Games « Isegoria

Scrabble Francophone

Monday, July 27th, 2015

The French-language Scrabble world championship just went to a New Zealander — who doesn’t speak French:

The BBC reported that Nigel Richards, originally from Christchurch, defeated a rival from French-speaking Gabon in the final in Louvain, Belgium, on Monday.

He had only started studying the French dictionary about eight weeks ago, said a close friend of Mr Richards, Liz Fagerlund.

“He doesn’t speak French at all, he just learnt the words. He won’t know what they mean, wouldn’t be able to carry out a conversation in French I wouldn’t think.”

Mr Richards, now in his late forties, is a previous English Scrabble champion. He is based in Malaysia.

He has won five US National titles and the World Scrabble Championship three times.

Posted in Games, Linguistics | 1 Comment »

Why The Next Sports Empire Will Be Built On eSports

Tuesday, June 30th, 2015

So-called eSports tournaments are reaching audiences of tens of millions:

Last year’s League of Legends championship, for example, drew nearly 30 million viewers, putting it in line with the combined viewership of the 2014 MLB and NBA finals, or the series finales of Breaking Bad and Two and a Half Men, plus the Season 4 finale of Game of Thrones. As with most sports, competitive gaming is now firmly entrenched in the US college system. The country’s largest collegiate league counts more than 10,000 active players, some of whom are on full athletic scholarships. Eager to capitalize on growing interest in the sport, Major League Gaming (MLG) opened the first dedicated domestic eSports arena in October 2014, and major brands such as Ford, American Express and Coke have begun forming partnerships with game developers, teams, players, event organizers and video distributors. What’s more, the US Department of State has been issuing athlete visas to competitive gamers since 2013.

[...]

In March 2015, Twitch averaged more than 600,000 simultaneous viewers, reached an audience of 51M worldwide and delivered more than 26B minutes of video entertainment. On a domestic basis, 11B minutes were watched in March – representing roughly 14 hours for each of the 13M American viewers. This consumption is so great that Twitch is already larger than 70% of American television networks, as well as Amazon’s own OTT video service.

However, the value of this consumption isn’t just its magnitude. An estimated 70% of all viewers are under the age of 35, making Twitch’s audience both highly valuable to advertisers and hard to reach via traditional television. Moreover, eSports fans, unlike linear TV viewers, are highly engaged in the content. Major League Gaming, for instance, consistently beats the industry average on key digital ad metrics such as completion rates (90% vs. 72%), click-through rates (4% vs. 2%), and ad viewability (99% vs. 44%). What’s more, Twitch shows little sign of slowing down. Total minutes delivered (both domestic and abroad) have grown by an average of 7% each month for the past three years, while per viewer consumption has doubled over that same period.

[...]

Despite ever-growing consumer interest and potential, eSports are still far from becoming an industry. In 2014, eSports generated less than $200M in revenue worldwide, including sponsorship, advertising, licensing, ticket sales and game-publisher investment according to Newzoo. By comparison, the US-only NFL and MLB gross roughly $10 billion a year each, while the European professional soccer/football leagues generate close to $21 billion.

Even as eSports tournaments have proliferated and audiences have expanded into the millions, the value of these tournaments continues to languish. The average event offers only $18,000 in total prize winnings (a figure almost unchanged from 1998) and 2014’s 1,990 tournaments handed out a relatively unimpressive $35M collectively. The largest prize pool did surge in 2014, from $3M to $11M, but only five players made more than $1M during the year. The remaining 6,200 e-athletes took home an average of $7,000.

Posted in Business, Games | No Comments »

Popular Sculpture

Wednesday, June 17th, 2015

Just as we have popular music and popular cinema, we also have popular sculpture:

Much of it is what we would usually call ornaments. Some of it is minis — i.e., miniatures. Minis are sculpture for the masses in the same way as pop is music for the masses. (If you are trying to explain this to someone suspicious with an arts degree you can call them Kleinplastik, which means almost the same thing but is German and therefore a valid intellectual construct.)

Every mini is linked to and feeds back into an overarching fiction, so each mini must encapsulate and even move forward a bit of the story. It has to have continuity with what came before.

In the 40k ’verse older technology is always better — and most of it is lost. R&D is forbidden. To make something better you have to actually find an archive and mine it for already existing designs. This makes sense of the insane tech levels in 40k, especially in human culture. Old and new, recently discovered and long forgotten all mixed together almost incoherently. If game designers want to invent something new they just have something old discovered. This means designers get to invent what they want, so long as it makes artistic sense. It feeds back into the power of the fiction because everything is old and decayed and no-one understands it.

