Isegoria

Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) visits the enormous board game convention in Essen, Germany:

Settlers [of Catan] is the game that brought “German-style” or “Eurogame” board games to the attention of an English-speaking audience. The board game market in Germany is more like the book market in other countries: several hundred new games are launched there every year — typically either at Essen’s Spiel convention in October or the Nuremberg Toy Festival in February — and each year, at least one new game will sell hundreds of thousands of copies, perhaps millions, as Settlers has. There are evergreen games, briefly fashionable sensations and flops.

“There are two schools of thought as to why the Germans love board games,” says Martin Wallace of Warfrog. “The Germans are of the opinion that it’s down to their superior education system. We English are of the opinion that it’s because German TV is shite.”

There are, in fact, many more than two schools of thought about why Germany is the world’s board game superpower. It could be the enthusiasm of the citizens. In a country such as Britain, it is downright odd to pull a board game out of a cupboard and offer to teach it to friends alongside after-dinner coffee. In Germany, people do that and more. They discuss old games and act as evangelists for new ones. Naturally, the games are better as a result.

The cause could also be Germany’s pluralistic gaming tradition: most countries play games, but German gaming has never been dominated by a single game — unlike Japan (Go) or Russia (chess). But it could also be the influence of a single pioneer, Erwin Glonnegger. Born in southern Germany in 1925, Glonnegger joined the publisher Ravensburger after the war, where he became its first board game “editor”, working with designers through the 1950s and 1960s to produce a series of elegant games now considered timeless.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, German newspapers were running columns about “family games”. There may have been a social motive — board games were, and still are, regarded as a wholesome activity — but the columns reflected the genuine enthusiasm of mainstream journalists who persuaded their editors to let them moonlight as game critics. In 1978, those enthusiasts decided to create an award, the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year). The first prize was handed out in 1979, to Hare & Tortoise — ironically, an import from England.
[...]
In a makeshift office tucked away behind one of the stands, I met Jay Tummelson, who has done more than anyone to bring Eurogames to the rest of the world. A likeable, fast-talking and opinionated American in his mid-sixties, Tummelson owns the company Rio Grande Games. Its stand is almost as large as those of the industry giants, the Ravensburgers and Mattels, but there are no 20ft signs, stages, or gantries.

The stripped-down approach is emblematic of Tummelson’s business model, which is to produce a vast range of gamer-friendly, no-frills translations of German games for the English market. He does business with all the major German publishers, accepting their game design and artwork, sharing their production costs and adding his own English print run to the end of theirs — typically producing 2,000 English versions on top of the 5,000 German originals. Tummelson throws these games into a growing market and reprints at much larger volumes whenever he has a hit on his hands. And he’s had quite a few hits. Before founding Rio Grande Games, Tummelson imported Settlers — and he is responsible for producing the English versions of most recent Spiel des Jahres winners.

(When I met him, Tummelson was launching his first non-translated product, a fast-moving card game called Dominion. It was the talk of Essen and this English-language import promptly won Spiel des Jahres 30 years on from Hare & Tortoise.)

When I suggest to Tummelson that he has, almost single-handedly, brought German games to the rest of the world, he demurs. “I played my part, but the internet was by far and away the most important thing.” German games’ successes may depend on personal recommendations, but in the UK and the US, gamers are spread too thin to speak to one another directly. Ironically, rather than wiping out board games, computers have provided the connections for once-isolated games in the UK and US to swap ideas online and meet up over the gaming table.

(Hat tip to Bryan Caplan.)

Being rather pedantic, Aretae sticks with the actual definitions of the words atheist and agnostic:

Theism and Atheism are positions about belief in a god. Gnosticism and Agnosticism are positions about whether you can know things — and usually talking about the ability to know about God.

I, like 95% of all the other atheists I know are Agnostic Atheists. We do not believe in a god. And we do not believe that such a thing is knowable. And mostly, we think that the question is silly, along with the question of whether you are an A-Thor-ist, an A-Faerie-ist, or an A-6-dimensional invisible blue banana-ist. Yeah, whatever.

(If you’re trying to promote skepticism, I think the 1st edition AD&D Deities & Demigods book may be the best inoculation ever.)

The evangelical Christians were so afraid that D&D would convert nice little Christian children into devil-worshipers, when it really did something far worse; it turned them into non-worshipers.

Actually, it didn’t do that either. If you’re not genetically predisposed, the inoculation appears totally ineffective.

Hard as it can be for Americans to believe, Steve Sailer says, people like soccer’s offensive ineptitude:

In the American cool weather game, scores have gradually risen as competence increased. In the 1970 NFL season, for instance, teams scored 3.5 times per game: 2.2 touchdowns and 1.3 field goals. (I’ll ignore point-after-touchdown conversions as vestigial.) That was 2.4 times the 1970 World Cup scoring rate of 1.48 goals per team per match.

By the most recent year, NFL teams were up to 4.1 scores per game (2.6 touchdowns and 1.5 field goals), while World Cup teams were down to 1.05. Hence, the NFL now sees almost four times as many scores as the World Cup.

Yet, both enterprises have flourished extravagantly over the last four decades. In a world that smugly congratulates itself on its purported increasing diversity, tastes in spectator sports have been homogenizing: football in America and soccer elsewhere.

It seems likely that the two kinds of football, in their different but both triumphant evolutions, are giving the people what they want. Hard as it can be for Americans to believe, people like soccer’s offensive ineptitude.

The appeal of high-scoring American football — with its action, expertise, and comebacks against the clock — is as obvious as the appeal of American summer movies.

