Caliban Darklock wrote this terribly early in the morning:
It’s occasionally instructive to examine a taxonomy and formalise it somewhat.
Russ Nelson’s discussion of game theory in economics relied on what is, at heart, a fundamental misunderstanding of what a game is. He selects a subtype of game and acts as though this is the only possible type of game. In reality, he ignores many alternative forms of game, and thus needlessly restricts his thinking.
I’ve defined a few terms related to this in a way that I find useful and instructive. Your mileage may vary.
Play is the pursuit of fun. It is the normal reason one makes use of toys and games. Fun, however, is a fungible concept - everyone has a different definition of it. In order to accurately interpret the suitability of a toy or game, one must first establish the current definition of fun. Depending on that definition, it may not be necessary to employ toys or games - young children often play by simply making noises and wandering about at random, amusing themselves with no particular attachments to any specific activity. A more adult version of this is web surfing, where you begin by looking at some specific site, but rapidly devolve into repeated instances of “ooh, shiny” as you happily wander about the internet. (It’s been a long time for most adults since they got to just play. I’d be tempted to point at this as the single greatest value in the internet.)
Humanity, however - for better or worse - craves structure. And as a result, open play rapidly gives way to the toy. The toy is not necessarily a physical object; neither is the game, which we will cover shortly. What distinguishes the toy is the definition of rules. The minimal set of rules is “this is a toy”; it establishes a focal point for play, and play may be further self-directed by the addition of more rules:Â ”This small model car is a toy; it follows the rules natural and normal to real cars. It usually drives forward, does not drive in reverse for more than a few seconds, does not drive laterally at all, and is required to obey traffic laws and rules of the road. This particular car is being driven from home to work by a businessman who is late for a meeting.” There is no natural requirement for any of these rules, and they might be changed or removed at any time. When a child playing by these rules becomes bored by them (most children view “lack of boredom” as a definition of fun), he simply alters the ruleset: “Oh no, space monkeys are attacking! The businessman has to save the planet by turning his car into a spaceship!” The boundaries are essentially wherever the player chooses to put them. An adult variety of this might be Wikipedia surfing; rather than browse the entire internet, the user browses only Wikipedia. (One is rather less likely to find malicious or dangerous content on Wikipedia.)
But toys are for solo play, and human beings crave not only structure, but social interaction. And here is where it gets interesting: a game is when two or more people agree on a set of rules for play. They are not required to play together. They are not required to play for the same reason. They are only required to agree on the rules. And the rules do not necessarily require the players to interact at all: “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” is a game, even when only one person plays. The goal is to start with one actor in one movie, and identify a chain of co-stars such that one eventually reaches Kevin Bacon. Groups will often turn this into a social event by having one person identify the starting point, and having group members trace the appropriate chain. But all one really needs to play is the IMDB. A variant of this is “clicks to porn”; from a given site, how many clicks on hyperlinks must be made at a minimum to reach pornographic material? A single player plays to beat his high score on a given site; a group competes, sometimes with a bidding war akin to the old game show “Name That Tune”.
In group gaming scenarios, any player may ruin the game for all concerned by twisting the interpretation of the rules. By altering the rules of the game without consent from the other players, this player creates his own personal toy -Â which may be useful in pursuing his own brand of fun, but alters the ability of others to seek their own definitions of fun. In the party game “Killer”, for example, players sit in a circle and one is secretly selected (usually by dealing cards) as the “killer”. The “killer” may “kill” other players by winking at them, at which point the “dead” player must announce that he has been “killed” and leave the circle. The killer may win by “killing” all the other players, or another player may win by correctly identifying the “killer” before being “killed”. Once it has been agreed that this game will be played, it is not too terribly uncommon for one player to take the approach that if he is selected as the “killer”, he will commit “suicide” by announcing that he has been “killed” and leaving the circle. In the event that this player actually does end up selected, fascinating social dynamics play out, but the only one having fun is the recalcitrant “killer” who has invented and followed a rule nobody else knows.
This is often called “cheating”. It’s a violation of the fundamental social contract of any game: that everyone is playing by the same rules. There are a few special cases of this; in games with very few rules, the social contract often includes rules which are not explicitly stated, and the inexperienced player can violate these implicit rules (or infer entirely different rules) without intending to do so. In games with a vast quantity of rules, the social contract often excludes many of those rules, and an inexperienced player may then follow rules nobody else follows - or, more damagingly, demand that others follow rules that are not normally followed. In games where the rules are enforced by an automated mechanism - e.g. a computer - an individual who has significant familiarity with the mechanism may be able to partially or completely bypass it, thereby exempting himself from a rule to which others remain subject.
To relate all of this back to economics, game theory in economics is not about examining the play of the game, but the rules of the game: what are the rules governing play in specific situations? Where do individuals “cheat” in the game, e.g. through information asymmetry? When the game/market breaks down and no fun/value results from play/trade, have one or both parties in the transaction cheated by converting the game into a toy?
I’ve been criticised a little for this set of definitions, and accused of rewriting terms to match my own needs. I don’t quite understand the criticism; philosophers since Wittgenstein have long wrestled with the question of what constitutes a game, and Chris Crawford was trying to establish a formal taxonomy in his 2003 book “Chris Crawford on Game Design”. The most accurate criticism I’ve heard so far is that this reclassifies some games as toys, but this is intentional - some things we call games are toys, and need to be classified as such to draw useful comparisons and conclusions.
Not to sound arrogant, but of all the things I’ve come up with to date while sitting around thinking, I suspect this is the one for which I’m most likely to become known. It simply has the highest probability of being useful.
Filed under: Business, Gaming, Microsoft, Programming, Software
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