Stories need inherent technology to talk about the future so that we understand it now. Star Trek has post-relativistic speeds, gravity control, matter reorganisation, and AI. A society with those things would look and act like nothing we can recognise. So the tech is used but the implications are ignored.

40k gets around this by inventing an incoherent culture. Its brokenness adds emotional and aesthetic power rather than taking it.One of my favourite things about 40k lore is the backward technology.

If it’s made by a major corporation then it will be affected by what the market wants. Space Marine models outnumber other human models because everyone wants to play Space Marines. The company semi-accidently hit something that jams right in to the adolescent male mind. It does so in an interesting way. It’s like a pop hit of popular sculpture. (If we look back at the fiction constraint, everything developed by the company for this setting needs to live inside a universe that justifies the existence of Space Marines. In the same way, everything developed for the Star Wars universe needs to live inside a universe that can justify Jedi Knights and star fighters.)

It will be affected by what the company thinks it can persuade people to want and by what makes the most money. The company has worked out it has a higher profit margin on very large very expensive kits. Now every army has one. (This means that in the fiction of the game, every imagined culture suddenly has access to unique giant robots that they are assumed to have always had, but that they just didn’t mention until now.)

In terms of sculpture, the Games Workshop mega-kit provides an entirely new aesthetic territory to work on. A small figure of a hero has the main job of persuading you that a very tiny thing can represent a very powerful or potent personality or being. A lot of what very small minis do is shape their form to persuade you that they are larger and have more mass, both more physical and more dramatic weight, than they actually have.

A very large figure is trying to be beautiful or interesting in a different way. It has real size, real mass, and space for enormous amounts of detail. A big part of its job is organising the arrangement of its detail and surfaces in a way that seems both pleasing and correct for its scale. Another job it has it to relate its enormous size to the imagined world whose active participants are usually represented by much smaller things. It must feel as if it can meaningfully interact with these tiny things, as if it represents something made by the same culture and belongs to the same world.

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Thomas Middleditch’s GURPS Campaign

Friday, June 12th, 2015

Thomas Middleditch, star of HBO’s Silicon Valley, describes his roleplaying-game campaign to Seth Meyers:

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The Morals of Chess

Thursday, June 11th, 2015

The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement, Benjamin Franklin explains, in the opening of The Morals of Chess:

Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions. For life is a kind of chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it. By playing at chess, then, we may learn:

1. Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action: for it is continually occurring to the player, “If I move this piece, what will be the advantages of my new situation? What use can my adversary make of it to annoy me? What other moves can I make to support it, and to defend myself from his attacks?

2. Circumspection, which surveys the whole chess-board, or scene of action, the relations of the several pieces and situations, the dangers they are respectively exposed to, the several possibilities of their aiding each other; the probabilities that the adversary may make this or that move, and attack this or the other piece; and what different means can be used to avoid his stroke, or turn its consequences against him.

3. Caution, not to make our moves too hastily. This habit is best acquired by observing strictly the laws of the game, such as, if you touch a piece, you must move it somewhere; if you set it down, you must let it stand. And it is therefore best that these rules should be observed, as the game thereby becomes more the image of human life, and particularly of war; in which, if you have incautiously put yourself into a bad and dangerous position, you cannot obtain your enemy’s leave to withdraw your troops, and place them more securely; but you must abide all the consequences of your rashness.

And, lastly, we learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favourable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources. The game is so full of events, there is such a variety of turns in it, the fortune of it is so subject to sudden vicissitudes, and one so frequently, after long contemplation, discovers the means of extricating one’s self from a supposed insurmountable difficulty, that one is encouraged to continue the contest to the last, in hopes of victory by our own skill, or, at least, of giving a stale mate, by the negligence of our adversary. And whoever considers, what in chess he often sees instances of, that particular pieces of success are apt to produce presumption, and its consequent, inattention, by which more is afterwards lost than was gained by the preceding advantage; while misfortunes produce more care and attention, by which the loss may be recovered, will learn not to be too much discouraged by the present success of his adversary, nor to despair of final good fortune, upon every little check he receives in the pursuit of it.

(Hat tip to T. Greer.)

Posted in Education, Games | No Comments »

The Madness of Mission 6

Saturday, May 23rd, 2015

The Madness of Mission 6, by Travis Pitts, explains a classic video game:

Posted in Games, Media | 1 Comment »

Scrabble Expertise

Monday, May 4th, 2015

Scrabble expertise follows the usual pattern — it depends on both practice and talent:

In one study, using official Scrabble rating as an objective measure of skill, researchers found that groups of “elite” and “average” Scrabble players differed in the amount of time they had devoted to things like studying word lists, analyzing previous Scrabble games, and anagramming—and not by a little. Overall, the elite group had spent an average of over 5,000 hours on Scrabble study, compared to only about 1,300 hours for the average group. Another study found that competitive Scrabble players devoted an average of nearly 5 hours a week to memorizing words from the Scrabble dictionary.