In contrast, low-scoring soccer fulfills other human desires: such as, to not lose. Americans find it derisible that of the first 48 World Cup games, 14 ended without a victor. (As General Patton noted, “Americans love a winner.”) But that means that 65 percent of the time, fans avoided the national humiliation of defeat.

Bad offense also keeps hope alive throughout the match. If, say, England takes a 1-0 lead in the first four minutes, you can always hope their goalie will muff an easy one. Moreover, the narrowness of the margin gives you more excuse to complain that the referee cheated you.

The lack of proficiency also makes each of the few goals seem more epic, more worthy of being carved on the player’s tombstone: “Scored goal against Honduras in 2010 World Cup.”

Finally, low-scoring games are easy for fans to talk about because there isn’t much to recollect: a couple of goals and your favorite coulda woulda shoulda moment. In contrast, NFL games average eight scores, and, honestly, who can remember all that?

American games, such as baseball, tend to be described best statistically. Yet, humans don’t naturally like to think statistically. They like to think in narratives, and attribute outcomes (if they win) to the proper workings of moral justice, or (if they don’t) to sneaky villains, for which soccer is perfect.

I recently mentioned that different games have very different notions of offside — which was my way of obliquely hinting that soccer (association football) could be a better game with different rules, perhaps inspired by hockey.

Richard Epstein goes a step further — without addressing offsides — and says that soccer should borrow from basketball and ice hockey for scoring and penalties:

On scoring, today soccer awards a single point for a goal, indeed for any and all goals. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is scored in ordinary play or from a penalty shot taken 11 meters from goal. Often that penalty shot is awarded on a questionable call for a handball, or a marginal infraction inside the penalty box. Let the penalty shot win or tie the game, and it leaves a bad taste with the team that scored its goals the hard way.

It does not have to be that way. Soccer instantly becomes a much better game when it awards two points for a goal and one point for a penalty shot. It should take its cue from basketball, which awards one point for a free throw awarded after a foul. But it also awards two points for any field goal from inside the arc: In an inspired refinement, teams earn three points for field goals beyond the arc.

No thank you.

If penalty shots are too much reward for too little foul, we could just move the penalty-kick spot back a few more meters.

His second key reform is an idea from hockey — one it’s pretty well known for:

In hockey a minor infraction sidelines the player for two minutes for an instant short-term advantage that doesn’t come with a yellow card. If there is a second infraction by a team, part of it is served concurrently with the previous penalty until the first player returns to the ice. If the other team commits a minor penalty when it is ahead, its player goes off the ice as well.
[...]
Note that if several players are off the field, the game opens up, thereby increasing scoring changes. Players also have to learn to confront novel tactical situations and to shift positions on the field.

Unlike other toys, video games belong to a certain generation rather than age group:

A new study by market analysts NPD shows that the average video game player is 32, up from 31 last year. That is a dramatic change from the Nintendo days when the audience was mostly pre-pubescent kids. Curious, I searched the NYT for “average age” and “video game,” and it turns out that the average video game player is whatever age someone born around 1978 would be at the time of the survey, from 1990 to 2010. This is only for home console game systems like Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation 2, etc. Computer game players tend to be 5 to 10 years older, but still their average age is however old someone born in the late ’60s or early ’70s would be.

Contrast this with the age profile of people who play with action figures — their average age stays virtually the same across the decades, somewhere between 5 and 13 I’d guess.

In a game like soccer (association football), where it’s much easier to clear a ball down-field than to advance it great distances, under control, past defenders, an obvious strategy arises: keep your attackers near the enemy goal and your defenders near your own goal, and then pass the ball over the empty mid-field to your attackers whenever possible.

The original Sheffield Rules had no notion of offside, and players known as kick-throughs waited patiently near the enemy goal.

We don’t have a copy of the 1848 Cambridge rules, but they apparently include the notion of offside. The 1856 Shrewsbury School rules include Rule No. 9, a clear forerunner to the modern offside rule:

If the ball has passed a player and has come from the direction of his own goal, he may not touch it till the other side have kicked it, unless there are more than three of the other side before him. No player is allowed to loiter between the ball and the adversaries’ goal.

In 1925, the rule changed to two players, and scoring increased by almost one goal per game (from 2.5 to 3.4).

You don’t have to be a sophisticated game theorist to see that this style of offside rule invites the so-called offside trap, where the defenders surge forward and put an attacker offside just before he can receive a pass — and force a difficult call by the ref, which might easily change the outcome of the game.

Ice hockey takes a different approach.

Before 1930, hockey, like Rugby and earlier forms of American football, simply didn’t allow any forward passing.

In modern hockey, you can’t pass across the blue line to a player already in the attacking zone. An attacking player is offside if he enters the attacking zone before the puck itself enters the zone — and if the defenders successfully clear the puck out of their defensive zone, any attackers have to clear out as well before returning.

There’s much less ambiguity and much less gaming of a system with such (literally) clear lines.

Field hockey, by the way, started with soccer-style offside rules, amended them in 1987 to only apply within 25 yards of the goal line, and then abolished them completely in 1998.

Team handball simply doesn’t allow anyone past the goal perimeter, which defines the fairly large crease.

Basketball defines a key, or free throw lane, near the basket. There are no rules against passing into the key, but offensive players can’t linger in the key for more than three seconds.

Originally the key was just six feet wide; connected to the 12-foot diameter free throw circle, it looked like a key. Now the lane is 12 feet wide in college and 16 feet wide in the pros.

As you can see, there are many different ways to address the problem of attackers hanging out near the goal, cherry-picking.