Control player, on the other hand, is trying to stabilise. He knows that the early game is a lost cause- he just can't keep pace with all those Goblins or Elves or whatnot. However, he also knows that his powerful spells and control measures make him the favourite in the long game, as mana costs become less important and the Aggro player depletes his tempo advantage. Therefore, most Magic games follow the general pattern of early game dominance by one player, a transition period in which the slower deck starts to get going, and one of two possibilities: either a somewhat slowed drop to 0 life for the Control player and victory for the Aggro deck, or a reversal in which the Control deck stabilises at a low life count and manages to halt progress utterly until victory is achieved. |
| RavenBlack |
| That doesn't make sense - you clearly do have some hope of winning if it's "Aggro vs Aggro" or "Control vs Control", and if you think you're being pushed into the wrong role for your deck you can try to redeem it. Regardless of that, however, monsters tend to increase the gap (if you have lots, you can largely prevent the opponent getting any), and if you have more control-based decks, land is often an exothermic factor. Whoever gets ahead in land will tend to get ahead more in other ways, so the small advantage compounds - and that's what exothermic is all about. I did say, anyway, that Magic isn't purely exothermic, just tends to it. |