Clearly, expert Scrabble players are to some degree “made.” But there is evidence that basic cognitive abilities play a role, too. In a study recently published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, Michael Toma and his colleagues found that elite Scrabble players outperformed college students from a highly selective university on tests of two cognitive abilities: working memory and visuospatial reasoning. Working memory is the ability to hold in mind information while using it to solve a problem, as when iterating through possible moves in a Scrabble game. Visuospatial reasoning is the ability to visualize things and to detect patterns, as when imagining how tiles on a Scrabble board would intersect after a certain play. Both abilities are influenced by genetic factors.

Further evidence pointing to a role of these abilities in Scrabble expertise comes from a recent brain imaging study by Andrea Protzner and her colleagues at the University of Calgary. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), these researchers recorded the brain activity of Scrabble players and control subjects as they performed a task in which they were shown groups of letters and judged whether they formed words. (fMRI measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow within different regions of the brain.) The major finding of this study was that competitive Scrabble players recruited brain regions associated with working memory and visual perception to perform this task to a greater degree than the control subjects did.

What might explain Scrabble experts’ superiority in working memory and visuospatial reasoning? One possibility is that playing Scrabble improves these cognitive abilities, like a work-out at the gym makes you stronger. However, this seems unlikely based on over a century of research on the issue of “transfer” of training. When people train on a task, they sometimes get better on similar tasks, but they usually do not get better on other tasks. They show “near” transfer, but not “far” transfer. (Practice Scrabble and you’ll get better at Scrabble, and maybe Boggle, but don’t count on it making you smarter.) For the same basic reason that basketball players tend to be tall, a more likely explanation is that people high in working memory and visuospatial reasoning abilities are people who tend to get into, and persist at, playing Scrabble: because it gives them an advantage in the game. This explanation fits with what behavioral geneticists call gene-environment correlation, which is the idea that our genetic makeup influences our experiences.

Posted in Education, Games, Science | No Comments »

The Hidden Politics of Video Games

Saturday, May 2nd, 2015

If you’re going to discuss the hidden politics of video games, perhaps a long list of explicitly political simulations isn’t the way to go:

Games can be criticized for being too violent, or a brain-dead waste of time. But they are not usually criticized for being political. Games are entertainment, not politics, right?

However, consider the popular computer game Sim City, which first debuted in 1989. In Sim City, you design your metropolis from scratch, deciding everything from where to build roads and police stations to which neighborhoods should be zoned residential or commercial. More than a founder or a mayor, you are practically a municipal god who can shape an urban area with an ease that real mayors can only envy.

But real mayors will have the last laugh as you discover that running a city is a lot harder than building one. As the game progresses and your small town bulges into a megalopolis, crime will soar, traffic jams will clog and digital citizens will demand more services from their leaders. Those services don’t come free. One of the key decisions in the game is setting the municipal tax rate. There are different rates for residential, commercial and industrial payers, as well as for the poor, middle-class and wealthy.

Sim City lets you indulge your wildest fiscal fantasies. Banish the IRS and set taxes to zero in Teapartyville, or hike them to 99 percent on the filthy rich in the People’s Republic of Sims. Either way, you will discover that the game’s economic model is based on the famous Laffer Curve, the theoretical darling of conservative politicians and supply-side economists. The Laffer Curve postulates that raising taxes will increase revenue until the tax rate reaches a certain point, above which revenue decrease as people lose incentive to work.

Finding that magic tax point is like catnip for hard-core Sim City players. One Web site has calculated that according to the economic model in Sim City, the optimum tax rate to win the game should be 12 percent for the poor, 11 percent for the middle class and 10 percent for the rich.

In other words, playing Sim City well requires not only embracing supply-side economics, but taxing the poor more than the rich. One can almost see a mob of progressive gamers marching on City Hall to stick Mayor McSim’s head on a pike.

Sim City is only a game, yet it is notable how many people involved in economics say it gave them their first exposure to the field. “Like many people of my generation, my first experience of economics wasn’t in a textbook or a classroom, or even in the news: it was in a computer game,” said one prominent financial journalist. Or the gamer who wrote, “SimCity has taught me supply-side economics even before I studied commerce and economics at the University of Toronto.”

