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Don't Lose The Forest For The Trees
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<blockquote data-quote="lewpuls" data-source="post: 7732519" data-attributes="member: 30518"><p>DRF - I write to educate/illuminate/enlighten, not necessarily to generate a discussion. Sometimes discussion happens, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes because English is easily misunderstood, and I am not perfect.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Hussar, someone could write a book about puzzles vs games. I've written somewhere between 6K and 10K words, not published. Also addressed this some in my book "Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish" (McFarland 2012). Very briefly, most single-player (and by extension, cooperative), games are puzzles. The exception is RPGs, cooperative but you usually have human-controlled opposition rather than programmed opposition (a deck of cards as in Pandemic counts as "programmed"). "Multiplayer solitaire" (I call this parallel competition) is usually a puzzle, and that includes a great many Eurostyle tabletop games. If a game has an always-correct solution - or a few, as in "multiple paths to victory" - it's a puzzle. This is why people usually stop playing video games when they "beat the game" - they've solved the puzzle. It's also why players can do "speed runs" of video games, they already know the solution. Chess is a puzzle, but too complex for humans to solve: a chess match played perfectly will always end the same way. Most if not all two player perfect information games are puzzles, from Tic-Tac-Toe through Go. There is always a best move. In games, especially games for more than two, there is no best move (frequently) .</p><p></p><p></p><p>Practicalm, I don't think simulation and determinism go together. In board games, such as SPI's wargames, some designers try to force the historical result by making a puzzle rather than a game (puzzles amount to a form of determinism insofar as there's one or a few always-correct solutions). This is always ahistorical, because history isn't what was inevitable, it's what happened as a result of many often-random events, the result often less likely than other outcomes that didn't happen. You can try to simulate without forcing a particular outcome/determinism.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="lewpuls, post: 7732519, member: 30518"] DRF - I write to educate/illuminate/enlighten, not necessarily to generate a discussion. Sometimes discussion happens, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes because English is easily misunderstood, and I am not perfect. Hussar, someone could write a book about puzzles vs games. I've written somewhere between 6K and 10K words, not published. Also addressed this some in my book "Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish" (McFarland 2012). Very briefly, most single-player (and by extension, cooperative), games are puzzles. The exception is RPGs, cooperative but you usually have human-controlled opposition rather than programmed opposition (a deck of cards as in Pandemic counts as "programmed"). "Multiplayer solitaire" (I call this parallel competition) is usually a puzzle, and that includes a great many Eurostyle tabletop games. If a game has an always-correct solution - or a few, as in "multiple paths to victory" - it's a puzzle. This is why people usually stop playing video games when they "beat the game" - they've solved the puzzle. It's also why players can do "speed runs" of video games, they already know the solution. Chess is a puzzle, but too complex for humans to solve: a chess match played perfectly will always end the same way. Most if not all two player perfect information games are puzzles, from Tic-Tac-Toe through Go. There is always a best move. In games, especially games for more than two, there is no best move (frequently) . Practicalm, I don't think simulation and determinism go together. In board games, such as SPI's wargames, some designers try to force the historical result by making a puzzle rather than a game (puzzles amount to a form of determinism insofar as there's one or a few always-correct solutions). This is always ahistorical, because history isn't what was inevitable, it's what happened as a result of many often-random events, the result often less likely than other outcomes that didn't happen. You can try to simulate without forcing a particular outcome/determinism. [/QUOTE]
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