Other games also let you tinker with politics and economics. Democracy 3 allows you to configure the government of your choice. The ultra-cynical Tropico is the game where the player—who is El Presidente of a kleptocratic Latin American government—can win by stashing enough loot in his Swiss bank account. In Godsfire, a 1976 boardgame of galactic conquest, players roll dice each turn to see what kind of government rules their empire. Extremist governments only build warships to attack their neighbors, Moderates spend less on defense and more on economic growth and Reactionaries will only spend money on planetary defenses (which also double as domestic riot suppression systems for keeping the citizenry in line).

However, the best example of politics and games is the legendary Civilization, an empire-builder and bestseller since it debuted in 1991.

[...]

Admittedly, some Civ political depictions are debatable. Communism in Civ 4 increases food and factory production and reduces waste from corruption? Someone should have told this to the Soviets in 1989, or China’s rulers today. Authoritarian regimes can’t create new technologies? Cheery news for Londoners who watched their city destroyed by Nazi V-2 rockets in 1944. Democracies embrace science? In Civ 3, the first nation to discover Darwin’s Theory of Evolution gets a science bonus, a game feature that some Kansas school boards would disapprove of.

What is most remarkable about the politics of Civ is how unremarkable all this seems to an American like myself.

Posted in Economics, Games, Policy | 3 Comments »

I’m still surprised that so-called eSports — spectator video games — have taken off, but I’m not surprised that competitors have resorted to performance-enhancing drugs. It is rather cyberpunk though:

Hours before Steven* was due to compete in his second professional eSports tournament, another team-member offered him a pill. “I had taken Adderall for a while when I was younger to treat my ADHD,” he says. “So I knew from prior experience that it helps with stress and concentration.” Steven, who was 16 at the time and who is now a third year university student in Kentucky, didn’t hesitate. “I took it,” he says. “I shouldn’t have. But it was amazing — like a kind of legal speed. Before, I’d suffered from nerves when competing in front of an audience. The atmosphere got to me. But when I played on Adderall and I was only focused on what was in front of me. It made me a far better player.”

[...]

But Adderall is peculiarly well suited to the medium, where victory depends on a competitor’s alertness, ability to concentrate and hand-to-eye-coordination. As one StarCraft player wrote in 2011 on the game’s official forums: “Adderall is basically a stimpack for gamers.”

Posted in Games | 5 Comments »

Two Types of Machine Learning

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015

Games are to AI researchers what fruit flies are to biology. A new AI has mastered many classic video games by combining two types of machine learning:

The first, called deep learning, uses a brain-inspired architecture in which connections between layers of simulated neurons are strengthened on the basis of experience. Deep-learning systems can then draw complex information from reams of unstructured data (see Nature 505, 146–148; 2014). Google, of Mountain View, California, uses such algorithms to automatically classify photographs and aims to use them for machine translation.

The second is reinforcement learning, a decision-making system inspired by the neurotransmitter dopamine reward system in the animal brain. Using only the screen’s pixels and game score as input, the algorithm learnedby trial and error which actions — such as go left, go right or fire — to take at any given time to bring the greatest rewards. After spending several hours on each game, it mastered a range of arcade classics, including car racing, boxing and Space Invaders.

Only games with a simple and timely relationship between actions and score were amenable to reinforcement learning.

Posted in Games, Science, Technology | No Comments »

Designing The Best Board Game On The Planet

Wednesday, January 21st, 2015

Twilight Struggle is the best board game on the planet — at least according to BoardGameGeek:

Twilight Struggle traces its roots to the early 2000s and a board gaming club at George Washington University. That’s where Gupta and co-designer Jason Matthews met. Not GW students themselves, they were friends with some, and would go to the school to play and also to bemoan the increasing complexity of historical games — a genre especially dear to them. The rulebooks were overlong, the game mechanics baroque.

Simplification, to Gupta and Matthews, was the name of their design philosophy. Rather than overwhelm players with a fat rulebook at the start, the designers spread the information required throughout the gameplay, on cards. A typical Twilight Struggle card reads, “Truman Doctrine: Remove all USSR Influence from a single uncontrolled country in Europe.” The Twilight Struggle rulebook is a relatively slender 24 pages.

They originally intended to do a game about the Spanish Civil War but realized they’d been scooped by a guy in Spain. “We’re probably not going to do a better job than he is,” Gupta joked. They eventually settled on the Cold War. Most games on the topic had focused on when the Cold War got hot. But thermonuclear war is depressing. Gupta and Matthews instead designed a game about the geopolitics, rather than a hypothetical military conflict.

Matthews, of Alexandria, Virginia, is an American history expert and was the legislative director for Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Gupta, a history buff, was doing policy work at a think tank, then was in school for computer science, before dropping out after he landed his first job in the video-game industry. The two would discuss key aspects of the Cold War — the domino theory, the arms race, the space race — and these would make their way into the game.

But publishers balked. “The Cold War? Why would anyone want to play a game about the Cold War?” Gupta recalled being asked.

Salvation came in the form of the company GMT Games, and its Project 500 — a kind of Kickstarter before Kickstarter was cool. Interested gamers would pledge money, and GMT would print the game if enough capital was raised. Even then, it took a grinding 18 months for Twilight Struggle to generate enough pledges to warrant a printing.

That first printing sold out in 20 minutes. It has gone on to amass 17,781 ratings on BoardGameGeek, as I write, with an average rating of 8.33.

[...]

Twilight Struggle is emblematic of a sea change from older, magisterial games with titles like Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, War in Europe and The Civil War. (The Civil War’s listed playing time is 1,200 minutes.) The redistribution of game information from massive rulebooks onto game cards was a revolution that can be traced to Mark Herman’s We the People, a game about the American Revolution, and Paths of Glory, a World War I game by Ted Raicer.

“What that meant was the game was a lot easier to learn,” Gupta said. “That started a renaissance in historical gaming.”

Posted in Games, Policy | No Comments »

The Packers of Catan

Saturday, January 17th, 2015

Apparently the Green Bay Packers are obsessed with Settlers of Catan.

I suppose they’ll move on to The Cones of Dunshire:

Posted in Games, Media | 2 Comments »

The Checkered Game of Life

Friday, December 26th, 2014

The Checkered Game of Life, released in 1860 by Milton Bradley, evolved into the very different modern-day game of Life:

Instead of becoming hair stylists or police officers and poking plastic peg-shaped children into candy-colored SUVs, players of the original game landed on spaces marked with “virtues” and “vices.”

Spaces like “honesty” and “truth” sprung you forward; spaces like “gambling” and “disgrace” slowed your progress.

“I think religion really affected how games were made,” Keren-Detar says. “In Europe, there were more excuses to play, whereas in the US, we didn’t have an established aristocracy. So the idea of playing was very negative, or thought of as lazy and idle and sinful. These games had morphed themselves into being entertaining, but also educational, so you wouldn’t get in trouble for playing a game on a Sunday if it’s based on how to become a better Christian.”

The pre-Civil War game Mansion of Happiness was even more righteous, Keren-Detar says. Some of its illustrated squares showed characters suffering for their sins with consequences like whipping posts or pillories.

Neither Mansion of Happiness nor The Checkered Game of Life featured dice, probably because dice were still strongly associated with gambling and sin. Checkered Game of Life used a spinning number wheel instead, a feature that survives to this day.

The shift in the narrative of Life over the centuries, Keren-Detar says, suggests a shift in American values.

“The narrative wasn’t dying and going to heaven—it was trying to go to college and be productive and get money,” Keren-Detar says of the version of Life we’re most familiar with. “A lot of games that came out around that time changed from being religious to being industrious.”

Posted in Games, Policy | 1 Comment »

Denigration of the Great Revolution

Thursday, November 20th, 2014

The latest Assassin’s Creed video game takes place in Paris during the French Revolution, and French leftists are appalled that the heroes of the People are depicted as bloodthirsty savages:

The former leftist French presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, called it “propaganda against the people, the people who are [portrayed as] barbarians, bloodthirsty savages,” while the “cretin” that is Marie-Antoinette and the “treacherous” Louis XVI are portrayed as noble victims. “The denigration of the great Revolution is a dirty job to instill more self-loathing and déclinisme in the French,” he told Le Figaro (link in French). The secretary general of the Left Front, Alexis Corbière, said on his blog (link in French):

To all those who will buy Assassin’s Creed: Unity, I wish them a good time, but I also tell them that the pleasure of playing does not stop you from thinking. Play, yes, but do not let yourself be manipulated by those who make propaganda.

Ubisoft, the maker of the Assassin’s Creed series of video games, which has been going since 2007 and has sold more than 70 million copies, is in fact French. One of the makers of the game replied (link in French) that Assassin’s Creed: Unity is a “consumer video game, not a history lesson” but did say that his team hired a historian and specialists on the Terror and other aspects of the Revolution. Le Monde lays out seven errors in the game here (in French).

Posted in Games, Policy | 5 Comments »

Greek Hold ‘Em

Wednesday, November 19th, 2014

Existential Comics turns its philosophical eye toward poker — Greek Hold ‘Em: