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Can You Suggest Any Non-Zero Sum Games?
epeus asks: "I have noticed that most games for children (and adults) are Zero-sum by a game theory definition - you have to battle over limited resources either implictly (Chess, Frustration) or explicitly (Monopoly). Modern economic theory (dating back to the Enlightenment) makes it clear that the world is not like that - buying and selling creates value; confiscation destroys it. The 'Gift Culture' notion of Open Source described by ESR takes this a stage further. Can Slashdot readers suggest Non-Zero Sum games for children and adults to help break this mentality? The only ones I can think of are Victorian parlour games like Charades or Ghosts, where the point of the game is playing, not scoring it." I too think that there are times when we may focus too much on competition when we might be better off with entertainment. Don't get me wrong, there is a satisfying feeling to compete and win (or even to compete), but sometimes just the act of playing should be rewarding in and of itself. As always, feel free to share your thoughts on the subject.
...if you look at them the right way. In other words, if everyone gains some enjoyment from the game, then it's not zero-sum.
Does anyone else think that the call for non-zero sum games does not necessarily imply positive-sum games? One game I could not help of thinking of is 'Nuclear War', in which the game wins as often (or more) as any of the playes do. And it's fun as well... :)
(Could I have change for 10 million dead?)
Is "Zero-Sum" being used properly here? I thought it referred to situations where gains and losses eactly offset each other (e.g. chess, options trading), but games such as Monopoly, while competitive, are Non-Zero Sum. There may in the end be one winner, but he/she could win with $1000, $5000, or $5,000,000. Scrabble is another example--though competitive, a player's move not only gains points for the current turn, but may create value for later turns (i.e. open possibilities for big words), and is not offset by a loss to the opposing player's points. Is there a game theory expert out there who can clarify?
It sounds goofy, but it's actually really well designed. (Reiner Knizia, a well-known German game designer, invented it.) It's not a name-brand media tie-in piece of junk. You don't have to know anything about Tolkien's books to play. The rules are pretty complicated, but no worse than Monopoly.
I've played several times, and each time the players staggered through most of the game on the edge of disaster. We had to scrounge cards and plan like hell to avoid dying, and even then we barely stayed ahead of the random encounters and events. My first game we failed; each time since then we managed to succeed.
(Does that mean it's an "educational" game? Hell if I care. It's a fun game.)
-- Andrew Plotkin (erkyrath@eblong.com)
Sociological and anthrolological studies suggest that the zero-sum mentality is a product largely of 'nurture' and not a 'nature'.
While there is a natural instinct to compete to survive, many cultures harness this to aim for the survival of the family, clan, community, or state not primarily for the individual. The net result is that these cultures have children who tend to invent games that are co-operative rather than competitve.
Western European (and North Amercian) based cultures tend to emphasise the individual, and cultivate personal competition between children, especially boys.
http://www.worldgame.org Work with others to change the world, a Real life sim. This was posted by Josh Drvsh, no time to login today.
You make an interesting point about the importance of Non-Zero sum games. Of course the first non-zero sum game I think of is dungeons and dragons. In an ideal D&D game the point is not to see who scores the most points. The point is to be someone else for a night and have fun doing it. And even in the games that do become all about power power power the players are still working together versus working againts one another. Therefore Dungeons and Dragons (or any other role playing game for that matter) might be an excellent way to teach children non-zero sum games.
The game Baron Munchausen, in which people are asked to tell wild and exagerated tales about specific exploits in their lives, in many ways lacks the level of competition of most games. It is true you are in essence competing for who can tell the best story, the actual idea of winning and losing is quickly overshadowed by the game itself to the point where I have never actually seen the game come to a win/lose conclusion. there is a difficulty in removing all levels of competition from a game since in most games the competition creates the interaction between players. Without any interaction non-competative games are more similar to several solitaire games being played at the same location.
First, you need a big board. Ours was constructed to hold ice (to keep your beer cold). Next, all the pieces have to be a beer or bottle of some kind. Each move you make, you sip from that beer. If you lose a piece, you have to drink the whole thing.
We used to shotglasses filled with Jack Daniels as Pawns, but we never seemed to finish the game for some reason...so we switched to those little 8 oz. Budweiser cans.
For Rooks, we use the big fat Foster Cans.
We have a few other favorites, but it doesn't matter too much since we made paper "hats" to put on the bottles to distinguish who is who.
Not for the weak of liver...
I get paid a nickel for every email I read!
Tell that to the orcs and dragons who were killed and whose treasure was taken. It was pretty zero-sum to them. Damned PCs.
I have found that some of the most, "no one wins" kind of fun is multi-player deathmatch Quake* (or any other FPS) It just depends on who you're playing with.. we've come up with some creative ways to play.. we make the point of the game not to just rack up frags, but you have to do it with style. and no one ever looks at the top score at the end of the map (timelimit, not fraglimit) all people want to do is get back into the next map. we also put addons in to make things more interesting. like having a grenade that powerfull enough to take out an entire room, but we have a rule.. you have to kill yourself with it.. terrorist style.. no cheap shots.
we never run tournements, have prizes, or any reward for winning.
Twister==How to interact with people of the other sex
Wow, I doubt Milton Bradley (or whoever makes Twister, I don't rightfully know) ever considered this. I can just imagine the marketing campaign now: Twister: The contortionist orgy game! Fun for the whole family!
Then again, maybe I just have a dirty mind.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
How about just about any of the Sim* games? For instance, SimCity where you goal is to build a bustling metropolis, but if you want, you can "win" just the same by building a tight knit little community. I think I should mention Roller Coaster Tycoon as well, although it has zero-sum elements in it...(your patrons do run out of money after a while).
As for regular games, it depends partially on what you consider a "game." Most athletic games are zero sum affairs by nature, because it just isn't fun for everybody to get out on the football field and help the other team get the football to the end of the field... Unfortunatly, if an activity doesn't involve competition in some way, many people consider it a hobby or a pasttime instead of a game. Maybe you should look into some new hobbies.
I personally like model building for example, but I'd hardly call it a "game".
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Maybe zero sum isn't the right term then. From the original post, it sounds to me like the poster was worried that kids are going to get the message than whenever two groups of people work towards the same goal one of the groups must lose for the goal to be accomplished.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
I think the original poster was trying to avoid getting into a zero-sum mindset, and games only promote this, even if you don't conciously think about it.
One more point, you mentioned something about non-zero life being unfair? Sure it is, everybody (well at least more than 1/2 of the people) "win". That's hardly depressing in my book, in fact that's something to be happy about. It's a peace and love world where I can trade something of mine for something of yours and we both come out ahead.
Oh, and books aren't always happy, and card games are almost invariably zero-sum. That said, I do agree with you on one point, if you make a game boring (Everybody wins all the time! Don't even bother trying kids!) then you've lost the point of playing a game in the first place.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
The reason RMS is held in high regard is because he personally, consistently, and repeatedly acts against the zero-sum concept wherever it presents itself. He began doing this when a LISP machine company gutted the MIT computer lab, imposing zero-sum conditions and blocking communication, and Stallman personally and singlehandedly reverse-engineered huge amounts of IP simply to give them to the 'loser' in the equation. He invented the GPL and specifically designed it so the single overriding requirement it imposes is that you may not make GPLed software zero-sum! It must always be left as an unlimited resource that cannot be seized as property by any 'player'. He continues to follow this purpose in everything he does, and won't bend an inch to accomodate those who want to make things more into 'winners' and 'losers'. To him, you are either part of the free society cooperating completely and socially, or you're in the way and need to stop being in the way, or be run over. If you're in the way you're not a competitor- you're a WALL. You're a locked door and the point is to open you, not beat you...
Are you (heh, 'WindowsTroll'. didn't notice that at first) following any of this? It's difficult to open a mind that is completely set in its ways. Whether or not you're following this, it can be summed up as, "No, that is not the way things are." Zero-sum and social ways of doing things coexist. They have _always_ coexisted, and your argument that social ways don't exist is just plain wrong- as wrong as a contrasting argument that competition and zero-sum could be completely eliminated.
In the event that your arguing itself is zero-sum, and the expectation that you'll just plain deny what I'm saying, I would have to say- fine, believe what you want. There's room in the world for your way of thinking. However, you are not entitled to be treated as if your way of thinking was the ONLY way of thinking- because there is also room in the world for cooperation at all levels, up to the very highest and down to the simplest level- and whether you like it or not, people are going to go on cooperating without your approval.
An English-language version of the game exists, and is sold by Hasbro under the name "Lord of the Rings". I've played it - it's a lot of fun. The premise is basicly that its the players vs the board, rather than the players vs each other. As a team, they have to try to destroy the One Ring, and if they don't cooperate, there's pretty much no way to do it. (For one thing, the ringbearer tends to get corrupted easily, so people have to plan to trade off who the ringbearer is so they can make it to the end without the ringbearer getting corrupted all the way (which ends the game).)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Although they are out of fashion, role playing games might fit your bill. The best known is Dungeons and Dragons, but there are literally hundreds of various games out there. There are even a few that are free for the downloading.
In case you've never played one, they are basically codified versions of "lets pretend". You adopt one or more personas and do things. Although there is often some form of "scoring" (often called "experience") for development purposes, it is not zero-sum. In fact, the group usually does better when they work together. "Entertainment" over "competition".
- doug
PS: I have no idea how well computer RPGs work. The little I've seen hasn't impressed me.
Shameless plug: The only computer game I play is King of Dragon Pass (http://www.a-sharp.com/kodp/), but it is not multi-player, so I don't think it is what you are looking for. But it is a cool game never the less. I just wish there was a Linux version.
Sorry, but it quickly becomes zero-sum. For the first year there is "true growth", but after that the only way to grow is to take.
I believe that there are variations of Diplomacy that allow exploration and growth, but nothing in the core rules allow for it.
- doug
One is that, for the past 30-35 years, the U.S.A. has had the capacity to produce enough food to feed every person on Earth, thanks to echnological advances. Even though our population has nearly doubled in that time, we *STILL* can produce 30 times as much food as we need.
And yet we don't. Why?
Because those other countries are, with rare exception, likewise capable of feeding themselves. If we could overcome the obstacles to simply getting them food, we would have in the meantime also gotten rid of the obstacles they've placed in their own way that prevent them from feeding themselves.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
MUDs are a good example, but even better ones are traditional fantasy roleplaying games like AD&D, GURPS, or Shadowrun.
Stephan
almost always wind up being a group, cooperative affair. Usually there wind up being some important milestones (completing the edges, filling holes in certain areas, completing the puzzles), but everyone wins when people help each other out with their little piece of the overall puzzle.
- Outburst - Draw a card with 10 related objects on it and their relation, give other team the relation and X seconds to name as many of the items there; good for brainstorming and the like.
- Taboo - Given a word or phrase, get your team to describe it but without using 5 key words that would make it really easy to name it.
- Pictionary - Like Taboo, except you can only use drawning to convey the word.
- Scattagories - Given a list of general catagories and a random letter, come up with things that fit those catagories that start with that letter, but to be as unique as possible for more points.
I'm sure there's plenty of others out there that similar in nature. Sure, you do keep some score, but when you play these games in large groups, it's a matter of having fun and enjoying each other as opposed to winning the game. And if you are talking 'fun for the family', there are kids versions of these games that are generally well-suited for family playing."Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The road that your contention leads down is one that leads uncomfortably near to:
- Paying big bucks to get your engrams audited, and
- Paying big bucks to take MLM courses
There may well be well and worthy merits to this game, and it may even be worth the $200. Please just don't use "you need to learn to pay for courses" as the apologia for the pricing...If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Second this comment, and mention that there are many "German-style" economic games like that. Andromeda, Union Pacific and the many Catan variants are just a few examples. You have to trade to win, and the winner is the one with the best combination of luck and trading skills.
The problem with games like Sim City is that you tend to play them alone, I personaly am more interested in games that you can play with a group of friends. (That being said I really like sim city)
And some of the old games like charades are a hell of a lot of fun.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
All games are zero sum in that the sum of the winners and losers is zero. Otherwise, it's called an activity, not a game.
Sports, say football are not zero sum, in that scoring a goal has no effect on the other team's ability to score unlimited goals. But, there is always a winner and loser.
The same is true for modern econics. Companies may not be battling for limited resources, but one of them always has more shareholder value, more market cap or whatever than the next.
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At first, Ogre seems like a zero-sum game (one side is a massive heavily armored AI tank, and the other is humans in various tanks jeeps and howitzers).
Either side could win or lose - I, for one always felt that the Ogre side often simply represented a stronger force. (it's a slightly imbalanced game, but you can modify the handicaps on the scenarios).
But in the end, everyone dies, because we're talking about the twilight of civilization, so it's really a zero-sum game anyway. (unless you subscribe to the sequel game, (I can't for the life of me remember what the name was - pre Steve Jackson game, from when they were Metagames) where the two sides were automated combat robot factories, you built and programmed these little robots to go out and kill eachother and attack the enemy factory - supposedly the successors to the Ogres).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
my 7 year old son plays on a basketball team. Doesn't matter who wins or loses - they don't keep track of the score.
Supposedly this is to encourage the kids to pass the ball to all of the players and give them a chance at shooting a basket.
but the kids keep track of the score, and they always pass the ball to the kid they know can make the shot.
Also, they don't call fouls. At least that's what they told me when they asked me to ref. Other team's coach bitched me out for not calling a foul. Next game, someone else reffed, and they were VERY strict about double-dribbles and such. At this age, some of the kids can't even dribble the ball. On the other hand, the good players could beat me hands down.
The whole thing is kind of ridiculous.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
yeah, you're right. Why don't we all just kill ourselves now, so we can save future generations from having to pay for our current extravagence.
So, everybody pick up the gun, place the muzzle in your mouth . . . on the count of three. . . one. . . two. . . three. . .
. . . hey, you still here?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This cannot be turned into a zero-sum game, under the Zero-Sum Obliteration Convention of 1996.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Thousands of homes stand empty. And yet we still have homeless people. Why? Because they can't pay for it.
Actually, a large fraction of homeless people are homeless because they intentionally rejected modern society. Another large fraction are homeless because they are mentally ill or drug addicts -- solveable, but not by giving them homes and job training, and not by imposing "programs" on them. People who are homeless because they just can't get a break exist, but they don't represent the whole population, and probably not more than a small fraction.
I don't have numbers for this, and they are probably hard to come by... after all, people who avoid society aren't likely to want to participate in a survey.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Two more steps are required to make it pro-cooperation:
Play a number of rounds, each scored that way.
Play with more than two people. Your score is the sum of your scored with each other person. Each pair of people plays the same number of rounds.
This is pro-cooperation because if you and your partner both compete, or if you trade off competing and cooperating, you both fall behind pairs who both cooperated.
Of course, you'd probably want some variation to make it interesting...
The part that makes many of these games zero-sum is the comparison at the end. This step means that subtracting from each team's score the average of the scores doesn't change the result, since the result you care about is just the direction of the difference.
But it's not a zero-sum game when the teams want to be able to say that it was a good match afterwards. From a zero-sum perspective, it doesn't make sense to play against people who are not worse than you or to give worse players an advantage, since both of these obviously reduce the chance that you'll win.
Go is zero-sum, but go with rankings and handicaps, considering the whole process and not just the play, is not. Both players take steps at the beginning to cause the game to be difficult but possible for both of them, and they have, as a longer-term goal, to improve their skill, and, as far as I know, nobody tries to give their opponents bad habits.
It's not so much the internal aspects of the game that determine whether it is zero-sum or not, but more the higher-level goals of the players.
The question boils down to what is part of the game and what is not.
The main play of a basketball game is not zero-sum, since each team makes progress. But including the win/lose descision at the end makes it a zero-sum game. But including having fun as a goal makes it not zero-sum again. Games theory applies to what makes sense to do within a framework of rules, but does not define what constitutes "the game being played". Anything which produces some variation can be made into a zero-sum game by having a cutoff to determine a winner.
What the original question should have asked, more preceisely, is what games promote strategies characteristic of non-zero-sum games. I would say that games where players tend to interact directly in ways that benefit those interacting (at the eventual expense of the non-participants) have this aspect: trading games (Res Publica, Settlers of Catan), the >2 player iterated prisoner's dilemma, and so forth.
I don't know how you play SoC, but when I build on a resource, no one else can build there or at any potential site directly adjacent to where I build.
Also, don't forget the concept of "the Robber" and stealing another player's resources.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.
-- Shel Silverstein, "Hug o' War"
Of course, adults tend to be better than children at playing this kind of game... ;)
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
One tetris variant I played (I think it was Magical Tetris Challenge on the GBC) had a multiplayer mode in which the challenge was to remove rows in tandem with your partner.
There are all sorts of cooperative games, as well.
Unfortunately, most board games rely on pieces of paper or cards to represent things, and by physical restrictions there are only so many 'things' one can package with the game, making it zero sum in practice.
--
It's also a rather fun game - as are most games developed by Reiner Knizia - a well respected German game designer.
Joseph Elwell.
Almost any mud is going to be non-zero-sum. The goal is to have fun, explore the world, and try to become more powerful. But there isn't necessarily a limit to how powerful or weak you can be, and being powerful isnt necessarily the end of the game.
Helping others is one way that you can get more out than you put in - the game is usually more fun for everyone when there are more people.
You might even want to check out the mud I run, Alter Aeon. Web page is at http://www.dentinmud.org/alter, connect via telnet to dentinmud.org port 3000.
-dentin
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
Any game can be made into a zero-sum game by specifying that whoever does "best" is the winner and everyone else is a loser.
Any game that includes "points" which are themselves non-zero-sum can be made into a non-zero-sum game by changing the "goal" from being "getting more points than the other people" to "getting the most points that you can".
For example, play a game where various players or teams get points, but one team getting points does not imply another team losing points. Now say that it doesn't matter who has the most points -- the only thing that matters is that after the game, you get one chocolate chip cookie for every 10 points you have.
Okay, so it helps if there are "moves" or "strategies" in the game in which both players can gain points by "cooperating".
Regards,
Zooko
Although the purchase price of the beer might not qualify as "zero-sum" ... ;-)
--
--
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
Well, if you play simcity compulsively, you realize that the player simply does what governments to-- creates an environment which makes it possible for cities to thrive. The user zones the areas, builds roads, and provides for law enforcement. The cities thrive on their own, as long as the necessary infrastructure is in place.
-Dean
Have you ever tried cooperating with the computer players? The AI in CivCTP can be described as a "belligerent idiot". Unless you play at the top level (or are spectacularly inept), you are going to be more powerful than the computer players, and they are not going to agree to cooperate with you, regardless of how much generosity and magnanimity you show. After a while they go hostile, start pirating your trade routes, menacing your cities. The only choice you have is of expending resources on defending against the moronic barbarians at the gates or of building up armies and wiping the floor with the computer players.
Amazing, you missed the point completely. I'd love to play some poker with you.
The teacher's lesson is not about cooperation instead of competing. It's about competing, and realizing what you are competing for.
So what are these kids competing for? In your mind, they are competing for some sort of abstract "victory" points. But anyone with a brain will eventually realize that victories have no intrinsic value. Pay attention now: The only thing worth accumulating in this game is SKITTLES.
The kids who cooperated got the most Skittles -- more Skittles even than the kids who won every turn. Repeat this to yourself until it sets in.
Your analogy to poker is perfect, and yet you still missed the point. When you play poker are you a) trying to win the most hands?, or b) trying to win the most money? Hint: $$$.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Prisoners dilemma is nothing like poker
The Skittles game described above is a zero-sum game: Some number of Skittles come into the room (with the teacher) and the same number of Skittles leave the room (with the teacher and the kids). Note that the teacher is part of the game.
In the above example, the kids were NOT competeing for the skittles
Of course they are. They're just not competing against each other for Skittles.
A skittle for you does not come out of the mouth of another student, it comes from the "banker" of the game.
Exactly. And that's who the kids are competing against. The fact that they have to cooperate with each other in order to obtain Skittles is just an indirect outcome of the competition with the banker.
The point is that even the most selfish (but intellegint) jerk will cooperate with his "opponent" in order to get Skittles. The person who wrote the message I was responding to completely missed this point.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
The limiting factor has always been personal. Inneficient government structures, like monarchy, were preferred because it edified the ego of a small group at the cost of society at large. Government structures have relunctantly changed, but fundamentally everyone would like to be "more equal than others" or get a break that their peers don't have. We want someone below and we'll tolerate someone above as long as we feel we are in the "better half". There are exceptions, but this is the norm.
We have rarely had scarcity, but we have always had the irrational desire to hold onto something and believe it is scarce, whether or not it really is. You can see business scrambling to patent information. We know it is absurd, but they can't bear to think of letting it go. They must quantify it and make sure their gain is someone else's loss. Sad, but true.
Your post made me think of something that I have considered for years. Let me give an example:
Lets say you work at a company and you use some form of machine to do your job. Now assume that a new machine comes along that helps you to do your job twice as fast. Barring some time to recouperate the cost of the machines, why are you still working 8 hours a day if you are producing twice as much?
In a zero sum game there is no reason to not slip into a 4 hour workday. Really, our purpose life isn't to be a wage slave, but for the large majority of the population they are locked into a work week regardless of what they produce. As a business owner (and geek at heart) I'm looking at ways that I can answer this question in my own business, but I'll confess that I haven't yet come up with a solution.
The only real scarcity is our humbleness to live without reference to heirarchy.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Here is a link to an online version of the game:g /prisoners_dilemma.html
http://www.dhegarty.de/pop_philosophy/downshiftin
For those too lazy to look at the link, the summary is that you have two prisoners. One will be let out based on the results of a game. It's played in rounds. Each round each prisoner decides to cooperate or compete.
I'm not sure this is pro-cooperative. Oh well.
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
...was Nova Games' "Dragonriders of Pern" which also happened to be a non-zero-sum game.
But "Dragonriders" (based on the McCaffrey series of novels) went beyond that. The two players could cooperate or compete to whatever degree they preferred. But cooperation was always more successful than competition.
The way the game played was you each rode a dragon which had the ability to breathe fire and destroy parasitic thread falling from the sky. Each player independently chose an maneuver simultaneously. Then an ingenious relative movement system allowed the dragons to execute the two maneuvers simultaneously without giving away the action of the first player to call out their action to the other.
If one player maneuvered his dragon between the other dragon and the thread, his dragon got burned. It was even possible to destroy two threads simultaneously, if both players cooperated.
Cooperation always produced the best results. If one player played competitively while the other tried to help him, the competitive player would "score" higher yet not as high as if both cooperated. But, if both players played competitively (each trying to get more than the other), the result was almost always failure with the thread not being destroyed and reaching the ground (where it would destroy crops).
I don't believe this game is still available. I think the publisher has gone out of business. It would probably translate very easily to a web game (two or more players sending in their maneuvers to a central server). I could be wrong about the publisher because they have another game system ("Lost Worlds," featuring fantasy hand-to-hand combat) and occasionally I see a new release based on this system (the most recent being a comic-book-based combat system).
There are actually quite a few non-zero-sum games which have been quite successful through the years. Many have been mentioned here, so I won't repeat with a post so far down on the main thread.
I would like to comment on two groups of these games mentioned in earlier posts: RPGs (role-playing games like "Dungeons and Dragons") and diplomacy games (like "Illuminati" or "Dune" or "Cosmic Encounter").
RPGs are true non-zero-sum games. While they can be played with varying degrees of competition (even competition between the referee and the players), they are intended to be non-zero-sum games and anyone who doesn't play them that way is not really playing the game.
Diplomacy games are games which are fundamentally zero-sum games which are played with so many competing players that a single winner is difficult (sometimes bordering on impossibility if one player threatening to win can always be stopped by a large coalition of opponents). Such games sometimes admit of non-zero-sum solutions by allowing two or more players to share a victory. Thus a cooperative element may become necessary, but this is not quite the same as a non-zero-sum game because a coalition victory still requires that the others lose.
A similar situation occurs in the party game "Mafia" which almost always has more than one winner, but a win still requires losers. (BTW, this game would be another which would make a great web game along the line of "Survivor." Does anyone know if the rights are owned by anyone? Maybe I should create an "Ask Slashdot" question out of this.)
I cannot leave this without mentioning another of the best games ever (whose name I cannot remember). It was a kind of an anthropology simulation published by a non-profit (I'm thinking the publisher may have been associated with the University of Denver, but I could be wrong). I believe there was an adult version and a children's version, but I only played the kids' version.
It was specifically designed for the purposes described by the poster of this question: To provide a non-zero-sum game to teach to a medium-sized group of children. Its only drawback is they could only play it once.
The group of players was divided into two pseudo-cultures. Separated into two rooms, each group was told about their culture and its values. Then each was taught a "game within a game" which reflected those values. Each group practiced their game, separated from the other "culture."
Then, in the next phase of the game, each group sent a party of envoys or anthropologists to observe the other. Each would try to play the other's game. After a time, the envoys would return to their own culture and try to describe what they observed. Armed with these descriptions, another group of envoys would then be sent, playing the other culture's game, and reporting back.
Once everybody gets a chance to play envoy, the two groups get back together and each tries to describe the rules of the other's game and their culture.
I'm sure you can guess how this turns out, but until you try it you will not believe the insights which can be derived from this simple game. If anybody knows how to get ahold of it, I hope they post the resource for this "Ask Slashdot" question-raiser, as I'm sure this would be very appropriate for the situation he describes.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Any FPS game with god-mode turned on.
Golf, with no score and unlimited mulligans turned on.
Casca
At least, the way I play it. It's about building and cooperating and stuff, and scoring it is even more counter-productive than usual because you can't end up with a winner, just a loser. I don't know what the instructions say...
How about sex? Or is that more of a recreational sport?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
THere is a non-zero sum game if I ever heard one. It's all about how well one can play a role. It's about hanging out with friends and acting. The best D&D games I've ever been a part of were all about the interaction between the DM and the characters.
"Eye halve a spelling chequer, It came with my pea sea, It plainly marques four my revue, Miss steaks eye kin knot sea"
Dammit you beat me to it! My post has a link, though!
From dictionary.com:
game n. 1. An activity providing entertainment or amusement; a pastime: party games; word games.
Ever heard of role-playing games?
Calvinball is definitely non-zero-sum. It's potentially infinite-sum.
"The object is to score 12 points provided that the other player scores at least 6 points - if the other player scores less than six points then the player reaching 12 points is the loser! Whereas in most games the person scoring the highest number of points is the winner in the 3 Spot game the 'winner' can be the 'loser'.
STFU about slashdot bias.
For a more general look at competition, and its supposed benefits, check out _No_Contest_ by Alfie Kohn.
Most ideas about the positive effects of competition are not based on any evidence whatever, and those who have gone looking for the evidence have largely failed to find it.
It's one of those broadly accepted assumptions that turns out to be unsupported.
(btw, read anything you can find by Kohn. He's always interesting, though he sometimes documents in such detail that it becomes tedious)
It can have shared-win conditions, though most players are too (delightfully) venal to allow that to happen outright..
Your Working Boy,
Since the point of most RPGs is to work together.
(Unfortunately, the RPG industry does seem to be a zero-sum game....)
Not only did you just make my point, you've posted an excellent argument in favor of the Second Amendment.
And a big ,,!,, to the leftist censors who keep modding down my posts. Hypocrits.
Actually, the wealthiest 1% already have about that much of their labor confiscated by taxes, and it hasn't paid for your fantasy in this country, let alone the entire world. (The top 50% of taxpayers, from the middle of the middle class on up, pay 96% of federal income taxes.) The government squanders most of that confiscated wealth.
It would be interesting to see what private charities would come up with if they weren't crowded out by the bloated, wasteful government social programs (and constrained by related regulations). Between the greater efficiency and effectiveness of the private charities and vastly lower taxes and regulations making it easier to create wealth and acquire property, we really could wipe out poverty... but it doesn't look like it'll happen.
I think most of us want to help out, but with the poor and needy voting for the politicians who want to enslave us, what's the point?
Wow, did you ever miss the point...
First, I'm at the karma cap. These points do nothing for me. You're an ass to assume I'm a whore.
Second, I DID answer this guy's question. I believe the education-major eggheads call it "unstructured play time". I just called it "goin' outside" -- I wasn't sophisticated enough as a child to know that what I was doing was "unstructured". (Trust a education major to take the fun out of playing).
The question seemed to imply that only an organized game could fulfill the role s/he was looking for. I wanted to make the point that just goofing around was as beneficial (if not more so) as sitting down around a board game with rules and structure -- even if the game presented some arbitrary metric such as "zero-sum", which I interpret as "non-competitive", regardless of the questioner's beliefs.
Must all questions be answered with "Yes" or "No" or "Parker Bros. 'Zero Sum Game Du Jour'"? If so, Slashdot is due to fall apart pretty soon.
I made my point without hitting you over the head, though it seems that some people are so thick as to not make the connection -- and thus assume I'm karma-whoring. Perhaps I should start parenthetically referencing myself for those too dense to read between the lines and see the point. i.e. [you're an idiot -- stop using a computer before you launch missles at China and start WWIII]
If some people found it Insightful, I'm flattered. If some people found it Funny, I'm similarly flattered. One AC's comment doesn't take that away from me.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I don't remember the exact name, but it consisted of me (and usually, though not always, my brother) going outside.
The game we played consisted mainly of running and jumping, although we occasionally played a variant where we would lie on the grass and look up.
The object of the game usually was to imagine a new way in which we could save the planet from the meteors and asteroids and alien invaders that were falling down around us. We did occassionally alter the parameters to include in our mandate the destruction of all things Plastic (up to and including Star Wars figures that would now be worth approximately 18 jillion dollars).
While zero-sum, the game could actually produce a winner, if the participants could manage to stay outside after dark long enough to catch fireflies before the referee called for dinner. This happened on rare occasions, but it did occur.
There is an extensive equipment list, however. You need the Silver Surfer's surfboard, a Mega-Lox Rocket Pack, a couple of bazookas, wings, the ability to levitate, and a half dozen tanks. In the event that you're too poor to purchase these, cardboard boxes, unused window screens, and oddly shaped sticks may be substituted at no penalty.
Two things to beware of -- there is a danger that the participants will grow up to be creative thinkers who cherish freedom and independance. Do what you can to squash such desires by allowing the participants to watch as much television as possible, where they will be subjected to fads, trends, and groupthink. The other danger is of incidental damage to Evil Doers Everywhere, Galactic Invaders, and the neighbor's fence.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
hear hear! going further to prove it's not the outcome of the game, but the PROCESS that gets you there that counts. and oh... do i ever miss the days when an oddly shaped stick could help you conquer the world. thanks for the reminder.- ---
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the amazing bc
latin/funk flugelhorn & trumpet
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
Sorta reminds me of that quote from War Games:
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Then, I thought about EverQuest... I'm not so sure about that one. I think EQ can be a real opportunity for developing characters in a rich visual setting, but for most people, it's just a competition to see who can get the most insane number of levels, or make the most money off collected magic items.
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Your Servant, B. Baggins
I'm not sure I follow you all the way here. Wouldn't Kiyosaki stand to gain a lot more by selling ten times more games by reducing the price to a quarter of its present cost?
I mean, Mattel and the other game companies have the price point down to a fine art: they're maximizing their profits by balancing price against number of sales.
If the price is $200 because Kiyosaki is greedy, then he's only hurting himself: he's not making as much money as he could be... which would make him a dumb man.
I don't think he's a dumb man, although I do find his books nearly unreadable.
I'm pretty sure that he figures he might as well not waste people's time. The people that will really put the ideas into use are the same people who are going to ante up the bucks for the game (and video and cassettes and books and all the other stuff that the game comes with).
Personally, I'd rather see it priced at about $50. Even if people don't actively start managing their money to maximize their cashflow, I'm pretty sure that there'll be some amount of change in their lives. Perhaps they'd finally clue in that they could pay off their credit cards and bring their spending under control...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
A generic followup to several of the posts asking for details:
Yes, it is The Good Capitalist. There are opportunities to give to charity, but, no, you're not going to find much in the way of subsidized healthcare and education in the game. It's a game about making money without working: indeed, about making enough money that you don't need to work.
Regarding price: yes, it's bloody expensive. It's expensive for good reason: the first step toward learning how to invest is to realize that you're going to have to spend money on learning.
Is it worth $200? Sure--if you've got six friends who'll kick in twenty-five bucks each to play it. And play it, you will: in six months, I've played upwards of three dozen times. Hell, we have a coffeehouse games night, now... anyone who wants to drop in and play, can play. Great fun.
That said, here's the general game play:
There's a large playing board. There are two loops on the board: one for the rat race, and one for the fast track. I'll describe the rat race: it's where by far most of your learning will take place.
The fast track is about three dozen "spaces." There are three each of 'paycheque,' 'doodad,' and 'market' spaces; one each of 'baby,' 'charity,' and 'downsize.' The remainder are 'opportunity' spaces.
Your game card contains income, expense and investment sections. You have a paycheque, from your 9-to-5 job; and expenses of a mortgage, various loans/credit cards, and living expenses. There's an additional expense for children, should you land on the 'baby' space.
Your income, less your expenses, is your cashflow. The money that you can save, and that you can invest.
When you pass or land on a 'paycheque,' you get the cashflow amount. When you land on a 'doodad,' it's an unexpected expense that comes out of your savings. When you land on 'charity,' you can donate and gain the use of a second die for three rolls, which gets you past paycheques more quickly (giving = getting, is the philosophy here). When you land on 'baby,' you add a kid to your expenses. And when you get downsized, you pay up your expenses en masse, from your savings, once, and then miss a few turns.
The real action is on the 'opportunity' and 'market' spaces. Opportunities come in two sizes: below $6K, and above $6K. They consist of opportunties to buy and sell one of four stocks and two bonds; to buy rental properties, from small condos to entire apartment complexes, with varying rates of return; to purchase land, gold or other property that has no immediate return; and to start up or purchase businesses.
It's up to you to figure out if the opportunity is worthwhile, whether you can afford it, whether you should carry a loan if you don't have the cash at hand, and whether it's time to sell it.
Selling properties and businesses (not stocks; stocks are sold in the oppoortunities deck of cards) happens with the 'market' cards. Some investments are good to keep as income; some are better off sold, to generate immediate cash that can be used for investing for better returns. Again, it's up to you to decide.
There are rules for handling bankruptcy, should you overextend yourself. Bankruptcy is stressful, but it doesn't necessarily take you out of the game. And it generally only happens if you play high-risk... which is a learning opportunity itself: sometimes, high-risk results in high payoffs, beyond one's expectations and hopes.
There's math involved. You have to get good at doing adding and subtracting, because your income and expense numbers are going to be changing, which will impact your bottom-line cashflow.
You get to learn about the value of bank loans, which can be used to invest in opportunities that pay so well that the interest costs for the loan are dwarfed by the cashflow the investment generates. You learn about investing in the stock market, and the kind of payoffs that can happen there. You learn about buying properties that are remarkably low-priced that you'd think are fucked-up, but turn out to pay off... and about rental property, some of the costs involved, and some of the risks involved (interest rate increases; tenant damage; etc).
All in all, it's a very stimulating game. If you're not currently investing in the stock market , rental properties and businesses, then it's worth getting the game: it'll let you learn and experiment, without actually risking tens of thousands of dollars.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
"Cashflow," from Robert Kiyosaki. It's a simulation of real life, intended to shift one's thinking about handling money. The objective: to get out of the rat race of daily 9-to-5 employee life, and onto the fast track of business ownership.
There's no competition, really, once you understand the game. It's all about making decisions for oneself, investing wisely and generating enough passive income (income that you don't have to work for someone else to earn: i.e. stocks and bonds, rental properties, etc.) to outpace your fixed living expenses.
The best part is that it's fairly true-to-life (at least if you live in the USA; the rental property thing isn't nearly as profitable in, say, Canada), and gives you a chance to experiment with risk without actually putting one's hard-earned cash up for grabs.
(putting one's cash into investing takes place eventually, mind you: you'll sooner or later learn that to make money, you're gonna have to spend it...)
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The same is true for modern econ[om]ics. Companies may not be battling for limited resources, but one of them always has more shareholder value, more market cap or whatever than the next.
More bugs. Microsoft has to win at something this year!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
When the participants grow up, they can participate in one of the greatest zero-sum games of them all.
No winner, no loser. The games often ends, but can usually be startet again some minutes later.
A lot of books have been written on the meta-game of finding other participants. Some people prefer to play with the same participant over many games. Other try out different participants all the time.
Can be played in groups, pairs and sometimes just solitaire.
One of the most played games of all time... Sex!
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For example, Ring-Around-the-Roses is called a game by virtually everyone, yet there is no winning or losing. Some games are not fun for anyone involved, such as a wargame (or, in same ways, war itself) yet they are still considered games by virtue of their being simulated.
SimCity is a game. We call it a game, we buy it in the game section, we say "I am playing a game of SimCity." We try to optimize our performance in SimCity on a variety of metrics (avoiding riots, maximizing income, etc.)
Alphie Kohn talks a bit about this in his book:
No Competition
He talks alot about the bad effects of competition in creative activity.
His simple sugestion is to switch competitive to co-operative.
Instead of playing musical chairs where 1 person is removed each time, play it where each time.. 1 chair is removed. Eventually you have a pile of giggling kids on 1 chair (make sure it's a STRONG chair) and they have to co-operate to get them all on there.
It's a non-direct way to get young kids to have to co-operate, without telling them "try to cooperate".
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Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Yes, and the implicit message being that if everyone cooperates all the time, everyone maximizes their benefit. Because the game is rigged to produce that end.
... What you get is people trying to get in sync, alternately competing and not. But when one doesn't *know* who the other prisoner is at any one time (you pass out chits with numbers on them instead), that's when it gets interesting.
Try this more realistic variant on for size: change the third rule to pay out 8 credits instead of 5. Any reasonably bright kid, and any adult with any experience in reasoning can figure out what they're going to get on average if they alternate 5-0-5-0-5-0 and so on. Alternating 8-0-8-0-8-0 on the other hand
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_index.htm
There ya go.
-Andy
Try checking out the mud connecter and looking into some games.
Mud Connector
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Outdoor sport, takes some skill, fun, non-competitive.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
But someone does win the game, or you tie. To win, you must make the other side lose. That makes it a zero-sum game. That is the defination of one, actually. For someone to win, another person has to lose.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
A game is never zero sum if, by defination, one player can score higher then the other. I.e., to get the highest score someone else has to get a lower one. Just having people abe to tie doesn't make it zero-sum, you have to have the fact you can 'win', aka, get the highest possible score, independent from the fact someone else can 'win'.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I probably haven't gotten enough carbs today. Change all 'zero-sum' to 'not zero-sum'. I have no idea what I was thinking, or why I didn't catch that in preview.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Actually, since we now know this...why don't we defect on round 9 instead, because we know we're not going to alter their behavior on round 10, as they have no incentive not to defect.
Oh, crap, now they're defecting on round 9 too. Well, if they've figure that out, I might as well defect on round....
Wait a minute...why did we both end up with only 10 Skittles each? And that team got 30 each! Well, this idea sucks.
It's really kinda funny to watch people come up with ideas that will 'win' this game. Everyone's thought of it before, guys. This game has the interesting property there is no way to win it. The logical stragity will cause you to get a horrible score, if your opponent is as logical as you. An 'unlogical' person playing a 'logical' one will lose horribly. But two unlogical people playing each other come out ahead of any players in any other combination.
It's a great game to teach kids.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And so on and so forth. Once the game has a set ending, no matter if it's thousands of moves in the future, it makes sense to default on the first move, because the 'The other player has nothing to lose by defaulting on this move, so I should default on the move before that.' moves all the way up the line! However, if there is no set end, then you can't applies this.
This is one of the really wacky examples of game theory.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Whether or not adding realism will actually make it more fun is debatable. The only way to answer that one is to try it out.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
While not being totally "non-sum", it does provide a level of interaction and really is never ending. I love arcade games (especially the old favorites), but enjoy interacting with others to something simple as Tetrinet to Quake, to EverQuest. With EverQuest, you actually depend on other (real) people, and the more interaction you have, the better off you are!
As some of you mentioned, I'm not saying anything about the truth or falsehood of the writer's beliefs (the writer of the anti-SimCity article, not the Slashdot poster). I'm saying that sometimes a game is simply a game and it's crazy to confuse an entertaining game with ideological brainwashing.
SimCity is one of a family of games where the player assumes the role of a god-like overseer who can (within the constraints of the game) mold the world to his wishes. If SimCity is Communist (or Collectivist, to keep up with the Ayn Rand theme), then playing Civilization is Fascist and perhaps even genocidal.
So like I said, the nuts who think that SimCity is a danger to our glorious cpaitalist utopia are equivalent to the nuts who think that dressing up like a witch on October 31st is toying with the occult.
As Justice Louis D. Brandeis said, "...the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."
Don't take this personally, but most of you don't have the critical reasoning skills to think your way out of a paper bag. Am I being harsh? Yes, but someone has to fight the Tyranny of the Self-Righteously Stupid.
It's a game. Geesh! I mention Ayn Rand because she had a similar habit of taking otherwise trivial things way too seriously. She invented some sort of Objectivist board game that was Ideologically Pure. I remember some Ayn Rand nut in college explaining to me how it was played. It didn't sound like a lot of fun.
Be very afraid of people like this. They're the sort of people who want to outlaw Halloween because it trains children in Satanism. Different absurd beliefs, same absurd way of thinking.
Actually, its been experimentally verified that the best result for prisoner's dilema is actually tit-for-tat ... now the stipulation is that you are playing with several prisoners and going for the highest score possible where the matrix looks like
C D
1 2 C
2 3 D
Where C is cooperate and D is defect.
Tit-for-Tat works by first defecting, then chasing tail on the other play. So whatever the 'opponent' did last turn do. If he Busted (C) you, bust him next round. If he worked with you last round, work with him. Apparently in the PD competitions, this is the winner.
Nathan.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
There actually was a game like this a few years ago ... the premise was basically the cold-war and the point wasn't to "wipe out" the russians, but to make sure the earth didn't get destroyed by bombs... called "Balance of Power". Don't remember a maker or anything (computer game)
Nathan.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
Now true the goal of the game can be to try to set things up so the guy next to you causes the thing to fall, which means you want to try to set your peices so that it topples his. The problem is that over time, it can actually be to your detrement because his peice won't necessarily fall. Of course the worst case is that things go utterly wrong and your bad peice becomes your own faulty cornerstone. So this is a case where you're not in 'direct' competition with the other players (unless there are only two, but that's a degenerate) and it's actually to everyones advantage to cooperate. Which is why in the end, people are upset when their cooperative high tower falls because someone got too shakey. I know there's a theorem for emergent cooperation involving the fixed point theorem, but I don't remember it now... sorry.
Nathan.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
My wife and I frequently play scrabble where we sum our scores and try to beat previous high scores. With young kids you can look at each others letters to help them find words.
I think this is what you're looking for; I just wrote this for somebody and I was thinking of open-sourcing the scripts. Actually, in its current incarnation it is called "Story Story Die", but the idea is, I think, the same.
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Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
HOWTO get better dates on slashdot
For linux, there is LinCity.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I believe the person's point was more that State Capitalism was a bad thing because the state was involved. You essentially have the government sitting there trying to make up rules which benefit certain classes of people in the hopes of getting more tax revenue. Icky.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
My friends and I wasted so many quarters on this game...[insert nostalgic interlude here]...
This is one game I'd LOVE to see an "open source" equivalent for. Crossfire is the closes thing I've seen, and it's not really close at all - it's far more of a Multiplayer Ultima V than a Guantlet (still looks fun, though, from what little I've played with it.) Anybody know of any "Gauntlet-like" game projects going on?
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Those "socialist" practices embodied in SimCity are actually how 90% of American cities operate.
The basis of SimCity is American-style Zoning. The basis of American-style zoning is to protect the property values of the bourgeois. The only way to succeed in SimCity is for your 'citizans' to increase their rent profits, aka property values, while attracting additional capital to your location. Therefore SimCity, is at best, a simulation of State Capitalism.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
That depends on what the definition of "is" is
<RAMBLE> Maybe this is why I had (and have!) so few friends. When I was younger I always preferred working together with my friend against an imaginary enemy over fighting against each other. I always preferred the cooperation over competition. I think the main reason for this is two-fold. I am usually more intelligent than my friends and so where would be the challenge in beating them? And I was raised as an only child by a single mother, so I experienced a life where working together created the best outcome. Why would I throw a temper tantrum that just makes both of us feel bad and decreases our happiness? Lastly, why can't everyone else just work together for shared future happiness instead of always being engaged in physical (think team sports) or mental (think politics) combat? </RAMBLE>
Would it still be called a peak if they didn't collapse shortly afterward?
Yeah... train them early for all those drinking games. Hey lots of those are zero-sum!
And LinCity is better than Sim
One game that I actually, honestly think is better on Linux than MicroShaft Winblows
Actually, as much fun as this game is, I think it is a zero sum game. There are only so many groups in play at a time, and when I gain control of one, it is removed from the control of somebody else. Or it becomes much harder for the other players to take control of. Either way, I'm better off and everyone else is worse off.
PaRappa the Rapper and similar are good too.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You can find many non-competitive games suitable for both children and adults in a book called "Playfair: Everybody's Guide to Noncompetitive Play", by Matt Weinstein. If your library doesn't have it, it can also be ordered from Playfair.com, Weinstein's company which runs keynote programs and team-building seminars.
In addition to various original games, the book has many suggestions for turning competitive games into non-competitive ones and the lessons Playfair has learned about designing them.
A good example is Ameba Tag. Ameba Tag turns the game of Tag into a cooperative game-- everyone caught by "it" links arms and becomes part of "it". The game ends when all the players are absorbed. To remove the advantage that faster runners have, the game is played with everyone running in 'slow motion'.
Doh! I can't believe I forgot this.
This is actually pretty close to zero sum - if you scale it down to Von Neuman's model, it's 1 for a win, zero for a tie, zero for an overtime loss, and -1 for a loss. That's variable sum (either zero or one). But you're definitely right.
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"You owe me a case of beer. Sucka'."
There are a few examples of non zero-sum games: for example, "The Prisoner's Dilemma" is a non-zero sum game (and technically, it is a game, albeit a very serious one).
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"You owe me a case of beer. Sucka'."
I remember a game that probably every high school international-relations or economics type class has played a variation of.
The class breaks up into groups. Each group is told that if they all make decision A, the entire class will win, say, 100 points each toward their grade. However, if even one group makes a decision other than A, everyone who chose A gets nothing, and the group choosing the highest value gets 110 points each.
If everybody trusts everyone else and does what they promised, the whole class walks away with 100 points each. But what always happens is that some asshole will ruin it for the rest of the group, which is the whole point of the excercise.
It's a pretty twisted lesson, really.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
...which you will probably use to buy property, unmortgage property, or buy houses, which is a disadvantage for all the other players. In monopoly, anything that is good for you, is bad for me. Likewise, when you land on Income Tax, I am going to smile, because what is bad for you, is good for me. Sure it's not zero sum?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It's simple: when you sell a product like this that's not a mass market product, dropping the price, on its own, doesn't necessarily increase sales enough to compensate. There's a sweet spot on the price vs. demand curve, and almost invariably, for "niche" products, that spot is going to be at a higher price than it is for similar consumer-level products, for the simple reason that the product itself is never going to sell as well as say, Quake.
Most video games (I'm talking arcade standups, not PC games) that let multiple people play at the same time are non-zero-sum. Gauntlet is probably the most well-known one (I saw it mentioned already at least once), but it's certainly not the only one.
There's a difference in types, though-- most such games are just individuals in the same space that can either help each other or not. Others, though are like Space Duel, a color vector sequel to Asteroids, which had a mode where two players played at the same time with two ships that were connected-- if you thrusted the wrong way, you'd end up with the two ships spinning around each other wildly. The final score that was put on the scoreboard was the combined score of the two players. Other examples are the old vector game Ripoff, or Cyberball 2084, where two players can play on the same team against the computer (or on opposite teams against each other), now taken up by more modern games like NBA Jam and the like. I've even seen pinball machines that had a built-in mode where two players' scores were combined for scoreboard and high score purposes.
I'd classify these as strong cooperative, whereas Gauntlet and Mario Bros (not Super Mario Bros) and the other multiplayer games are weak cooperative, where the players can cooperate but don't necessarily have to. I'm sure there are tons of more examples, but those are the first ones I can think of off the top of my head.
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At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
What about Gauntlet... Im not sure I am getting this zero-sum definition thing down. But Gauntlet was always cool because it was cooperative and everyone was trying to help each other win.
Announce that you are going to auction a dollar bill to the highest bidder with the proviso that both the higest bidder and the next highest bidder need to pay their bids, but only the highest bidder actually gets the dollar.
Once the bidding gets going, it's difficult to stop. Whatever I bid, you can outbid me by a penny. Eventually, I'll bid $1 and you'll still be better off bidding $1.01 because you're only out 0.01 compared to being out 0.99.
From the point of view of the bidders, it is a non-zero sum game.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Man, you have some cool ass parties
1) the universe is a persistent and theoretically limitless space
2) rankings in the game are based on "fealty points". Each planet in the game is worth one fealty point if you control it. Each planet is worth two fealty points if somebody else controls it, but pledges their loyalty to you. So there's an incentive to not just go out and kill everybody.
I do intend for the game to have resource limitations, but as the game goes on and your technology develops, you become more efficient in your use of resources. Furthermore, the limitations on resources are planet by planet, so as the universe expands and players are added, more planets and more resources appear.
Another thing is that technology can be shared in the game, so it encourages players to collaborate with eachother. So, you can develop powerful weapons while another develops powerful armor and combined you can put together some pretty nasty ships.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
This is one of the best Ask Slashdot topics in awhile. To bad I can't think of a good game that meets it. I was initially thinking of "Once Apon a Time" (I think that's it's name) which is a story building game which uses cards and the player's creativity to build a story. I haven't played it myself, but have watched a few games in action. It can be quite entertaining. Another game that came to mind is "Mission Statement" where one generates mission statements from buzwords, but it's still a player against player compeditive game and it isn't in wide distibution yet.
Oh, wait, I already give half of my money to an organization that does that. I like to call it Uncle Sam.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I've been thinking about better Monopoly rules. Here's what I've got:
1. You can borrow money from the bank to buy the properties or houses, but you have to pay it back, plus interest.
2. Every time you pass Go, rather than collect money, you need to make a loan interest payment on your outstanding balance.
3. Every time you pass Income Tax, rather than just when you land on it, you need to pay.
It's be interesting to play-test these rules and see how they work.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Getting $200 for passing Go is the real problem. Putting money on Free Parking (I know, not an official rule) makes the game more of a lottery than anything else.
If you want to eliminate the automatic $200 from GO and Free Parking, you need money to develop properties from somewhere, and that somewhere is the bank.
Furthermore, if you need to keep on borrowing to improve lots, you can't rely on mortgages alone. So interest-based loans come in.
Like I said, I've never played this way, and I don't know if it would be more fun. But it would make it possible to develop properties quickly and without hitting the jackpot which is Free Parking. My guess is that it would make for a quicker, more skill-based game, if anything. Whether that's good or bad is up to the people playing.
Regardless of who invented it, it is a fun game. In fact, removing the anti-monopoly rule that was in the original game is the secret to making it fun. We all might hate Bill Gates, but we love owning Park Place and Boardwalk with hotels...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
see subject.
Everybody Lies. But it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
Somewhat of a varient. Juggling. Simple, easy to learn and lots of fun to teach to others. (I just bought 20 juggling balls for the office...).
The great thing about it is once you have reach a certain level, you can start juggling to others which makes the entertainment loads more fun.
Read above for the example about basketball.
Scrabble is still zero-sum, because for every point you make, that's one EXTRA point all your opponents need to make to equal your score.
One way to look at it is: As the game progresses, the datum line moves upwards, to the average of all player's scores. Ie, the sum of all players scores is zero, plus an offset.
A true zero-sum game that uses scores would be something that a point by another player is not necessarily a point YOU dont have.
is probably the best example of a non-zero-sum arcade game.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
-m
I think the card game Settlers of Catan is a more traditional board/card game that is also not zero-sum.
-m
...rather than let a game do that. Life is a competition, like it or not. I just don't buy your premise. My kid will grow up (hopefully) understanding competition, compassion, and kindness because his parents demonstrate it.
I think perhaps that somebody needs more sims in his life.
This is a subject close to my heart, but I don't have all the answers. I'm not even sure there's a scientific answer since the definition of game can vary, and how you define what you're summing can vary. Presumably most games are positive sum (in some ways) or they wouldn't be played. Even zero-sum (money-wise) games should be positive sum games in some aspect(s).
For example, playing poker can be done to socialize with friends, to learn how to play the game (even if you lose $ or cents), spend time having fun, or for the challenge. I think all of these aspects are important in playing games, but there are definitely different niches for games just as there are different tastes in games.
I'll just give a (pseudo-) brief synopsis of some of the best positive-sum and positive zero-sum games I've played (and why the apparently zero-sum games are positive sum).
POSITIVE SUM GAMES
1. RPG's
The most obvious examples are role-playing games. The big daddy (and original) is Dungeons and Dragons (www.wizards.com). It's paper-based, 3rd edition, and classic, but doesn't have much inspired flavor. Other RPG's are Warhammer Fantasy (Hogshead Publishing), Deadlands (Pinnacle Entertainment Group), and Vampire: the Masquerade (temporarily forgotton publisher). There are plenty of other paper-based RPGs, but these all have unique and rich flavor.
These are all positive sum as there's no way to "win" the game. They're more like story games, where the story has no pre-defined ending. They're as complex or as simple (hack-and-slash) as the players desire and have the ability to create. Ultimately, they can be very rich and creative hobbies in character, world, and story creativity. They're also very social games. Unfortunately, by today's standards, they're very time-consuming and inefficient fun-wise (due to the heavy time demands).\
Recent years, the computer RPG has come online. This is another positive sum game with no predefined ending. People play to socialize as well as to battle and build characters. In some ways, they're more competitive as many players play to have the buffest character, but any good CRPG will have plenty of ways for players to achieve great goals and quests. Ultima Online and EverQuest are popular examples of these games. These are not my personal favorites as they (early generation) tend to be time-intensive and not very satisfying for my tastes, but I believe they're one of the best ways to play games over the internet.
2. Console games.
These games are all multi-player for best results. A few are good 1-on-1 as well (e.g., Tekken Tag Tournament, and Rush racing in arena fighting mode), but I'm concentrating specifically on the multiplayer aspect for the variety of game play, good mix of unexpected when there is more than one opponent, and the social benefits of having multiple players to laugh, smack talk, and generally whoop it up about the trials and victories of each gaming session.
These promise to get very interesting in the future as Sony, Nintendo, and Sega achieve the internet gaming model. CRPGs on these should be quite a bit of fun with the next generation games and kick-butt graphics.
My favorite games, though, are essentially zero-sum games which are a blast to play.
Positive sum aspects are their fun (!) and when you're losing badly --- their less than serious flavor and mix of luck which provides ample (even plentiful) opportunity for prolific smack talk ("You're *so* lucky!", "I can't believe that hit me.", "If you hadn't gotten that missile, you would've been toast.", "Wow, you actually won one!") You get the idea.
The best of these games (that I've found so far) is Sony Playstation's "Crash Team Racing". We keep looking for replacements and alternatives, but despite the humor and luck necessary to make the games more than zero-sum, the game play itself must be the highest integrity for the game to have a lot replay value. CTR has a unique combination of great strategic depth, high gameplay variety (lots of fun surprises), and a highest integrity game engine for very consistent and responsive game play. (Some games can be very frustrating due to inconsistencies or 'bugs' in the game engine which interrupt the immersion in the game.) CTR is both supremely fun and light-hearted but, also, very high integrity in game play. The game strategy (and maps) must also have plenty of depth and surprises to explore. We like all the racing maps, but (fyi) we really use only one of the maps for battle mode (excuse me for not knowing the name): the square-walled, split-level map with the kiosk in the middle, and the garage underneath the starting points. Despite all our attempts to upgrade to another game, we keep coming back to CTR. CTR is good for both racing and battle mode (arena fighting).
Other games are Sega's "Rush: 2049" racing which has an excellent Arena (battle) mode. This game is even good for 1-on-1. There are several maps which are strong.
For fighting games, we've really enjoyed Tekken Tag Tournament. This game was a total surprise for me as a multi-player game, but you play in pairs. I was afraid that the player tagged in would have all the fun, but the reality is that the tagged out player has to be ready to swap in at any moment. It's totally absorbing even in the 4-player tag mode. Plus, this game has the rare virtue of being a team (pairs) game. There's plenty of smack talk potential in this game. However, it can be pretty disappointing (a la zero-sum) if you suffer a losing streak. That's quite possible due to the high skill:luck factor of the game. Players need to handicap themselves if they're too skilled for the opponents. Play for fun, and it's great.
Another great game (two-player only) is the new PS2 game, SSX: Snowboarding SuperCross. This game is great because the game controls are supremely responsive, the game fantastically fun, and the play explicitly blurs the line between competing and performing. The secret to the game is the incredible tracks which are a joy to race and explore, and the stunts which are wacky fun to learn. The cornerstone of the game, however, is the stunts points and the boost meter. You pump the boost meter with tricks, and you can spend the boost to speed your racer. So tricks *can* help you race faster despite the fact tricks can take time. There's plenty to this game, including the different characters you can play requiring different paths over the courses for optimal play due to varyied abilities of the character; also, the tracks have plenty of interesting shortcuts; finally, the game has a variety of modes including the typical zero-sum race (which becomes more positive sum as the stunts become half performance art/fun and half boost for racing faster) and explicit positive sum exhibition modes (stunts only). The exhibition mode is also two-player (though if you look at points, it could be considered zero-sum, but the point is the stunts more than the points). Total surprise (to me) of a great game.
In sum, these games are zero-sum in a pure points perspective, but they have qualities which lend themselves to positive sum play. Those qualities include:
short games (for lightness of play, and quick replays)
a balance of skill and luck, leaving room for smack talk and good humor.
heavy game depth for plenty of strategy and replay value
multi-player (typically) for socializing, unexpected fun and crazy surprises in game play.
3. Puzzle games.
These are not necessarily games due to their nature, but in team mode can make for great games. The classic is Myst which can take hours to solve and is great fun when solving with help of another as a team. More recently, the Abe's Oddysey series can be great fun; just play in 1-player mode and hand-off the controller to the next person when abe dies. The fun here is from the camaraderie trying to complete the puzzle. When it's smooth going, you want to show everyone how good you are, and when a particularly vexing puzzle arrives, everyone is rooting for each person to complete it so everyone can move on to the next stages of the game. Unfortunately, MS has pretty much hijacked the future of this game for their XBox (and the PC too I guess), so the next generation won't be available on PS2 as originally promised. Doh! Fortunately, all the PS1 versions are readily available and proven strong (the new one is 3D and unproven). So, puzzles are not necessarily games, but they're definitely positive sum in satisfaction. Like jigsaw puzzles, a little social interaction to an otherwise pure puzzle can create a social and positive sum game.
-=-
Well, thanks for reading this far. That's my braindump on the current state of the art in positive sum gaming as I know it. The obvious oversight is lack of board games (I'm sure there are some fun ones I should be thinking of), but I think this post is long enough already. Hmm, I've also overlooked purely educational games (definitely positive sum for society!). The games I've concentrated on are for entertainment and social fun. I hope you enjoyed the article and even the games if you choose to try them.
= Joe =
You can check out my site skatepark.org which has more information on how to get a skatepark and skateboard culture, or I can also recommend a fun book about learning the flying trapeze.
There's a cooperative game based on the Lord of the Rings (I'm pretty sure it's called "Lord of the Rings).
The interesting thing about this conversation is that, NO GAME IS INNATELY ZERO SUM OR NON-ZERO SUM. Whether or not a game is zero sum has as much to do with the utility functions of the players as it does with the structure of the game.
The formal definition of a zero-sum game is that it must have the property that the aggregate utility received by all participants remains constant, regardless of the outcome of the game (although the allocation of this utility may, of course, vary.)
So, take the game of Charades, suggested by the original poster. If the participants derive enjoyment from the activity rather than from the outcome, then of course the game is non-zero sum. However, if the people playing the game only care about performing better than the other team then the game may be zero sum (IFF the utility team A gets from winning plus the disutility team B gets from loosing is equal to the utility team B gets from winning plus the disutility team B gets from loosing).
So this argument could go on all day, as any game (even Chess and Monopoly) can be legitimately viewed as zero-sum or non-zero sum, depending on the poster's assesment of the typical player's preferences.
Perhaps a better phrase for this conversation would be mutualistic, which is used by sociologists to mean "non-competitive"...
-topher
The game which does a good job of depicting the non-zero-sum nature of
society is, well, Civilization. Not the more recent computer game, the
original board game implementation.
Players trade, and having a large quantity of a single resource increases
superlinearly in value. Thus it's to everyone's advantage to exchange their
naturally-balanced resources for more tightly focused monopolies.
Outright combat is sometimes necessary, but usually very inefficient, and
thus quite not the point of the game. The result is a good balance of
competition and cooperation... much like real civilization.
Does this include the rule that all rules are subject to change? Because if it does, then you could make is so that not all rules are subject to change....
--
Matthew Walker
My DNA is Y2K compliant
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
Traditional RPGs like AD&D of course, but board games such as five player Line in the Sand (good luck finding it now) where someone doesn't have to lose for you to win.
Here's a game that a few friends and I made up one night while sitting around the campfire late at night. It also consists of changing the rules as you go (actually, it is more like you are more like 'deciding' the rules as you go.) We called it "The DaisyChain Game" for lack of a better name. Basically, someone starts out by saying a common phrase, sentence, proper name, etc... Then the next person in the circle takes either the last word or last part of the word in the previous person's phrase and uses it to start off another common phrase, sentence, etc... For example, a standard round might sound like this:
Person1: daisy chain
Person2: chain smoking
Person3: king of the hill
etc, etc...
One of the best things about the game is that you will start to realize what kinds of phrases you will accept as a group and what kinds of phrases or sentences are just not common enough to be accepted. For example, we decided that if someone ends a phrase with a weird word (for example, Beef-A-Roni) we would accept a "morph" of that word, or word part, in order to start the next phrase. For example, we'd use "A-Roni" from Beef-A-Roni to start the phrase "Our only way out" ('A-Roni' was morphed into 'our only').
Conversely, we decided not to accept very flimsy sentences. For example, if someone's phrase ends with "close", we would accept "close call" from the next person, but not "close the door" (it was just too flimsy.)
I suppose you could score the game, but it'd be highly subjective as to how original each new phrase was and how many points each one should get. We always played for the fun of it and we'd pass hours just going around and around.
Beat me to it!
But would you spend the money for RealMyst?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
It depends upon the simulation. Some have limited resources which you have to use, and you have to accomplish something to "win" before running out of a resource. A game can be tuned to make it more open-ended, such as considering fusion to be "free" power and using that power to recycle everything -- including mining old landfills which were occupying real estate.
I'll give 5,000 points to whoever creates a computer-based version of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?".
Maximising your own score (usually by playing long words) often increases your opponents chances of playing a long word, and thus increasing their score, too.
Admittedly, some people make part of their strategy not to leave helpful letters dangling where they're useful, but when I play (usually with my mother) that sort of negativism is frowned on. We generally consider a 2-player game with total points less than 600 "bad", whereas greater than 700 points between us is "good". We don't concentrate too much on the individual scores (except when Mum wins!).
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E_NOSIG
One of the best positive sum games I"ve ever played is Lord of the Rings by world class game designer Reiner Knizia. (You can buy a copy at Funagain games.) The box says ages 12 and up; I think it's appropriate for kids in 4th grade or higher. It does not require familiarity with the books. In America, it's produced by Hasbro, where it has received basically no advertising.
In the game, each player is a Hobbit on a Corruption scale from 1-15. So is the Eye of Sauron. Various game events move individual Hobbits towards Darkness, and various events move the Eye of Sauron towards the Hobbits. If Sauron finds you, you lose. If you're the Ringbearer, everyone loses.
Play proceeds through Bag End, Rivendell, Moria, Lothlorien, Helm's Deep, Shelob's Lair, and finally Mordor, where, if the Hobbits are quick enough, they destroy the One Ring and win the game together.
I'm a college student and *I've* had a lot of fun playing this game. I highly recommend it for your students.
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
don't know if anyone's mentioned it yet. but pretty much all drinking games are non-zero sum. everytime you 'punish' someone with making them drink, you're aiding them in their goal of getting drunk.
matt
Everquest is a game that lets you earn money from "nowhere" - either creating value by making traded goods or farming monsters for treasure.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
... would be to look at the league system.
There is a finite amount of points available, and for someone to gain points, someone else has to drop them.
Soccer, in the european stage, is even worse in this respect.
This is because matches ending in a draw, actually makes BOTH loose.
This is because it is 3 points for a win and 1 for a draw.
The reasons are obvious for anyone having watched soccer. It is to prevent teams from playing very defensively to secure a draw.
However. Both these sports are positive sum on another level, because they create entertainment and income for lots of parties.. not only for the successful ones.
I used to play that with a bunch of other geeks in High School. It was cool =:-)
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Play Six Pack Man. I
Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Champions, etc. are all non-zero sum games. The players usually find that working together works out a lot better than fighting over the loot.
I haven't played Nomic, but there is a card game called Fluxx that also has changing rules.
The rules are pretty simple; the game is more easily played than explained. 4 kinds of cards: Keepers, Actions, Rules, and Goals. When the game begins, there is no goal. The Basic Rules are: Draw 1 card per turn, and Play 1 card per turn. From here on in, however, it starts to get sillier
The Keepers are cards played in front of you, depictions of various nouns: Chocolate, Time, Taxes, Love, Milk, Rocket, etc. Actions are cards such as: Draw 3, Draw 4, Play 2, Play 4, Play All, etc. These modify the basic rule of Draw 1, Play 1. Rules are cards that allow players with certain keepers to get bonuses, or otherwise globally affect the conditions of the game. Finally, Goals are cards that set the winning condition of the game (e.g., the goal of Death and Taxes means that the game is won when there is one player with the Keepers "Death" and "Taxes" in front of him/her.)
Since any player may play any type of card(s) during his/her turn, this leads to a lot of rule/ goal/ action turnover. You may have all the necessary cards to win the game, but by the time it comes to your turn, the goal has changed 3 times, and you're starting from scratch.
This game often goes over well with large groups of people, even those who are not particularly into gaming. It's easily learned, entertaining, not much skill or strategy involved, and not particularly competitive. Yes, someone does "win" at the end of each hand, but the win is as often due to luck as anything else.
Buy a deck. Play. (DISCLAIMER: I don't work for Looney Labs, I don't get monetary kickbacks, blah blah blah
-rv --
gallimaufry - http://www.ultranet.com/~rv/
popplers - http://www.ultranet.com/~rv/weblog
Just about any game can become a zero-sum game if the correct atmosphere is set. For instance, when playing basketball make sure that all players have had at least 5 shots of good liquor. A shot must be taken for every 10 points scored. Trust me, it doesn't take long before no one has any idea what the score is.
As for me, wrestling is a zero-sum game. I wrestle Stan, our clubs head coach, and he can beat me into the mat any time he chooses. But, every once in a while I score, or pull off some really slick move. He didn't lose, but I won.
If that didn't make sense, read it again until it does. Any game becomes zero-sum as soon as you choose to ignore the score and concentrate on the play and allow the score to worry about itself. Once you can reach that state, then regardless of whether you had more points or not, you rate yourself a winner/loser on how well you performed against your own criteria and you enjoy the game while it last.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The Hollywood Stock Exchange is an online game where you trade Movie Stocks and Star Bonds. Lots of fun, and while the game is "technically" scored, there is never a winner, as the game never ends. It's a psuedo-real life simulation, mimicking the stock market with the movie industry as a basis.
Nethack is still one of my favorite games. I think there is technically a score in Nethack, but I don't know of anyone who really pays too much attention to it. The adventure is the point.
-Jennifer
Disclaimer: I am not a jock. I'm not even remotely fit.
What about telling your kids to play outside? I've never been into team sports, but I do enjoy a lot of outdoor activities (despite my Programmer's Gut).
Examples: Skiing (Nordic and Downhill), Snowboarding, biking, running (yuck), frisbee, kite flying, stunt kite flying (too fun... like Asteroids on a really large screen), surfing, wind surfing (my fave), waterskiing, wakeboarding, sailing, hiking, climbing... And so on.
The best of the non-competitive activities have existed for decades, centuries, and millenia.
Like I said, I'm not a jock. I just live in Calgary. When you see mountains on the way to work every morning, you get some good ideas for spending your free time.
Zero-sum or not has as much to do with the way people play as with the game itself. For example, some have suggested that RPGs are zero-sum but it's still entirely possible for people to compete and declare a winner based on gold or experience points. That will always be true as long as there's any kind of score involved, and if there's not then people can invent their own scoring methods. On the other side of the coin, zero-sum games can often be played cooperatively or just playfully if some or all participants simply decide they don't care about the score. I've messed up many games of Scrabble just so I could play cool (or rude) words, I've spent my time in racing simulations going backwards and trying for a spectacular collision, and so on. Some games - e.g. frisbee - or puzzles or market simulations can be approached either competitively or cooperatively according to players' wishes. Whether some computer games are cooperative or competitive depends on whether you consider the computer to be a player.
The point is that you can almost always decide whether there are "winners" or "losers" in any game, regardless of the game's internal definitions. IMO it's as important for people to know they can keep their own score as it is to know that not all games are zero-sum.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
how about Drinking Jenga?
a bud of mine took out his jenga set, and had everyone who was around write out a piece. we ended up with everything from "Drink 1" to "Obtain a mouthful of the strongest beverage in the room. Gargle 'God Save the Queen.'"
i do not remember too much more, as we played the game almost immediately. if i ever find out who wrote the one with the christmas lights...
Don't ask. Go see.
...if you make a game boring (Everybody wins all the time! Don't even bother trying kids!) then you've lost the point of playing a game...
"Daddy says dice are wicked. We just move one space each turn." -Todd, or Rod, maybe
Don't ask. Go see.
RL example:
Calvinball!
it's the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
'course, it don't hurt to have an imaginary tiger to play with.
Don't ask. Go see.
We've enjoyed a Chaosium board game called Arkham Horror. Players choose between cooperating and competing in their moves/actions. Too much competition between players, and the Eldrich Horrors take over the world (Microsoft isn't mentioned by name :-)).
o rr or.html
There's a rather arbitrary determination of a "winner" if the monsters are banished, but you can enjoy the game without worrying about that.
The game was published in '86, and is apparently out-of-print.
There's a more detailed review at
http://student.educ.umu.se/~time/gobume/arkhamh
This game has been one of the few I've seen advertised on TV, although it was one of the bestselling computer titles even before that happened. It's a great game where you have to build an amusement park and complete certain goals within a certain amount of time (like 900 guests in the park, a park value of $10,000, etc). I played it once and then had to go out and buy it it was so addicting, and I am not really a huge fan of Sim games usually.
:/).
:)
You can pick it up for probably 20 bucks now, plus another 20 for a combo pack with each expansion. While there's no sandbox mode (which is probably it's biggest problem), you can download trainers which can let you have pretty close to the same thing (the main disadvantage is you can't save these parks
It'd probably be great for kids between 8 or so on up; some of the scenarios can be a little frustrating and building your own rollercoasters takes a little practice and good spacial perception. Be careful though, you tend to lose track of time and end up playing this little bugger until the wee hours of the night.
Some more than others. I've seen a number of Monty Hall type Dungeons and Dragons "dungeon crawls" where the goal is essentially to identify a "bad guy" who is weak enough to overpower and steal from. In this case it's a simple "he's got it; I take it" proposition.
In most modern games this *can* be replicated, but that's not as clearly the goal in the system.
Systems that come to mind are:
White Wolf's Mage: The Ascension. More so than any other game, this one tries to get the point to be the story and the characters and not the external conflict (though there's lots of that).
FASA's Shadowrun. Here's a system where the goal is to do your job and get paid.... There's just one catch: your job is to be a cyberpunk-cum-magic-ish mercenary, selling your services to the mega-corps for smuggling, theft, or whatever other corporate backstabbing the corps can't admit to in public.
Traveller (as well as GURPS Traveller, the GURPS-ized re-release of the system). A finer space merchant / mercenary / millitary game has not been devised as far as I can tell. Here, your goal often was related to trading or millitary actions depending on what sort of flavor campaign was being run.
I think the non-zero-sum nature of true RPGs is what will always stand between them and the computer-game faux-RPGs. Some games (e.g. Soul Reaver, Dungeon Keeper) try to be true to this RPG legacy, but there are very few.
It wasn't exactly what you want, but I think it's worth mentioning: Avalon Hill used to publish a game called "Republic of Rome", where you and your family jockeyed for political power and control of Rome. The twist was this; if you didn't cooperate with your opponents, barbarians would come and destroy Rome, and everyone would lose. Kind of a mixed competitive/cooperative kind of game.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
Mmmm.... Iocaine Powder...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Umm.. Are you unhappy knowing that life is unfair? I think that the best thing to do is to teach your children that not everyone is a winner in this world, because otherwise they will live with a disillusionate prospective on the way things really are in the world. It is a gental lesson in development in saying sometimes you win, and sometimes you loose.
I am happy in knowing the way things are, not the fantasy world of univeral benefit, although I would really like the world to be like that some day.
Bye!
Alfie Kohn wrote a book a few years ago called No Contest: The Case Against Competition. He spends quite a bit of time discussing what he sees as a distinctively American obsession with competition and competitiveness.
My favorite little snippet of the book:
I first heard about non-zero sum in real life from Robert K. You can get his game that teaches financial education as well has have some fun. You can get the game from his website (they have a kids version too) at:
http://www.richdad.com/products.html
It's not so much the games that are played, but the children that play. When I was younger, I remember playing soccer and hide and seek, as well as various other childhood games. This includes 'games' played in elementary school gym class, some of which are intended to be fun, and difficult to be considered competitive.
While some kids would have the mentality of 'I'm going to win' others, like myself, would have 'I'm going to have fun.' While I was trying my hardest to do well - not necessarily win, but just to give my best effort - and have a fun time, there would be other kids who would try to hurt the other students in order to get ahead of them, win, or whatever else their sick, twisted minds thought. If it wasn't physical abuse, it was verbal. (these kids were actually smaller than me - I was quite the gentle, eventually-quake playing kid. I still am anti-violence, but I'm a martial artist and play violent, dangerous video games. But that's another story entirely.) At any rate, it's all on the child's mentality, I believe. As a child, nothing was ever competitive to me. Granted, I did quite well when things were competitive, but I was just doing it for fun. I think part of the problem is that America and her citizens are too fundamentally bent on 'being number one' and beating everyone else. I think part of this might have to do with America's economic and political position, but I'd say the largest part of the issue is that parents put too much emphasis in winning, and not enough in doing your individual best. Thus, why we have so much cheating in schools.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Your words, not mine.
All that I said was that the economy is not zero sum, not that it is bad. With a UID as low as yours, I would expect you to have learned by now to read the fucking post.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Economists believe that the economy is not a zero-sum game, because they can show that a person on his own can create value where there was none before. They are not looking at the whole system, however. Consider the case of a blacksmith. He takes raw iron from the earth, refines it, and shapes it into useful tools. His source of value is not just his muscles - it's the earth that produced the iron, and the earth which bore the food on which he has nourished himself, and the sun which created that pre-historic vegetation which is how his coal. It is not value from nothing, it is value taken from the past (coal), and also out of the future (in the form of pollution).
But, you may say, what about "intellectual property" (ignoring the issues of its correctness). It consumes no resources to produce, right? Wrong. Even a poet needs dead trees to write on, ink to write with, feathers or plastic for a pen. And, to produce value from this work, she needs the machinery of modern society - the printing presses and glue factories and fleets of trucks for distribution. Computer programmers who distribute their work online consume only the smallest bit of electricity in its distribution, but chip-making plants are highly toxic - we (for I am one of these programmers), too, are taking resources from the future to pay for today.
This can not, and will not last forever. When we have destroyed our air, our forests, and our rivers, we will see this "zero-sum game" for what it really is: a shell game.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Mother: "What would you like for Christmas this year?"
epeus: "I want a non-zero sum game!"
Mother: (under her breath) "Little F*ckin choosy bastard, he's getting a Tickle-me Elmo, a Furby, or a PS2 instead..."
And, as always, Christmas morning would involve a lot of crying, yelling, and Jack Daniels. Of course, this was nothing compared to the year that Santa Claus got stuck in the chimney and died there, but that's another story altogether.
Gee, after reading this story, it's like I'd rather see more about the PayPal...
This is an example of a game that is close to the possibility of non-zero sum, but depending on how you think about it, it may not be. But the game is so cool that I just had to talk about it. Cosmic Encounter is a rather old board game about conquest of the galaxy. Each character is dealt an alien race and the goal is to get bases on five extra-solar system planets. It's quite possible to share a planet with other players, and frequently more than one player works together to win the game jointly. The reason why it's probably not exactly zero-sum is that I'm not sure if it's possible to have _everyone_ win the game. I think that with the right combination of alien abilities and a very contrived situation, it might actually be possible to have everyone win, but I haven't thought of how.
Anyway, this is a terribly cool game, but try and find one of the old versions (either mayfair or west end games), and not the most recent (i.e. last couple months) release. It really simplifies the game and really isn't all that cool.
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Another famous game that I've learned from mathematics is the Hex game. Imagine a gamefield tiled by hexagons, vaguely rhombic in overal shape. Two oposing sides have the same colored border (white) and the other two oposing sides have the other colored border (black). Players take turns coloring hexes until the board is full. In 2-dimensions this is the ultimate in zero-sum. There's a famous theorem that proves that there will be exactly one and one winner.
If you expand the game to multiple dimensions (one dimension for each player) (which would be almost impossible to play, but theoretically interesting) in a specific manner, the game changes so that there is _always_ one winner, but anywhere between 1 and every person could win once the board is filled.
Of course in both these games, if people played to intentionally try to make everyone win, it probably wouldn't be all that interesting of a game. Why? Because virtually all entertainment includes some measure of conflict.
In passive entertainment (movies, fiction, television) the conflict is experienced vicariously through the characters. Even humor is built out of a conflict between expectations and actuality. In interactive entertainment (games), the conflict _still_ needs to be present. Classically, that conflict has been directly with the other player. It was simple; if you rigged it so everyone wanted to win on at least some level, the players would provide enough conflict with each other to make the game enjoyable.
Of course this isn't really the only way to provide conflict. There _are_ games where the conflict is provided elsewhere. In an RPG, the conflict is provided by the gamemaster. The players aren't necessarily playing against the gamemaster, but he provides the necessary resistance. He sets up the NPCs and monsters and dungeons and challenges. This allows for a clever opponent who doesn't exist.
Some games don't require a person to provide the complict. The new Lord of the Rings game is played by a group of people against the game itself. It's supposed to be difficult to win (my friends and I are 1 for 2), but the resistance is provided by situations dictated by cards and on the boards. I don't think I'd like to play this game repeatedly, however, because the opponent never changes. He does the same things every game.
Computers change this. If the computer provides an opponent for a classical-style game, then the game is non-zero sum for the players involved _and_ the opponent is as clever as the AI involved. Of course non-classical games can be programmed as well. But one can always think of the players playing _against_ the game, or the universe presented by the game. In that way, many non-zero-sum games become zero-sum again. The better chance the player has at winning, the worse chance the game has at winning. But only if you think in those terms.
It's not necessary to deal with winners and losers in the traditional sense for a game to be fun, but it certainly is necessary for there to be some sort of resistance or conflict, however it is achieved. In order for this to happen, there has to be a goal, and there has to be at least a perceived chance of success and one of failure. In this way, there always needs to be the potential for winning and losing. What isn't necessary is for there to be any particular number of winners or losers.
HC
I think that's +3 funny that you mention Bubble Bobble to prove your point. There was never a game that caused more pain in my household than the economics of this.
What's the first thing to do when you get to a new level? Go grab all the food and leave your helpless 5 year old cousin to defend himself. After a few levels of this they will gush with tears and hate you for hours - but then someone else gets a turn to be broken down.
Not to pick nits, but Monopoly isn't zero sum. Every time you pass Go, you collect $200.
I think you'll be hard pressed to find any game which isn't "zero sum" by the notion you're talking about, because eventually someone has to win by either having the highest score at some arbitrary contest, or by taking all the resources from everyone else on the playing field.
Are actually zero-sum games. Non-zero sum games typically require collaboration, and that output / points / winnings go up. Chess, Go, Diplomacy, etc. are all zero-sum games - the resources of the game are all consumed / traded around until someone wins and / or someone else loses.
Note that the defending portion of bridge could be considered to be non-zero-sum: I might have to give up one trick so my partner can take two...
D&D - yes, its not a zero sum game, however, some DMs try to make it that way.
SimCity - yes, its also not a zero sum game.
I suspect that most of the non-zero-sum games are going to be open ended, or have some arbitrary stopping point (eg. whoever has the most points after 30 rounds).
I had a game called Stock Ticker, but it was pure randomness - stocks go up/down at random (dice rolling). So it too was a zero-sum game.
Keep in mind, that, for all the interesting consequences that fall out of game theory, the CIA used game theory to 'prove' that Iran would not attack Iraq to start the Iran-Iraq war...
Cya
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
Tony Hawk Skater, or that snowboarding game on PS2. I play that for hours figuring out new tricks and combos and stuff. There's not really any competition, though as you get better you open up new levels.
And it teaches you important lessons, like "Skateboarding is not a crime" and "Everything was put on this earth so that you may grind on it."
blog
Is Wumpus the shameful part, or is it the fact that you write VB?
Given the context (/.) I would have thought that obvious. I stand tall and proud to say I've implemented Wumpus.
And it's "wrote", not "write", OK?
I loved that game--i think it was origionally for the TI-99/4A
Wumpus certainly predates the TI-99 systems, and I think it predates microcomputers in general. Here is a page showing the instructions for a PDP-8 version. Note the stylish usage of ALL CAPS, for those people who couldn't afford lower case.
A quick bout of Google will yield any number of web-based Wumpus Hunts, and surely the source code is out there somewhere.
Shameful confession: my first Visual BASIC program was Hunt the Wumpus.
Isn't chess non-zero-sum.
If you lose a pawn, the opponent actually gains nothing.
Chess is zero-sum in that there are only three possible outcomes to a game:
1) White wins, black loses.
2) Black wins, white loses.
3) It's a tie or stalemate.
The total score of all players at the end of any chess game is always "1".
However, you could consider the concept of pawn promotion to make the argument that you can come out of a game with more materiel then you went in with: in theory you could promote all 8 pawns to queens.
Umm, what was the question again?
I assume that you're reffering to what my circle calls pelt, where after the sack is hit a certaint number of times you catch it and try to throw it at someone. A fun varient of this that we came up with, and fitting in with the topic, is where after cathing it, you can't throw it but must pass it to someone else who can then try to hit someone. Makes an interesting dillema of whether to run away to avoid getting hit or stick around in hopes of getting passed to.
I'm not sure this is pro-cooperative. Oh well.
If you know you will be playing only one round, it is indeed not pro-cooperation.
The game becomes much more interesting when you play the game over and over with the same partner. Then cooperation can pay off.
There is a a vast literature on the topic; the original work on the iterated prisoner's dilemma was done by Robert Axelrod at the Univeristy of Michigan. He has also has a web site for his book The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration.
For those interested in the evolution of social behavior, this stuff is fascinating. And it lends itself to all sorts of cool simulations, so there's a high geek enjoyment factor in it all.
Gee, that reminds me of Steve Jackson games' "Car Wars". There were too many - or + modifiers just to see if you hit your opponent.
Scrabble is a good non-zero sum game. It makes you to explore a world that many people don't go too often: the words.
How many words do you use in a day?
When I came in US I was amazed on how many misspelings people made, and the fact that this was seen as normal: I am an awful speller. was the excuse.
I was amazed because as a non-native English speaker I was able to spot and correct a lot of these...
And somebody was making smart posts about poor education in Brazil in some other thread.
I don't think that is the point at all. Axis and Allies, by definition, produces a winner and a loser. Games like Balderdash, Charades, and Ghost can all be turned into competitive games. But, the point of playing them is the imagination. They also stress out-of-the-box thinking. I think that is what this poster is looking for.
Any game can be turned into a struggle or contest. The players determine the course of it. If the people care more about winning than playing, they will play that way. On the other side, if the emphasis is on the enjoyment of play, winning and losing become irrelevant. If you want to teach your children to think that way, teach them. If you don't, they will learn from whomever influences them most often.
I learned to play games when I played with my parents. They showed me that the point of chess is the thought processes. The point of Balderdash is creativity. The point of Charades is communication. These days, I play a lot of games. For me, now, the fun is in the playing and the doing. I don't care if I win or not.
I can't believe a geek site wouldn't have mentioned RPG's right off. I know lots of old-time D&Ders who got their kids to start playing. The earliest I know of is about age 8, although there's anecdotal stories of some kids getting hooked on it earlier. Open ended. Lots of different genres - fantasy, superheroes, sci-fi, space opera, gothic, sleuthing, etc. Whatever your family is into.
I don't know of any other game where there's as much interaction and learning potential. If there's a particular lesson you want to impart to your kids, think about a Copper dragon dying of lung cancer or lots of people in a town hooked on a really addictive drug. Or scenarios where teamwork is the only way to achieve the objective.
Of course, if the parents suck at GMing, it probably wouldn't work. Something to think about.
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I was argueing with my boss this morning about Vollyball. When I play with him, he is all about positions, the set shot etc. I was telling him that a fun day of vollyball for myself is with a beer in one hand, sun shining, tahoe nice and cold and the only reason to keep score is so everyone gets a bathroom break at the same time.
Remember it, write it down, take a picture, I dont give a fsck!
Back in the late 1960's and early 70's there was considerable interest in what were called "New Games." These were an attempt to develop group games (generally somewhat physical in nature) that were essentially cooperative, avoiding "winning" and "losing." Some of the games are quite a bit of fun. I used several of them when I was teaching/leading children's groups. The values predisposition was toward cooperation, interaction, self-organizing, etc. Sounds sort of what you're interested in. The new games were described in a couple of nice, illustrated books. You can probably track these down at your local library or your library can get them through Interlibrary Loan. Most require no or household items for equipment: New Games Foundation The new games book / New Games Foundation ; edited by Andrew Fluegelman Garden City, N.Y. : Dolphin Books, 1976New York : Fluegelman, Andrew More new games! -- and playful ideas from the New Games Foundation / text and photographs by Andrew Fluegelman Dolphin Books/Doubleday, 1981
"When I grow up, I'll be stable."
Nuclear war is a perfect non zero-sum game. EVERYBODY LOSES!
Oh, you wanted a GREATER than zero sum game!
Beware of asking for !=... You may receive it...
When playing non-zero sum games, kids will often still try to see who gets "more." So effectively turning in a non-zero sum game into a zero sum game.
As Stan Freberg once said, "is all how you look at it." That's only zero-sum if the sum you're worried about is "ranking" or "winning". If the sum is whatever the game's about, such as building paper cranes, it's still quite positive-sum.
What depresses me is when adults, usually left-wingers, insist on looking at life this way. They don't care that they have riches beyond the dreams of your average third-worlder or caveman, only that Jones across the street has "more", so therefore they feel "disadvantaged" and it's "unfair".
The only time someone else doing better than me bothers me is when they do it at my expense (*cough*spammers*cough*billgates*cough*).
My personal favourite is Mage: The Ascension at white-wolf.com, but all a system is is a framework within which to build the group's creativity.
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian
The prisoner's dilemna primarily shows a viable strategy to employ in a simple non-zero sum game. The strategy being, tit-for-tat. No messages may be sent, but the message that is being sent to the other person is, whatever you did to me lsat round, I'll do it to you this round.
Most any game can be considered zero-sum if the goals are set as such, but most any game can also be non zero-sum by setting goals in that direction.
Taken from "Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction" by Morton D. Davis, he states:
I don't think the goal is to find a perfectly non zero-sum game, but to find a game that has more elements of cooperation than competition.
It would seem to me that n-person game would be more likely to have cooperative elements in it, as opposed to a 2-person game, where the opponent is clearly defined.
It's appropriate that you should mention Nomic, because the inventor, Peter Suber, created Nomic, his main goal was to emulate the government system. He wanted to "make a playable game that models this particular situation." Hence the need for the 2-tiered rule system.
As I've stated earlier, there are rarely purely n-person zero-sum and non zero-sum games, because most games require you to cooperate in some way or another as well as compete. In the case of INWO, it is possible to play the game as a non zero-sum game. Depending on who you play, your utility function will determine what winning is to you.
If you're the Bavarians, then by all means, might makes right, but if you're Shangri-La, you win (or rather, all Shangri-La win) if there are the given number of peaceful groups in play. The main thing is to DEFINE WHAT IT MEANS TO WIN.
Taken from "Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction"
Board games like the ones listed above are zero-sum games, but more so, they have perfect information and as such, aren't very intersting on particular level. Granted, they are still excellent games, but for this discussion, they probably don't need to be considered.
Everquest, for instance, is now heavily non-zero for the players (just don't interview the monsters as to how *they* feel...) What's interesting about EQ is that they've started to take fuller advantage of their ability to tune the reward system lately. They've added a grouping bonus that means you gain experience more quickly when you cooperate with other players. Sortof like small business loans.... But, of course, there are zero sum elements - such as artificially scarce high-powered weapons and so on. And they're having a hard time finding the right way of dealing with the out-of-game trade in characters and items where real money changes hands - but that's another story.
Programming is tonnes of fun, and you create stuff while you're at it.
Not a terribly social game (normally), but it can be very rewarding.
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.
Not exactly cooperative, but provides at least 22 minutes of good clean sweaty fun.
Materials: Trashcan, bouncy ball, soft projectile
Rules:
- in the middle of a 10-15' circle is a trash-can or similar receptacle.
- One person (the "it" person) stands near the trashcan in the middle with a dense, soft object he can throw (a baseball glove or a flipper)
- Everyone else playing stands on the edge of the circle trying to bounce the ball into the trashcan.
- The "it" person tries to prevent the ball making it into the trashcan by throwing his object at the ball. He can never touch the ball with his body or bat the ball with the soft object.
- Once a person bounces the ball into the trashcan, they get to be "it"
Play until you are to tired to stand up.
-e
Remember back in the day when games were fun and you played them cause they were enjoyable, not cause they were so difficult that you got satisfaction from accomplishing some amazingly difficult task? It's pretty much the same point, and that why I'm never giving up my Super Nintendo. As much as I love Mario Kart 64, I've found very few N64 or PS2 games that are actually fun anymore.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
But it is what zero sum means with regard to chess. If you sacrifice a queen to make a checkmate, you haven't lost, you've won. All that matters is that in the end, one of the players has one point, or they both have a half-point.
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
In the games of Mao I've played, it's made clear that going out of cards is not "winning", it just lets you add a rule. You "win" when you understand the game well enough to introduce it to other people.
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
You're affirming my point. The point values of pieces in chess are totally arbitrary and, though they help in strategy, are not related to the outcome of the game.
Thus, the points have no place in game theory. All that counts is who wins. If you're playing a lot of games, you don't keep track of who won by more pieces, just who won more often. So, an effective way of representing the outcome in game theory (and in tournaments) is +1 for a win, 0 for a loss, and +1/2 for a tie.
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Every time you get a question right, you have to do a shot. It tends to level the playing field pretty nicely.
...Except for the first time we played. We were playing normal Pictionary, my team was in last place, and my teammates had to leave. After introducing the TP rules, I had someone from another team join me, and the two of us won.
Thank god they had enough couches! I do NOT recommend driving after playing a round!
What are you looking for? A game that is not about limited resources? A game that is about sharing and cooperation rather than competition?
There are plenty of board games that sort of fit into the first category. Torres is an interesting mix - the you get points by having your knights high up in big castles. So everyone's trying to build at the same time, and pretty much everything you do will help someone else. But to do well, you have to choose things which help you more than other players, which violates the spirit of the second criterion. Carcassonne is another game which has a vaguely similar building mechanic. These games don't really emphasize scarsity (though there is of course some scarcity of space, and you have a limited number of turns, so those are scarce in a sense), but they can be fiercly competitive.
If you're looking for cooperative board games, there aren't very many. However, Reiner Knizia's Lord Of The Rings is a fantastic example of one. You're still trying to manage a bunch of limited resources, but if you don't share them well, you'll all lose. It's really a fun game, if somewhat complicated, and unless you have more than three players, it's really hard to win. I wouldn't recommend this one for real small children.
In between is Bohnanza, which is a bean trading card game. The goal is to grow enough beans of a certain type that you can harvest them for money. But you only have two bean fields, and each field can only hold one type of bean. If you draw the wrong kind of bean, you might have to harvest your crop prematurely - unless you can trade it away (or even give it away!). Great game, not real complicated, not very competitive (you can at the end count up who has more money, but nobody really cares), encourages a high degree of cooperation.
Depending on the age of the kids, you might try playing scrabble, but not keep track of the scores. On the note of "victorian parlor games", are a lot of modern party games. Apples To Apples is a good one. If you can't find these locally, Fun Again Games will sell them over the net.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
That would be damn cool, but also damn impossible to program. . . I think that there should also be something dealing with increasing levels of beauraucracy as your country grows, so that it starts to become socially unstable if the beuraucrats don't handle their wants efficiently enough. . . that seems to be a real limiting agent in many large civilizations. (hence why Switzerland can reach ZPG and the US doesn't have a chance in hell at it.)
You are correct in saying that these games are not realistic. The fundamental problem is that in real life, there is no such thing as a "single minded" nation. Countries are made up of lots of independent minds pulling in different directions; it's very hard to combine this with the idea that every player controls a country.
Having said that, after I read the history of European politics and diplomacy in the lead up to the first World War, I found the similarities to a game of Diplomacy quite disturbing. Millions of people died because some countries managed to stitch up better alliances than others...
Fixing copyright
You're not really competing for any resources, just playing detective in a giant puzzle-world.
edw, if I hear one more attack of an idea based on the personality of the person who espoused it, I'm going to give up on the education system.
The question is: does SimCity, by its assumptions, advocate a particular political philosophy? I have no idea, but I do know that we'll never get anywhere by judging ideas based on whether we like or dislike the person who espouses them.
If Adolph Hitler had been the first to come up with the idea that the world was round, he would have been right. If Mussolini had been the first to insist that maggots were caused by fly eggs and not "spontaneous generation", he would have been right, too. Get it?
So though Ayn Rand may have been paranoid, made mountains out of molehills, delusional, etc. that isn't a valid argument against her ideas.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. -- Aldous Huxley
Age Of Empires 2 is like this. Limited resources, to be sure, except for food which you produce in quantity enough to purchase anything else you need.
:-)
If this rehashes another comment, sorry, but I'm not reading through the mass.
This signature does not exist. It has never existed. It is all a figment of your imagination.
One of my favorites to play with a large group of kids is "Reverse Musical Chairs." Basically, the idea is the same as musical chairs, but as chairs are removed, nobody leaves the game and everyone has to find/make/become a seat. If you've never seen 35 people scramble on to 3 folding chairs, you're really missing out.
One goal, no enemy, it's pretty cool. The only thing is that it's really only fun once with a given group of people. Most of the challenge is the cooperation aspect. Once that's worked out, the game isn't very exciting.
Now, not all games allow that, such as chess (defeat your opponent's king) or Monopoly (bankrupt your opponents). However, two games that do are Life and Careers. (Based on what I found on the Web, Careers may not even be sold any more, so the rules for it can be found here.) The purpose of Careers was to be the first player to achieve "success" which was based on a formula each player would set for themselves at the beginning of the game. Each would have to get a set amount of money, fame and happiness. So even if your opponents have more money than you, you could win because you achieved goal first. Then others could continue to play. The same with Life: even if others haven't reached Millionaire Acres yet, they can continue to play.
The point is that most games define rules for only one winner. It is up to the participants to allow others to "win" as well.
Republic of Rome is a good example. You play senators in the Roman Republic trying to become famous, or become rich, or just keep Rome from being sacked by the occasional invading army. There are, in essense, three possible outcomes: (1) Rome is sacked. All your characters die. (2) One person becomes so famous that they are made consol for life, and that person wins - but the Republic and all the ideals it stands for dies. Non-winning characters are now powerless 'advisors' to, essentially, a dictator. (3) Rome survives but no one person is so famous as to become Consol for life. Obviously, everyone wants ending number (3), however every time I play the players form two camps: the one side with a slight majority of votes, and the other with a slight minority - and the majority keeps all the honors to themselves - thus making all their character so famous that if they win any more wars, that lone character will become Consol for life. In my experience, at this time, the leading faction splits and either Rome is sacked, or a coalition government pulls it out by, essentially, cutting the most famous character out of public life completely. In fact, we used to bring famous people back once in a while specifically to take unpopular action - such as raise taxes - under the condition that they would not try to go for a solo win. Often, the player could actually have the power to simply bestow an honor on himself and win, but would not because that would end the game. Often these characters were great generals, so we would have to send them out to fight the Punic Wars, or something, and after fighting the first Punic War, they would be totally willing not to win the game (and end the game) because it would be so much fun to fight the second Punic War, instead.
So, in conclusion, we play games because they are fun, thus since winning the game ends the game, they stop the fun. Typically the people having the most fun are winning, so why should they want to end it?
I like games that can end without a "win". In Republic of Rome, it was surviving that last invading army. I'm sure people know of other examples.
Cheers,
Greg
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
This discussion reminds me of a book I read called "Finite and Infinite Games" by James P. Carse. In it, a finite game is a game played to "win" - ending in the termination of the game. An infinite game is played to continue the play at a different "level" or "type" of play - essentially to innovate. This seems the goal of the discussion, not zero/non-zero sum games, which I believe are defined as games in which by helping (or not helping) others, the total rewards of the game may be increased. I have seen 3 posts about Everquest. Although it is a non-zero sum game (you help others - in fact, you can make items for other people and sell it to them for less than they could buy similar items for and more than you can sell to a merchant for - essentially helping both you and them), it (Everquest) is clearly not an infinite game to any extent.
In the book, culture is often refered to as an example of an infinite game, but it is really something you have to get a sense of what the author is talking about. Don't just assume what you mean by "culture" is this guy's definition of infinite. After reading it, I was so caught up in infinite play that I tried to advocate it as a way of life to a couple people I knew. Then my Father pointed out feeding other people was a finite game. That shut me up.
I don't want to "re-define" this topic - I really love the discussions of both zero/non-zero games and what James P. Carse (author of Finite...) would call finite vs. inifinte games. Just wanted to point out a nice book on the subject.
Just a little more on the book: although it is a philosophy book, and I believe it is fairly modern, it is written very simply (nothing like most recent philosophy I have read). Even though I kind of dissed it's conclusions above (to live as an infinite player) I truely appreciate it as a totally different framework in which to see our actions (and our games and competitions - even the little ones we play like who gets out of the airplane first or who gets the closest "best" parking spot. Just think of all the little competitions we do every day. After reading it I asked myself about so many of these little things: should I even be concerned about these things?
To take it a step further: it allowed me to see the signes of when I was "competing" with another person: who knows the most obscure Unix commands, who knows the speed of light to more digits, who can recite the most Python (Monte) lines flawlessly, have I just gotten into a game of who's wife is better (or worse!), or who's got a better job/car/home. The frequency of this kind of interaction was really stunning to me. Of course I'm sure most of you are smarter than I and have already realized all this at a far younger age (another game...) but if you are interested in this kind of discusion about games, it is not a bad book to look at. It's $9.50 (US) at Amazon, likely free at your local library.
Cheers,
Greg
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
But then both statements are generalized crap. You seem stuck between empathy for those that "have-not" and defensiveness over those that want a part of your piece. That probably doesn't fit in the right and left wing model that forms the public debate. You may find that you do not adhere solely to either.
If all the rich were duped into contributing like that, much of the aid would simply end up in the hands of corrupt local officials, countless warlords, and numerous rebel armies...
Remember, seizing all the food aid in a region and starving your enemies, or in fact everybody but your direct supporters, makes a GREAT recruitment tactic. It's been done, is being done, and will be done. Ditto with pretty much every other form of assistance -- remember that the recipients often aren't exactly just going to repent and reform instantly no matter HOW much aid you give 'em.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
only one? hrmm nope. sorry but europe!=world.
theres no loser in drinking games. one in particular involves pointing at each other, yelling a word at them, and possibly drinking (if you pointed the wrong way) i can't remember the rules because i got really drunk when i played it but the name involves the word perfiglione.
never hear of the mongols? also the ottoman empire. both were larger than rome sizewise. at the time, most of europe was considered too primitive to bother with. the rest of it was conquered
Ever play SimStapler for the Mac? You press the mouse button on the stapler and it staples something! YOU CAN'T LOOSE! Unless you *don't* click the mouse button.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Another interesting variant of these games is played by all citizens of the united states, every day of their life. It is called "bueracracy" (sp?) and it is the government of the united states.
So did the kids who each got 30 land high on the grading curve for solving this problem?
I'm Abram Bender. You're not.
Go Climb A Rock.
All of the physical fitness of a serious competitive sport, far more satisfaction, and a heavy emphasis on cooperation.
And the cliff doesn't lose if you succeed in climbing it.
In the end, the only competition is agains one's self. Yes there are climbing competitions. Anything can be made into a competitive sport, but that is as much what climbing about as a bake-off is what cooking is about.
And kids are usually better at it than adults (come on, Dad. It's sooooo easy).
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
While the game it self was I guess zero sum, the game was definatly more fun when played with another person, thanks to its co-op nature.
Personally, I think cheats are the one redemption to most games played for score. Especially earlier FPSs (wolf, doom, nukem) - i find it more rewarding to be able to play the game, explore the maps, find secrets) than just frag 'em all and get all treasures (although that has it's own pleasure). Probably why I loved myst and riven.
~A
Linux, Vai, Satch and Guitars.. that is the life ICQ# 7357858
WARNING: The most important positive-sum group activity where multiple clans are involved is detection and exclusion of defectors in the sense of the prisoner's dilemma. Otherwise you will get cycles where people come together, cooperate, build up a wonderful environment and then attract parasites who multiply until your little society collapses and everything has to start over. This is very much like the real life cycles of civilizations.
Seastead this.
Alexander conquered the known world. Several Indian and Chinese leaders made similar claims.
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
However, as has been pointed out already, the universe is a closed system. The theories that underpin the current economic system can be rendered moot by the political dynamics that support it. Prior to the Enlightenment, no economic theory would support capitalism because every item within a specific political boundary belonged to the monarchy.
The law of supply and demand is superceded by the laws of conservation of mass and energy. All value created in the capitalist model collapses when Sol expands to Red Giant; nothing will survive it, so value is irrelevant.
The people who incorrectly apply a conservation of mass and energy arguement to economics and conclude that capitalism is a zero-sum game are correct in the long view. Nothing is more important than survival since that is all nature requires from humans. The luxuries that are produced under a capitalist system by the theoretical concept of value do not account for the finite supply of energy and resources that this planet offers.
The timeline for how long these resources may last will fluctuate based on the technological adaptations we produce to extend, or deplete, their reserves.
Capitalism is just another survival strategy that humans have developed to enhance the chance for the strong to reproduce. Ultimately, the whole process is a zero-sum game because survival is the basis for existance. Altrusitic endeavors to spread the resources out in a fair and equatable fashion only benefit the strong; there may be an intrinsic value to the feeling one gets in charity. In the end, the resources will eventually run dry and natural selection will again favor those who's strength, speed, and intellect are superior to those who cannot adapt to change.
The fossil record is replete with examples of the failed experiments of biological evolution. It remains to be seen whether humans possess the intellectual capacity to look beyond the last quarterly report and see themselves as part of 3 million years of hominid evolution.
Capitalism, in its present fashion, works best to lift all boats with rise, and spread, of wealth. Whether that will remain true is an open question. In the end, life itself is a zero-sum game that pits your intellect against that of your neighbor.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Kids are also very good at inventing zero-sum games, like "You're on MY side of the room".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Of course it's nice to be able to sit back and blow crap up, but our brains work the same way they did thousands of years ago. We still wake, work, eat, shit, and sleep.
Competition has always been a part of life. You compete for work, for accomodation, for attention of the opposite sex, etc. To say life is pointless is pretty lame, sorry.
To get this back on track with some sense of realism, there are people who enjoy mindless entertainment, and today it's easier to find it. Television, Nintendo, PS2, they didn't EXIST back in the day where people lived hand-to-mouth. The games people played then are similar to those played by kindergarten kids the world over - get stuff, pretend it's other stuff, and make your own reality. Sometimes it's just making a stone into a person and playing shop (Barbie dolls, the Simms, lots of other toys considered suited to girls, all sexism aside) sometimes it's making a stone into a person and playing beat-em-up (WWF toys, Action man, Quake, and lots of other toys considered suited to boys, all sexism aside).
Basically, role-play is the oldest, most basic, and most persistent form of game. It just so happens that the role a lot of people (typically young males, actually) would like to play is to go around blowing crap up.
Nothing to do with "pointless" or "meaningful". It's a game. You play it to have fun.
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
No wonder "it is a tough world out there", and
that Darwin's observation of "survival of the
fittest" was so readily accepted as self-evident
Truth by the Victorian English--and by any other
people who live within a money system of their
own design, such as us today. In fact, there is
not much "out there" that supports such a cynical
interpretation, claims Professor of bio-sociology
Imanishi, from Kyoto University. He has shown that
the Darwinian vision of nature as a struggle for
life simply has been completely blind to the many
more frequent cases of co-evolution, of symbiosis,
of joint development and harmonious coexistence
which prevail in all domains of evolution. Even
our own body today would not be able to survive
long without the symbiotic collaboration of
billions of micro-organism in our digestive tract
for example.
http://www.transaction.net/money/book/rethink2b.h
Altruism breeds altruism, and reciprocal acts breed
reciprocal acts. "If we feel that other people are
only out for themselves, one is wary of being
altruistic. If we feel other people are not giving,
we say, 'I'm not going to be a sucker,' " says Cronin.
"The more people understand that we are evolved
altruists, and the more people feel that no one is
taking advantage of another, the more we will become
altruistic, and the more we won't take advantage of
one another."
Why has nature designed something so useless? As
useless as being nice to the other guy? As useless
as sharing information? As useless as committing
your life to pursuing an idea whose outcome you can't
possibly know? Reputation, says Cronin, is a key
element in competition. "Once you understand that
sexual selection is displaying qualities like kindness
or goodness, or is demonstrating that you can afford
to give things away, then you understand the close
connection between flamboyance and altruism. Altruism
can be one of those evolved peacock feathers in our
minds."
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/29/paranoia.htm
In those frightening times, it was kind of an encouraging outcome--and not that bad a model of how things actually turned out.
I was once involved in a game of gnomic that will never end. One of the players managed to make a move such that he became the only player who was allowed to make moves, but at the same time rendered himself unable to move. All 20 or so players are still playing, since there's no way to end it (the initial timeout provisions had been somehow warped, IIRC). Anyway, it's a great game.
Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
I've wanted for a long time to make an online Tradewars variant. I used to log on to several dozen BBSes that all had TW running. The ones that were really hardcore were the ones that made you post first ...
anacron
Think about it.. all you do for these games is you take on the role of someone else... and you're not really competing against anyone else. Yes there are adventures where you have to go and get a certain item or items, but there are also games where the main goal, is to just live. You take the life of someone else, and try to live and stay sane.
Hunter: The Reconing is an example of that, the idea behind it is, you're a normal human in the world, who suddenly is able to see these 'otherworldly' beings around on earth. While sometimes you get rid of them, mostly, that game is to try to survive.
Basically, while RPGs can be defined as a zero sum game, it also has the potential not to be.
Nim is non-zero sum. In Nim the first person to move can always win. Kind of like in Tic-tac-toe the second person to move can always force a tie.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
I doubt that it's still being manufactured, but in "The Farming Game" players didn't really compete so much against each other as just try to avoid getting screwed by bad luck, bad weather, and, of course, the government.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
I think Jenga is fun and zero-sum.
Busy, busy, busy...
If you can't find an existing game, try to drum one up yourself based on some form of the Prisoner's Dilemna.
It shouldn't be too hard, use cards or something. And the Prisoner's Dilemna is a simple yet effective demonstration of a non-zero-sum world.
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Montesquieu, in his essay "Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness and Decline of the Roman People" describes a paradigm for the expansion and collapse that follows the following (sorry) pattern. With the aid of various social institutions, a state grows. With luck and superior institutions (very vague term, read the book) the state reaches a zenith. The reason that Carthage fell to Rome, he explains, is not that Rome was a greater civilization, but rather was still in an earlier part of a natural cycle. The greatest challenge to any group is very rarely external. Examine almost any once-great civilization, and trace its eventual collapse to internal events. The Greek nations after Alexander lost to the Romans not because they had less military manpower or drive, but because they were overspecialized and infighting. They had spend two hundred years, from about 350-150, (something like that) developing longer and longer spears for their hoplites. Unfortunately for them, the Romans opted for a mixture of foot, horse, and archers: and a 5'5 guy with eighty pounds of equipment and a 20 foot spear can't really do anything to escape an arrowstorm. Big shields don't do anything after enough time. My question is, can someone develop a game that balances zero-sum considerations, such as total war with an arch-enemy bent on destroying you and cooking your daughters, with non-zero sum considerations, such as economic managment? Seems Civ often does this; at the same time, it fails where it "expects" progress. Regression happens: The Carolingian "renaissance" in 800 didn't even catch up to Roman standards. Ptolemy had worked out a astronomical system that you could navigate by, keeping track of the various celestial phenomena to an incredibly precise level, before Christ. And in 1000, fewer people believed the earth was round. I've yet to see a video game with the capacity to lose gains in "progress" because of internal mismanagement. The essence of experience is a balance between zero-sum and non-zero sum games. Often, we are caught playing non-zero sum games when we oughtn't; and yet sometimes zero-sum thinking is exactly what we need. To wit, and no offence, this is not intended as a flame: the PLO is playing a zero-sum game: only one winner will get control of the land from southern lebanon to the negev. The Israeli gov't (for now) is trying to play a non-zero sum game: the vital waters of the internation cash flow will give to everyone, more. But are the Israelis right in playing for all to win, when dealing with people whose sworn objective is their annihilation? Could they be making a huge mistake? (My intuition would agree with another line from Montesquieu, implying that a Palestinian child, if raised the same way as an Israeli, would understand the comprise. Optimistic... the big fish eat the little ones...) Less writing, more thinking. NotRealGod (no morality without metaphyics, no metaphysics without revelation, no revelation without reason, and no reason, no reason at all...)
heh, like, who cares about winning?
<---[singularity sig]
-- could be a negative-sum game tho >:]
<---[singularity sig]
...with host Jeff Bezos!
<---[singularity sig]
Be sure to log on to our website and play Self-Mutilation Chat against millions of others!
<---[singularity sig]
Gene Rayburn Rules!
<---[singularity sig]
...this sort of relates to the idea I (and many others before me) have had for a while. The world is still operating as if there isn't enough for everybody, so we still have to compete. Regardless of what the resource is -- food, electricity, land, heck, even information -- we keep acting as if there's only a limited supply, so we better not share!
Two examples spring to mind. One is that, for the past 30-35 years, the U.S.A. has had the capacity to produce enough food to feed every person on Earth, thanks to technological advances. Even though our population has nearly doubled in that time, we *STILL* can produce 30 times as much food as we need.
And yet we don't. Why? Because who's gonna pay for the shipping and distribution to other countries? If the top 1% of the wealthiest people in the country each contributed half of their money/resources to this and other problems, we could have an entire world with a solid communications, travel, and most importantly, EDUCATIONAL infrastructure. THE ENTIRE WORLD. But, no, the rich would never do that; it's their money and they earned it, and screw everyone else.
The second example are these giant housing tracts out on the edges of urban areas (like the deserts surrounding Los Angeles), that were built with the expectation of filling up with emigrants from the cities, but instead failed. Thousands of homes stand empty. And yet we still have homeless people. Why? Because they can't pay for it. What if we gave them the housing, and tried to help them become productive members of society? Train them, teach them, help them. No, we can't do that, it would cost too much money.
It just makes me sad. I honestly look forward to the day someone invents a general assembler, that can not only replicate food and water (and building materials) from raw materials like dirt and rocks, but can also replicate *itself*. Maybe it's a pipe dream, but I don't think so. Give nano 20 years and we'll see what happens.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Aha! You've fallen into the trap of deceptive simplicity. The point is when you play this game multiple times in a row -- the iterative Prisoner's Dilemma.
I did this once as a bonus problem with a roomfull of math kids. For points I used Skittles. I carefully explained the rules, divided the whole class into pairs and they played for 10 rounds.
Most of the class followed your strategy. If their opponent cooperated on the first round then defected the other nine, they got 14 Skittles and their "opponent" got 9. I asked the class "how do you win this game", and most of the replied "by getting more candy than your opponent". BZZT!
Exactly one pair of kids cooperated the entire way through. They each got 30 Skittles. I pointed this out, and figurative light bulbs flashed on all around the room. It was freaking perfect.
Ever play Konami's bemani series of games, like Dance Dance Revolution, where you have to match these series of arrows coming up the screen by stomping on a platform beneath you? Pretty easy concept, right? Thing is, there's really no losers, sure there's vs. mode, but you play for fun, to dance... sometimes, there's a crowd watching you play, so that's a plus, and besides, you get a pretty good workout that way. Also, some people do all these tricks like touch the platform w/ their hands and knees, it's all about the dancing, the game is just a platform... and it's fun!
Multi-planet Risk!
Requires 2 or more boards, and at least 3 players.
Players can start on any board, each player gets dealt 5 country cards and can place 20 armies on those countries. All countries not occupied by a person are occupied by "peaceful natives".
Once you control a continent, you may enter the Space Race. You give up your continent bonus for (roll a die) years, at the end of which time you may send (roll 3 dice) to another planet every year.
Landing site is determined by pulling a random country card; and yes, you can land on another player. War ensues.
The winner is either (a) the player who stays awake longest or (b) the player who has effective control of all planets.
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
Its an interesting note that thats true and not true. Chess is such an amazingly complex game.
I could even argue that there are times when an oponent takes a knight or a bishop, they gain nothing, or lose more than they gain.
All in all, more important than the peices, is the position.The actual utility (value?) if a peice changes with its position.
Everything in the game though, is a tradeoff. There are times when the best move is the one that results in the loss of an important peice. (ever notice that most people will not trade their queen, even if its the only way to avoid checkmate? - even some really good players fall into that trap).
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I would think that most things that don't follow this pattern are typically called "play" rather than called "games."
But there have been some good cooperative games written over the years for computers. My favorite is a very old game called bubble bobble (orginal nintento!)
dean
Look at your figures. The total for compete/co-operate (5) is less than the total for both co-operating (6).
You get an interesting result: on their first go, people will instinctively play the game to find a winner. And there'll be one, but that person will often have got there by doing the other players down. Then you tell the players that you're calculating their personal score by dividing the total among everyone. Sure enough, on their next go they'll all co-operate, so as to share in the increased benefits for the whole community. Analogies and lessons about real life are left to the reader.
(I've been told by someone who should know that there are cultures where this point is lost on the people, because they think like that anyway.)
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
I'd have to say that the Oregon Trail is a non-zero sum game. You don't necessarily "win" or "lose", you just "survive". You survive by managing your resources, and trading intelligently to get those resources. You're not trying to beat anyone, and your only goal is to get to your destination alive.
I think everyone here is just arguing semantecs. We have plenty of non-zero sum games. - They're just not considered games.
Tennis is a zero sum game. There is a winner and a loser.
Going to the movies with your buddies is not a zero-sum game. You could all have fun, or all not have fun or something in between.
Find me a "game" without a winner and a loser.
>And there was the X-Terminal vendor who wanted to
>adapt the simulator in SimCity into a game
>called "Sim MIS", that they would distribute for
>free to Managers of Information Systems, whose
>job it is to decide what hardware to buy! The
>idea was that the poor overworked MIS would have
>fun playing this game in which they could build
>networks with PCs, X-Terminals, and servers
>instead of roads with residential, commercial,
>and industrial buildings), that had disasters
>like "viruses" infecting the network of PC's,
>and "upgrades" forcing you to reinstall Windows
>on every PC, and business charts that would
>graphically highlight the high maintanence cost
>of PCs versus X-Terminals. Their idea was to use
>a fun game to subtly influence people into buying
>their product, by making them lose if they
>didn't. Unlike the oil company, they certainly
>realized the potential to exploit the indirect
>ways in which a game like SimCity can influence
>the user's mind, but they had no grip on the
>concept of subtlety or game design.
Wow that sounds really cool. I bet I could I wrote a game that 'simulates' forcing you to reinstall windows. Give me your email address and I'll make a game that lets you control spam in your virtual inbox.
How about a game that teaches problem solving ability by deleting a random file on your hard drive, then YOU have to figure out which one it was and how to get it back.
touche.
I used to play the Ungame when I was a kid... I must still have it at home, I'll have to go check it out. I don't remember it too well, other than some parts of the board... the chalet for example. There were cards you'd have to draw that were kinda like chance cards, you'd have to do different things, like hug someone playing or tell a story on a certain subject or something. I'm thinking it is probably zero sum though, but a lot less competitive than most board games.
I have been playing role playing games for 11 years, and they are one and all non-zero sum games. People discount these games as for freaks or crazy people that are going to go around using mideval weapons on someone or dressing up like a kook and running around manhattan scaring the locals.
:)
The truth is that all of these games are nothing but a chance to explore your imagination. You never win, but you gain. You can lose by dying, but you can always start again. The benefit is that you think when you play, and you mostly play together as opposed to against one another.
Computer games have this as well in the form of Muds , Moos and Mushes, or games like Asheron's call. Not that most of you didn't already know that
At the material level it obviously is not because pieces leave the board.
However, the game starts off drawn, both sides exactly equal. But, the only way to have a better position on the board is for the other player to have a correspondingly inferior position.
To say its not a zero sum game would mean that if two players exchange pawns to an even (drawn) position, both would be worse off than before.
The game is not judged by absolute strength of the pieces, but by the relative positions of those pieces board.
If its not zero sum, then I challenge you to show me a move where either: 1. Player A is better off and Player B is better or the same, or 2. player A is worse off and player B is worse or the same.
t
Basically you could put money into a country to influence its beliefs. This would also influence bordering countries to lesser extents. But if you were caught tinkering with, say, East Germany, the Soviets would get highly pissed and demand you remove yourself from there and possibly make a concession somewhere else. At some point you would have to draw the line or nukes would fly. This basically comes down to guessing what random number the computer has picked, since there was little feedback on hostility to guide you. So your only way of learning what would provoke a nuclear was by trial and error. Not much of a game in my opinion.
Oh, and Global Thermonuclear Warfare is not zero sum.
t
To reiterate: Improving your position will weaken your opponents position by the exact same amount. This certainly qualifies as being zero sum.
Also, since the discussion was originally about it being a zero sum game, and not a game consisting of zero sum moves, chess still qualifies. The result of a chess match is 1-0, .5-.5, or 0-1. The only way to improve your score is to take that much away from someone else.
t
Are you suggesting both players now have a better than 50% chance of winning?
t
A mere pawn capture does not constitute a game of chess.
If you kept score by material, both sides would be strongly negative. If you kept score by enjoyment, any range from both being winners to both being losers would be possible. But, if you keep score by wins draws and losses, it is a zero sum game.
t
Rubbish - non zero-sum games often have winners, winning and losing has nothing to do with a game being zero sum or not.
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
That's not what zero sum means.
Games can have winners/losers and be zero-sum or not, but these two things are not necessarily related.
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Yes, I do know what you really meant, but thats not chess - it's like confusing squash scoring with a squash ladder. Why not talk about Elo ratings as well - that's not a zero sum game, and it's related....
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
When was the last time you played a normal game of chess and ended a game with 32 pieces on the board? There are some games where you re-use pieces captured from an opponent, but chess isn't one of them. If I take your rook, I don't get to use it as mine.
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
After P-K4 P-K4, for example both players, by your definition have not improved their position? I suggest that both players have improved their position, or are we know splitting down to half moves?
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Most RPGs - (Advanced) Dungeons and Dragons, Chivalry & Sourcery, Call of Cthulu etc.
Board games: Cluedo (Clue), Diplomacy, Risk.
Card Games: cribbage.
All of the above are zero-sum games - technically I don't think Monopoly is a zero sum game either as there is no reason to regard the cash supply as limited to that supplied in the box...
You could always try the Prisoners Dilemma or similar - try Douglas Hofstadters "Metamagical Themas" for ideas.
Is it part of the human condition that games that have no winner are considered worthless by most people - how many adult (or older child) games are there where winning is not the object?
----
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
"Myst" ends the game without destruction. "Civilization"-esque games teach both creation of value through trade and alliances and destruction through war. If you want to embody the real world, war/destruction should be a possibility. "Creatures" is a game for the sake of entertainment, as is "Aquazone". The first person shooter has its place, though.
Whatever you call them to differentiate them from being confused by computer/console RPGs, these games are the modern equivalent of charades. I'm actually rather suprised that you didn't immediately think of them. The point of every RPG I've ever played is to simply have fun -- there is no such thing as "winning" (although I suppose you could say that you lose if your character dies but even that depends on circumstances and how you look at it).
Unfortunately since I can't be bothered to actually wade through the commends on this node I'm sure a million people have already said this. Not like it matters anyway as this comment is so far down.
Like Monopoly, it's better with your own house rules. For example, you don't have to buy the black die, and instead it is rolled for each person during his turn.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I think that it is also easily possible to turn "zero sum" games into cooporative endevors, or to ignore the win/loose asspect and just play the game.
For example, chess and Monopoly. Chess does have a clear winner and looser, but I rarely play chess to win -- to beat the other person. In fact, if I did, I would quickly become very bitter from constantly getting my butt kicked. Chess is a game of great beauty to me... there are a nearly infinite number of outcomes; pieces move in millions of combinations to make nearly every game unique. To play chess against someone with great skill is a thrill; you are allowed to peek into the processes that shape their mind. Good chess is an artform.
Still, there is a winner and a looser... Monopoly does not have to be that way. Hell, you could make it much more like the real world by bringing the values of the last row or two of proporties down a bit. Even then, most people I know get bored with Monopoly after the first hour or two, and the game ends without a winner. Even if people don't get bored, it is possible to create a complicated real estate market within the game, with no winners or loosers, just two or three really rich players.
I'm sure that there are better examples that one could use, but ultimatly, if one wishes to play a "non-zero sum" game for fun, then any game they play can be made into a non-zero sum game with no trouble at all. If one is always striving to prove superiority over others, then any game played with them will be zero sum.
----------
Rhapsody in Numbers
...is most definitely not zero-sum :-)
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Thank you! That's the clearest and most understandable definition I've heard so far.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
In life, we don't count matter as the only thing worth striving for - it is not the absolute measure of success that money is in monopoly.
In life, when we have more money than anyone else, many (most?) of us give some away, because we gain a feeling of well-being out of that act.
Attention, friendship, acceptance, validation and respect are just 5 examples of non-exhaustible "commodities" (I avoided love because it's too obvious).
The amount of matter in the universe makes it relatively theoretical to talk about "all matter being consumed", and matter isn't ever consumed (as far as I know) - it is merely converted into another form of energy, but the total amount of matter remains constant. We might say "all matter is in use at any given time", but that is merely to say that we have reached the pinnacle of efficiency, rather than the limit of our existence.
The same applies in economics - money circulates - it is not consumed and it is not owned - it is merely a medium of exchange - in a way, it is the lowest common denominator by which all other things are divisible. The number of different goods and services available in the world means that no one person can be capable of doing them all. One person could own them all (Rupert Murdoch? Bill Gates?) but you assumed only a limited number of actors - if we have millions of people, who cares what the head honcho does or owns, we still all need to buy stuff off each other (or him, but made by each other) and therefore commerce lives on, because the head honcho will need to employ people to make things in his factories, run his business and fix his machines.
I'll stop now - I'm rambling...
Salocin.com
I'm not quite sure whether Settlers of Catan is what you're looking for. Trade usually benefits both, if you don't trade, you won't win.
It's incredible successful hereabouts, the US edition is actually prettier than the original. Very fun.
Censorship on Slashdot
I played it only once, but I liked it very much and it seems to fit. Each Player is a Hobbit, together they must destroy the One Ring. Cooperation is the key, and even then you would need some practice to win your first time.
It's homepage is in german, but you can hassle them for a translation. Or order the german game at your favorite bookshop.
Censorship on Slashdot
Did anyone ever port this game to a modern environment? Yes I know about Win64 (A Commodore 64 emulator for Win32, NOT a 64-bit version of Windows[tm]) but I think we can do better.
This thing was ancient history but the poster's right - you couldn't succeed in MULE without cooperation with the other players, and if the colony's total worth didn't exceed $60k at the end of the game you ALL lost!
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
The longing search for a non-zero-sum game eh? That *must* be why people are playing so much solitaire!
-
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
"Take basketball: zero-sum game? No. Points aren't scarce; your opponent getting a point doesn't take one from you. That's the definition of zero-sum."
Zero-Sum Game? YES! Points ARE scarce...the game HAS a time limit! You can't score WHILE your opponent has control of the ball. That's why the defense tries to STEAL the ball! That's why you run down the shot clock when you're ahead of your opponent!
Have you EVER watched Basketball??
Unlike M:TG, which comes out with a new collectable expansion every month or two, INWO has only had a few expansions in its life, and one of them isn't even collectable! INWO SubGenius is a stand-alone version of INWO produced in cooperation with the Church of the SubGenius. (Yes, the "Bob" guys.) Ah, heck, let me quote:
BTW, INWO encourages players to create their own cards. Steve Jackson Games sells blank cards expressly for the purpose.
In case you haven't guessed, this is one of my favorite games of all time. Buy it, you won't regret it!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
actually in college my friends and i started playing scrabble without scoring, and we had a lot more fun with it. we didn't get so damn anal about "well that's not a word" or whatever---we just played, and the "winner" was just whoever made the coolest word. It was a lot more fun than trying to keep score in scrabble!
--
"I think there is a world market for, maybe, five computers." __ IBM Chairman, 1943 __
This only works because you know when the game will end. On a game where you don't know the number of iterations, this strategy is impossible.
Played properly, this game is all about the playing, and cooperation between the players. Of course party conflict is also part of the game, but if the end result of a game of D&D is that your players destroy each other I would submit you are "doing it wrong".~ ~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
Guess which wrote this...
Here's a game I picked up from a Computer Summer Camp in Virginia many years ago: Everyone sits in a circle and places their hands in front of them. Each person crosses their right arm over the left arm of the person to their right. (my l hand (left persons r hand) (right persons l hand) my r hand). The players pick a start person and direction, and players slap their hands to form a continuous circle. One hand is slapped, then the hand next to that one slaps, etc. To make it fun and challenging, any player may slap _twice_, which indicates that the direction of rotation shall reverse, and a fist slam, which means "skip the next hand". These work like Uno(R). Any player who fails to slap or slaps out of turn loses the hand that slapped out of turn or should have slapped. Last player left with a hand wins. This game provided lots of entertainment back then. (It's harder than it sounds, especially at higher speeds!)
Bippity/Boppity:
Everone stands in a circle. One person chosen as "It" approaches one of the circle-members and says either "Bippity" or "Boppity". If It says Bippity, then the circlemember must respond with Boppity. If It says Boppity, circlemember may not say anything. It may repeatedly say both words to anyone any number of times. i.e. you can go up to someone and say "bippity bippity boppity bippity" and the circlemember must make the proper response, then move on to someone else. When a circlemember either fails to say boppity when required, or says it out of place, they become It.
Advanced rules for this game
Elephant,"Charlie's Angels"
It may approach someone and say "Elephant". After It says this, the person they spoke to plus their neighbouring friends must pose like an elephant(center person sticks their hand out like a trunk and the sides raise their far hand to their head to imitate an ear. If this is not successful (ie someone goofs), that person is It. If more than one goofs, It selects someone to be It. Same thing with Charlie's Angels, except that the trio must pose in the manner of this show. (three gun pose, outer members turned to the side)
Yeah, its all zeroes. :-)
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
I always liked role playing games best for this reason. While I enjoy watching others play "strategy" (read : war, or continuation by other means) games, I've never liked them myself. I was watching my friends play Settlers of Catan the other day and I realized that I would never be able to enjoy the game, because it takes a situation that cries out for cooperation, and artificially forces a zero sum outcome on it. (for the players of the game, I realized that the way I think, every time I got a chance to move the thief, I'd put him on the desert hex where he wouldn't hurt anyone.)
I've always liked long term card games when the people I'm playing with don't need to obsessively keep score. wist or gin rummy and just saying "oh, I lost that hand, lets play again" instead of cribbage looking at the score peg where one person is 200 points ahead, but INSISTS on keeping on playing and will not accept a graceful surrender.
kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
I'm afraid it is you that missed the point. Prisoners dilemma is nothing like poker, because in poker, everyone brings money to the table, and the same amount of money leaves in different people's pockets. In order to leave with more money, someone else has to leave with less. This is the very definition of a zero sum game. In the above example, the kids were NOT competeing for the skittles. A skittle for you does not come out of the mouth of another student, it comes from the "banker" of the game. You can both leave with more than you came in with. This is a non zero sum game.
Its really sad/funny that you can't see that with the terms already there in the discussion.
PS, you might have been close if you talked about blackjack, where several players play against the house. If you pay attention to other people's cards, you can sometimes cooperate to force the house into busting, rather than everyone trying to optimise their individual hands.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
As I understood the orriginal game, you are close, but no cigar. Two prisoners were given the chance to inform on each other. If one informed and the other didn't, he would be set free in exchange for helping get a very high sentance for the cooperator. If both defected, they screwed each other - both got long sentances, because the gaurds had enough evidence to keep both. But if neither informed (dual cooperation) there was not enough evidence to convict either of the serious crime and they both got short sentances for lesser crimes.
The points then, indicated the overall effect of their behaviour, not, as you indicated a long term attempt to screw the other. If you rat on your buddy, this time you might go free, but next time, he'll remember and rat you too and you're both screwed. Cooperate, and you may serve a little time, but next time you will again only take the small fall instead of getting screwed.
Prisoner's dilemma is all about non zero sum, thats what it was developed to explore. Your method would be pointless as a learning tool for economics and psychology.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
I want to play with your friends! Why do people have to play pictionary as a competition? The fun part is drawing and guessing, why risk ruining it with stress or blaming someone for "losing us the game"?
Competitive games have their place and sure they can be fun, but sometimes the process is a lot more enjoyable if you just do it moment to moment than having to be the "winner" at the end.
Think about kids playing "tag". Unless you have a bunch of jerks who hate one or two kids, you have brief moments of competition all strung together but no need for an end winner or loser.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
You can't apply Machiavellian principles to a group with 16 people in it.
- The Prince
is about city-states, not a bunch of boy scout wanna-be's. Yeah, yeah, -1 (offtopic).Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
Good point, and the same that my wife just made. It depends whether you take the "losers" definition or the "every gain is balanced by a loss" definition; both are presented below, and I don't know enough about game theory to decide. I'm fairly convinced that the price / cost volatility in the game (eg landing on Mayfair with a hotel is 2000 pounds, against an investment of 1000 pounds) means as time -> infinity, players -> 1. (I have no proof, I would be fascinated to see some.) This would satisfy the "losers" definition. Anyone got more detail on this?
The one and only!!!!
There's an excellent game called Tikal from Rio Grande Games that is non-zero-sum while still competitive. The game is complex enough for adults and requires multiple layers of meta-strategy.
The object of the game is to get as many points as possible. This is done by uncovering sections of an archaeological dig (Tikal) and assigning people to discover as much as they can. Resources and time are both limited, but it's possible to gain points from other players' sites without taking the points away from them. This is made possible by a stepped scoring system that allows each player to maximize points before they're tallied.
To me, the strongest aspect of this game is the Othello-like possibility of turning a competitor's points to your advantage without necessarily "robbing" them. It makes it possible to win the game by a comfortable margin even after trailing behind for most of the game.
~chrisRead the full text my book Perl for the Web
A fundamental property of all games is to have some goal. In some games, players compete for the prize, either individually or in teams; in other games players co-operate to share the prize. Traditional blood-sports, such as fox hunting or beagling, where a group works together to catch (and kill) some animal are cooperative games. There are also humane derivatives of hunting games, such as the paper chase or hashing, where the goal is to find and follow a trail.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Any roleplaying game fits ... Since the point of most RPGs is to work together.
That doesn't rule out a zero-sum game between Team Good and Team Evil.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The initial set of rules in Mao is similar to Bartok. (Read more about Mao at Everything.)
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The gamemaster's ultimate goal is neither coincident with the players' (if, above all else, he wanted the players to reach their goal, he could make it insanely easy for them to do so) nor opposed to it (if he wanted to stop them from achieving their goal, he could do that as well). The gamemaster's goal is to create an interesting game
Think dissociative identity disorder. A gamemaster can also be analyzed as two separate players; one represents Team Evil (who engages in zero-sum gaming against Team Good), and the other is the referee (who engages in non-zero-sum activity with both Team Good and Team Evil).
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
It wasn't that there were no rules, but that any rule immediately becomes effective if declared. This led to things like:
Calvin: You just stepped into a vortex spot, you have to spin around until you fall down!
Hobbes: Sorry, but this vortex spot is in the boomerang zone, so it returns to whoever called it.
Also, there are points in Calvinball ("Okay, the score is oggy to boogy." "I already had oogy!"), but that's probably not the point.
There's a game called 1000 Blank White Cards that's pretty interesting. Basically you take a stack of blank cards, draw pictures on them and then away you go. It definitely blurs the line between "games" and "play" since the object of the game is entirely up to the players. It might work very well with children because they are so attuned to the concept of "pretend".
Tony
_____________
I'll bet / with my Net / I can get / those things yet.
_____________
I'll bet / with my Net / I can get / those things yet.
--Dr. Seuss
There is a game called Enlightenment that I beleaves fits. At the start every one can advance, as some one gets ahead they must give to others inorder to advance at all. Sady I am not able to find a link for the game and the last time I saw it was about 8 or 9 years ago. it seemed that few people wanted to play a game where you had to help others rather then step on them.
Question reality.
I believe the term for that is "cold war". :) It's not a zero-sum situation, but only because everybody loses.
-Erf C.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
that adam duritz is a sell out. he wears hair extensions.
I think we do that in life too, turn everything into competition. The way our society from grade school on up is about who's got the better pokemon, who's got the better television, who's got the hotter chick, who's got the hooch, who got into the better college, who got the better job... Our lives now require us to prove that we are better than at least something out there.
Not that I'm supporting that all the time, I think that cooperation would yield much higher results than competition in many instances but society seems to place a higher appreciation on one being better than another.
One of my favorite games of all time. Perhaps one day it will be ported to other platforms (namely Linux,) so that other people can enjoy it. As a Mac user, I feel privledged to have EV and EV: Override to play.
So long as the circle isn't overtaken by hacksturbators, it is a great way to spend a sunny afternoon. Here in Victoria, BC, there are three or four people who can hack all day solo without the bag hitting the ground. Get them in a circle and it feels like all day in between the times that you get to kick it.
There was an old board game my friends and I used to play called "Stock Market" If you played it well and long enough, you could actually run the game out of the money it came with. We were eventually making million dollar and billion dollar bills to keep playing. An excellent game for an example of how wealth is created.
tcd004
Hey, Monopoly is not zero-sum. Each round, each player gets a reward for passing through the start field. So there will always be much more money in the game when the game is finished, compared to the lously resources each player had when they started.
It is also a fun game, both for adults and children (and trust me: children learn math fast if they play this game). Besides, it's so extremely frustrating for the looser, that it teaches you to keep up the spirit when loosing.
Sure, monopoly is about competition, but hey, it's one of the more entertaining games out there... And, you go through so many ranges of emotion: greed, frustration, happiness, pride, envy, anger, exploitation, selfishness, winning and loosing. In short: a great game!
There's a lot of party games that can be played by a single team in an attempt to maximize the team score ("Password", "Taboo", etc.). I've got a group of friends practically addicted to playing "Taboo" in an attempt to see how high a score we can get in one turn.
And, of course, D&D or any other type of roleplaying game is evidenced by a group attempting to help each other advance in achievement level. (Assuming that you don't stipulate a static world and count all the monsters and unearthed treasures as "losses".)
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
There's always games like Axis and Allies. Sure, it is zero-sum in that there are two opposing teams. But within each team, you don't win or lose. For example, it is generally in the Allies' best interest to protect Russia early on in the game. In fact, England may give up their own strategic goals in order to help out Russia. By so doing, both countries end up better off.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Hey kids, who wants to play a few rounds of "Prisoner's Dilemna"? Just remember, don't give away your strategy in advance! C'mon, you can beat tit-for-tat, can't you?
- Energy in games like Total Annihilation or Red Alert 2 (from various power sources, whether nuclear power plants, solar plants, or Tesla generators)
- Gold, if traded or yielded from garrisoned relics, in Age of Empires (1/2); while mined gold is finite, traded gold is infinite, and via commodity trade, you theoretically can acquire infinite amounts of any resource given enough time
- Reinforcements are free in Ground Control or conditionally free in Dungeon Keeper 2 (if the proper infrastructure exists to support them (though to build that infrastructure, it's true that you have to compete against enemies for gold))
- Gold in Majesty, where your units gain gold by defeating spawned monsters; while one could argue that the monsters are simply the commodity being fought over, monsters spawn infinitely anyway even in the middle of your town
If any of you is a gamer and hasn't tried one of these yet, I suggest you at least play a demo.I think is is as non zero-sum game as it can get now. Sure there are goal, but no one really knows what their goal is and people spends months interacting and finding something to do. Some will chose to do nothing and some will set their own goals. Very non-linear, very MUD, very addicting.
In the de Bono Super Mind Pack he has a cooperation game in which players build hexagons from smaller triangle pieces. They can exchange pieces as well as get pieces from the central heap. It is possible to win by building the most hexagons, but if the ratio of used & free pieces is low then everyone loses. This has been called a zero-sum game.
Sex is a non-zero sum game. Though I don't recommend playing it with children.
Now, most of our games didn't end up like this, but every once in a while, something would balance just right, and we would end up at this kind of stalemate of ever-increasing armies..
Edward Burr
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
But the land was already there, and now the people are not, so in effect, the world itself has lost something. There is now a physical lack of something in existence, thus, a loss.
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In Simcity the idea is to progress further then you did last time, and to do that you earn money.
:(
Doh, progression and money, defintly disqualifies SimCity as being Zero Sum,
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The reason that Zero Sum Games are so popular is that there is a point to them. In a day and age where people are without direction and have no idea what they are here for, it's nice to be able to sit back and blow crap up.
Of course, compare this to ages past, where life defintly did have a set purpose and a set goal (get X amount of wheat farmed in X amount of time, or else you starve) the idea of playing a game WITHOUT purpose was a nice thought, since every minute of every day of their lives was setout by directions, people liked the idea of an occasional break from working to get stuff, and enjoyed None Zero Sum Games (should that be cap'd?) for the sake of the leisure they allowed.
Reversal of roles in life, reversal of what we define as fun.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Sure there's a winner and losers, but you get a chance to be the winner again the next time the level rotates, which is usually a few minutes away, and you respawn instantly when you die instead of being kept out until the round is over like in facist games like Counter-Strike. Plus there is no hardcoded limit on the number of frags you can get, it's determined only by your skill.
Settlers spend large amounts of time upgradeing land to create value where none existed polution destroys fertile farms and rageing armys blow up roads railways and forests! I'm sure this is not quite what you wanted but the best example that popped into my head.
It is worth noting that just because a game is competitive, that does not imply that it is zero-sum. Consider, for example, a competitive game where a "tie" is possible. If two kids play this game, the possible outcomes are 1 win-1 lose, and both tie. Unless you assign the value 0 to a tie, the game has a variable sum.
Also, just because a game is cooperative in nature, that does not mean it is not zero sum. Proof is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)
Whoops, I was wrong. This game is still in production! Go buy a copy, but be sure to leave your friendships at the door. Non-zero-sum does not mean no losers! ;-)
In fact, many of the Japanese games, are non-zero sum. Karaoke, of course, where even tone-deaf people like me can have a great laugh, arcades with Dance Dance Revolution where a score is kept, but it's not really the point, to the newer versions based around Para-Para (think of John Travolta dancing in Saturday Night Fever!) which are just so much fun to do in groups.
Life--No one likes it so no one will play
NY Ranger Drinking Game--Everytime the Rangers Score you take a drink, since that never happens no one plays
Web Surfing--I like counting banner ads
Religion--Find one that isn't just out for your money; there isn;t one so no one wins
HOWEVER, UNO is the game. You don't play UNO to win; you play to make the two people next to you lose. SO I would say UNO is the best game for this discussion.
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This
Inventor Peter Suber quotes one of the "interesting, maybe impossible goals" of Nomic is to try and make a game in which "at least one" rule is completely impossible to change, yet at the same time there are still some rules which may change.
Lego is a zero-sum game if you're playing with your sister ("That big green one's MINE!").
...like D&D are great.
All though not intended to be so, if you play GTA my way it can be considered a zero-sum game. That is, to play it with cheat codes on and unlock all the levels.. I basically just drive around and blow things up. Many mmorpgs can be played as zero-sum games, such as Ultima Online where I basically just sat around role playing all day... Allthough I was competeing in a sense, trying to make my character better at times.. It still leads to the possibilites of zero-summedness.. I think the whole concept of zero-sum titles is a very good idea. Things such as "Microsoft Flight Simulator" could be good examples of this. I have been playing video games a lot for many years, and have come to the point where I've competed so much that I'd rather just play to have fun. The whole idea of turning something on, being entertained without having to think and then turning it off is such a good idea. So many games these days stick to the mission based mentality. I believe that if the idea of zero-sum games was harnesed properly, it could be the next big step for video games.
- soy
these are just for fun... unless there is a scoring system I dont know about...
zork% mv *.asp
283 files eaten by a grue
I used to play Scorched Earth (the BEST multiplayer game ever) back in high school, and I remember the game allowing you to play with a free market economy. You still had to beat your enemies to win cash, but the more certain items were purchased, the more expensive they got. Similarly, the less something was purchased, the cheaper it became. Let's face it, capitalism drives most of the free world, but most games don't take that into account
The village had had a problem with teen suicide, and we were working with some of the younger kids there.
We thought it would be fun one day to have a relay race, in hopes that the running would help them mellow a bit.
We divided the group into two teams, formed them into straight lines, and explained to them that they were supposed to run down the road to a certain point, turn around and race back and tag the next runner.
To our chagrin, they ran down to the turn-around spot, stopped, waited for the other runner to catch up, and ran with the other runner back to the starting line. The race ended in a tie.
It was a good lesson for me. Particularly in light of the harsh environment they lived in. Competition of the European sort in a survival situation would have surely ended in death for the winners and losers.
On a slightly different note, that is what I find so utterly repugnant about the TV show Survivor. In a true survival situation, a Machiavellian jerk would be banished or killed. That sort of soap-opera chicanery will only minimize the chances of survival of the group.
Well, I guess there is the possibility of running out of alcohol, but then everybody is a loser.
--------------------------------------
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
This is a German board game that is less well known in the states, but is distributed here by Mayfair games.
This game is very well designed. The board is composed of hexagons that are shuffled each time. You have to aquire resources to build settlements, which in turn allows to build more. It has been dubbed a cross between simCity and monopoly, but is more entertaining than either of those.
People get points, but no one "owns" anything. Therefore the "competition" (which is necessary to define this sense of game) is simply over who knows the most words, not who can take who's land, or who has what tile, etc...
The only limited resource is time and letters. But that's equal for all parties.
Does that count?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Any online gaming community is a non-zero sum gain if you don't look at it from an individual perspective, and this is also how economics works. Economics is zero sum gain from an individuals perspective, but from macro economic and gaming perspective, the more people playing the better.
I think all the Abe Oddworld games would qualify as non-zero sum games. The object is to save your fellowman, and you get penalized if THEY die. But your character can get killed over and over again. Plus it's fun!!!
The version of the game that you have proposed has different victory conditions for the players. Your version makes the implicit assumption that the students want to maximize their own individual collection of skittles. You also allow the players to communicate and therefore adopt a cooperative strategy that allows for the players to pursue the goal of maximizing total skittles accumulated. Seen this way, the players as a team have a choice between recieving 6, 5 or 2 skittles per round based on their strategy. This is an interesting variant on the game, but very different from the original.
...
The original game is more of a winner-take-all as the player with more credits is let off the hook (the "credits" are in and of themselves not valuable). As well, the players are not allowed to communicate and therefore cannot strategize, coerce, or otherwise influence eachother. I will assume that players are aware of their own running score, and therefore aware of the other player's last move. I will assume that if the prisoners tie in score, that neither will be let off (why would the prison be so generous?) Gaining more credits puts you in a better position to be let off than your opponent - therefore the original game is zero-sum. In addition, it only makes sense to make moves that will possibly increase your score relative to the other inmate. Cooperation yeilds only relative increases of 0 (both get 3 credits) or -5 (opponent competes) , while competition yields relative increases of 0 (both get 1 credit) or 5 (opponent cooperates). It is clear that you will never win unless at some point you compete when the other player cooperates, however if you only compete, and the other player only competes, then you are both up the creek. So then the game becomes "how can i convince the other player to cooperate without losing relative points?"
Theoretically you could try to communicate with the other player by encoding a message in binary into your moves, but unless the game lasts a signficant number of turns, the opponent knows to look for the message, the opponent knows ascii (or whatever you send yor code in), the opponent knows what parity you are using, and the opponent cares at all that you've handed over the release from prison to him by trowing in so many cooperative moves
in any case, it just goes to show that different games teach different lessons, and it is not valid to assert that just because coooperating in one variant of a game is beneficial, that the same is true for the real world (tm).
i see. so what i had was a sort of mish-mash of the skittles version with the original version. as for learning tools - my point was that a game can be designed to get across any idea, so using a game to teach a lesson is about as good as using a work of fiction. neither are neccesarily based in reality.
I own a copy of this. The problem wasnt that noone wanted to help each other the problem was that the game sucked. Way too long and way to boring.
Pithy, yet ultimately meaningless, phrase expressed with gusto!
The object of the game of Mao, if you play it right, is not to 'win'... there's no winning. If you complete things before anyone else, you rejoin the game. The game is wonderful for two reasons:
. txt
1/ You are not told the rules; you work them out.
2/ The rules are never always the same.
I really can't describe it more... "No-one can be... told what Mao is. You have to see it for yourself"
The version we play is explained by example at: http://www.shelluser.net/~kwtam/puz/mao_cambridge
It's not a zero-sum game when you have to pay $50 to play.
Actually the only rule is that you can't play it the same way twice.
Yeah, but that's not the usual modus operandi in D&D. Usually the goal is to make your character the baddest ass on the block, and to make sure the other characters and/or the Dungeonmaster doesn't stab you in the back. I have never been in worse dysfunctional situations than in the middle of a cutthroat D&D all-nighter.
D&D a non zero-sum game? Shehyeahright!
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The trick is to add a fictional extra player, who is awarded the negative of the cumulative score. The n player non-zero sum game "normalizes" to an n+1 player zero sum game.
In the 100 yard dash example, one player gets one point and nine get -1 giving a cumulative score of -8. If you award a new player, say the track, 8 points then the game becomes zero sum.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
I think most drinking games are not about winning, they are just about getting drunk. There are never any clear winners in such games.
The developer was a guy named Chris Crawford - regarded as the Sid Meier of his day - I remember a decent number of interviews with him in various magazines.
Crawford had a number of interesting ideas, but they didn't always turn out to be fun. "Balance" was pretty frustrating, as others have pointed out, since your Soviet opponent was extremely touchy - they'd freak if you sent economic aid to Poland, but they'd also freak if you objected to their sending "military advisors" to Mexico!
The black screen & "Failure will not be rewarded" was the result of blowing up the world. However, Crawford apparently didn't believe in rewarding success, either - after managing to complete the game successfully (making it to the end without blowing up the world and coming out ahead of the Soviets, influence-wise), I was greeted an equally dry screen displaying the final game state.
That pretty much soured me on the whole game after that. It reminded me of the Simpson's episode where Skinner is trapped in the supply room, and he describes how he passed the time: "I would try to bounce a ball as long as I could. Then I'd try to beat that record".
I also bought a game of his called "Guns & Butter", a sort of Risk-like game with sophisticated technology tree concept & resource management. The crux of the game was directing the flow of various raw materials into finished products. Instead of a technology tree, you had a production tree, and you had to balance how the "feeder products" were allocated to make finished goods.
A pretty cool concept, and fun to play with, at first. However, since the end result was either Guns (in the form of swords, rifles, tanks) or Butter (in the form of plows, tractors, etc), it ended up being a lot of dicking around with knobs to get the end result you actually wanted. Eventually you figured out that all you wanted was N units of Guns & M units of Butter, so could the computer please run the resource allocation in reverse and just set it up for you? The end result was that the game became an example of just solving N dimensional system of equations every turn (expressed in the form of GUI sliders) - at that point it became strictly mechanical and pointless.
It had a diplomacy system as well, not dissimilar from Civilization's. In a lot of ways, it was pretty ahead of its time - I wouldn't be surprised if Meier & Co. took it as inspiration. But in the end it wasn't that fun.
-BbT
I've plugged the game elsewhere in this thread, but it fits your criteria exactly. also by the same publisher earth 2025 is less interactive but in the same genre. http://games.swirve.com
I'm afraid its you who's missed the point. A game's objective is to win. In soccer, your goal is not to score as much as possible. You don't see too many games with score of 300-299 where each team has cooperated to let each other score as often as possible.
If a game has winners and losers, it is by definition zero sum. You can re-read my post for explanation. The details of a game aren't relevant as to whether its zero sum or not.
Zero sum activities are those which neither create nor destroy value. Thus a stock transaction from the perspective of the 2 transactees is not zero sum due to brokerage and exchange fees, but if you include the broker and exchange it is zero sum among the 4 parties.
The original post makes little sense in determining what types of games he's looking for and whether they are zero sum or not.
Any game where there is a winner and losers could be described as zero sum, in that there exists a heuristic score (like chess) whereby every activity in the game increases the probability of winning for some players and has offsetting decrease for others.
Even solitaire can be described in this way as zero sum, as you will either win or not.
Its also possible to look into individual games, and see non-zero sum elements in individual activities. Monopoly has situations where you pay the bank or it pays you. Increasing the overall wealth in the game. So Monopoly is not a purely fixed resources game. My favorite game of my past is Utopia http:\\games.swirve.com . The resources in that game grow rapidly every day, and in the end of a game run, there will be 49,999+ losers. Several game elements encourage cooperation. Yet because there are winners and losers, a zero sum perspective of the game exists.
What the author is really looking for are games that are win win for all participants. This infringes on the definition of a game.
Solitary Simcity or Golf are not really games. There is no arbitrary criteria that determines if you won or not. Though each can be used to make competitions that are games.
The point of this post is to get the author to ask for what he really wants, without evoking terms that don't have anything to do with anything, such as zero sum games.
If you're looking for games where cooperation plays a big role, Utopia is good. Where each participant can set their own goals, try golf or simcity.
Agreed. Many of the possible endings in Riven were definitely ambiguous... even the one that was intended to be the "winning" situation was very... mysterious, for lack of a better word.
Why don't you just let the kids pick out and play games they enjoy?
They're games. Not real life.
Not wanting your kids influenced by Quake? I can sort of dig that. Not wanting your kids influenced by chess or Monopoly? Please.
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
No it's not :-) The entropy's always increasing...
--
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
Nuclear Risk. You needed a 10 sided die to roll chances on various things. Then (very simple here) we had rules about when you could build nukes, odds of them working, how much damage, all that good stuff. The rules we used is HS were very play balanced. I'll have to go home and see if I can find them.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Nuclear multi-planet risk. You have just given me a great idea. I'm glad it's Friday.
Sleep!?! I don't need no stinkin sleep.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Unfortunately now out of print, Arkham Horror by Chaosium was a board game in which all the players had to cooperate against the game, if they cooperated insufficiently, the game would win and all players would loose. That said there was also a point score such that one person would be declared 'first citizen of Arkham'. This ment that it contained a competitive as well as cooperative element, it really was the best of all worlds.
The point has been made repeatedly here that role playing games are non-zero sum and that is very true. They may be the perfect non-zero sum game. However they are not for everyone, given the investment in time and resources necessary to play.
Hasbro recently released a board game based upon roleplay principles called 'Lord of the Rings'. In it you cooperate as a group to defeat the game. There are no winners per say, but everyone can loose. Sink or swim together, pretty much like the boat we find ourselves in on this planet.
Peter
At one point and time Cheapass Games had a site dedicated to free games which were totally free and FUN. Of these games my favorites were "Flipin the O'" and "The Coin Game".
Seems they have taken down the link to these games but they are still fun.
The idea is to mess with others mind and thus totally enjoy yourself. I will discribe the coin game.
The Coin Game:
The objective is to see how many people you can get to watch you play. See if they guess the rules.
MAN IT IS FUN!!!
"A sample size of one is really just statistical masturbation."
I loved that game--i think it was origionally for the TI-99/4A
Competition rules! It's the only way to learn, and the only way anything gets done. Teach your children to be competitive. Teach your hamster to be competitive!
I'm just saying that SimCity has some questionable underlying premises. That is, after all, what this thread was about, no? The underlying premises of games?
Although, being a not remotely ideologically pure Objectivist myself, I have to agree with you about the Ideologically Pure Objectivists. Many are Really Scary(tm).
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
GeekPress: The Weirder Side of Tech News
It seems, then, that SimCity has a set of rules for how cities thrive that are (1) at odds with lots of people's political and economic beliefs about how cities thrive and (2) probably not very accurate.
These two issues are not the same, unless, of course, your political and economic views about how cities thrive are totally accurate.
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
GeekPress: The Weirder Side of Tech News
Check out this review by the Ludwig von Mises Institute for more details:
http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.asp?control =280&sortorder=authorlast
Such statism does imply a zero-sum picture of the world. The pie, after all, is never increased by government tax-and-spend.
Personally, puzzle games are my favorite. The good ones are simple, easy-to-learn, and require a good grasp of logic. No hidden premises either!
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
GeekPress: The Weirder Side of Tech News
Most roleplaying games can be zero sum. They often aren't played that way, but there's nothing inherent to an rpg that makes it zero sum. The gamemaster isn't necessarily the enemy, but rather all enemies and all friends in the game world.
I'd like to think that Twister would be such a game. And damn fun with a few chicks and some beer.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
isn't competition to win the number one reason most slashdotters -are- slashdotters?
/. is not in this group.
;)
isn't asking a group of overachievers to wax philosophic on 'entertainment' value over competitive value a little counter-productive?
It's like getting a defense of socialism as a socio-economic theory from a citizen in a capitalist culture who's never seen socialism, let-alone lived in one.
granted, the true ivory tower academics that are -really- into creating value without accumulating through opensource do exist... but i maintain most of
and as you may surmise, no, I don't know of any such games
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Though the rules have sections about points and winners for these games, I guarantee that everyone that I have played with ends up just enjoying the process:
Apples to Apples:
This is a word association card game in which a Green Apple Card (adjective) is played by the current "judge" and then other players (which can number up to 20 or more... great for get togethers) search their hands for a Red Apple Card (noun) that is best descibed by the Green Apple Card. Green Apple Cards include words like "evil," "peaceful," "yummy," and "hip." Red Apple Cards include nouns like "Puff Daddy," "earthquakes," "rain forests," and "Martha Stewart." Whether cards match is completely subjective and up to the judge. The winner gets the green card and once a total is met the game ends. Everyone we've played with doesn't care at all about the points, but just likes the strange combinations that can be had. Also, it is very easy to think up variations on the game rules that are fun to play in and of themeselves.
5 Card Nancy and other "storytelling" card games:
There are a couple of these out and about and a few have web versions. 5 Card Nancy is a Dadaist card game developed by Scott Mccloud. Being Dadaist, in most respects, at their core, the process is more important than the result. Creativity is rewarded more than strategy and finesse.
Some games we played as kids were slugbug, where you yell out slugbug when you saw a VW bug then punch/tap someone on the sholder.
We also played "bury the cows" (which is easier to play here in Texas away from the cities). The game goes where you count the number of cows on your side of the car as you pass them. And if you pass a church or a graveyard you bury the cows and start back at 0. Eventually the game get's dropped by the time you got to the city, cuz you ran out of cows.
We also played alphabet, where you start off by searching for the letter A in the signs (or you can rule it to just license plates but in parking lot traffic or light traffic it doesnt play well, we usually use signage and plates). You just go seraching for one letter after the other in order. (usually we would start over several times, really good game for in the city when you ran out of cows)
popeye is best played at night, you watch for a car that has a headlight out, then you yell popeye and hop up and hit the roof with your hand (some ppl would just hit the roof with their head)
Each of these games can turn competitive if you counted, but who cares?
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
I just remembered some games we played in our youth group.
Guess that song.. Our youth minister had a Rolland Midi Keyboard that would accept disks with midi files on them. He would download a bunch of songs and put them on a bunch of disks.. and we would try to guess the songs he would play. He would play only short peices of it to give us a hint.
Another game at youth camp, i think it was called spider web, where the camp counselors had put up some rope nailed it to a tree like a spider web. We had to get everybody through the web through the holes without reusing the same hole (they put masking tape across holes we had used). It's an ok game.
Hide and seek, or sardines are both non zero games (unless someone gives up but who does that?) Sardines is like hide and seek except one person hides, everyone goes looking for them, then as each person finds them they join the group hiding. (I was entertaining my boss's 4 year old at the office by playing hide and seek in the office, Even though Im nearly 6 ft tall, I can still hide well in a very small office behind doors)
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
Static, finite scarcity is the very definition of "zero-sum".
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It might just be because it is a late Friday afternoon, but I don't get what you are trying to say... can you elaborate, AC? Was there a joke there that I missed? :/
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Keep in mind that Twister was invented during a time when people were desperate for more excuses to touch each other.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Nobody seems to stay on top for very long... a mere century can be considered to be a darn good run, if you are keeping score.
The good news is that people generally live very well during the decay of a great civilization... until the Visigoths actualy come and sack the city, anyway. It's far easier to live in a crumbling superpower than to participate in building one up.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
So, yes... Rome was the only Empire that ever got close enough to even kid themselves about being World Conquerers.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I was thinking along the lines of a multi-player game with a little more complexity to it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Of all the great empires of history, only one (Rome) got big enough to fool itself into thinking it conquered the world, and all great expansionist powers seem to collapse shortly after their peak.
It would be fun to put together a computer game where the goal is to run a nation (in a sort-of SimCity/Civilizaton style), and where success is measured according to the success of your nation, but where wiping out an enemy almost never serves your best interests, where a conquered nation can assemble an underground revolutionary movement and regain their sovereignty, and where the game simply continues to be played for as long as the participants are enjoying themselves.
I would buy a game like that, if it was well done.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
hide and go seek, contains little score keeping activity.
...just like the real world. Or rather, life is a zero-sum game, with a *much* larger game set. On Earth, there are a finite number of resources. Just because we haven't exhausted them yet doesn't mean that they'll last forever and perpetually allow us to make them increase in value. And when we use them up here, we've got a choice: leave the planet, or stay here and keep fighting over the dwindling resources until everyone's dead. And I mean everyone: us, the animals, bacteria - everyone. As long as there are at least two lving things, there will be competition. And if we leave this planet, we have the rest of the Universe to exploit, but it's a finite Universe. Just because we won't exhaust all the matter in the Universe in our lifetimes doesn't mean it won't ever happen.
There IS a finite supply of money; it's just a very large number in real life. Think of it like Monopoly. It's possible to win Monopoly 2 ways:
- One player is better than all the others and winds up having money when everyone else runs out. At this point there's no reason to keep playing; everything the Winner owns becomes valueless because no one has anything the Winner is willing to accept as payment.
- More than one players are equally matched, and they continue passing money back and forth (commerce) and collecting $200 every time they pass Go (consuming resources) until the bank runs out of money (all matter in the Universe is consumed.) Then they're either tied, or one has more money than the other. But that really doesn't matter, because at this point neither will accept the all but worthless money in exchange for properties, because in the next few turns they'll have to fork it right back over for rent.
The second scenario quite probably has never come up in the hundreds of gazillions of games of Monopoly ever played, but it's still possible. Either way, Monopoly mirrors quite successfully the economic aspects of real life, so much so that I'm willing to say that if Monopoly is a zero-sum game, then so is real life.
But that's just my opinion; I could be Dennis Miller.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
English edition by Hasbro/Parker cost me 37 pounds from Esdevium games in Aldershot, England (phone +44 1252 311443).
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Actually, SimCity (2000, anyway) is very free market; unlike LinCity (where players actually build "mills" etc.), the player merely zones land which and hopes for something good to pop up. City planning, deciding on ordinances, etc., is part of the game, along with zoning land, all things typical of democrat municipalities at least in the U.S.
But, if it were possible to all have the sims making free choices by AI, and have them act on their own, what would be left for the player to do? You could say the LEGO teaches authoritarianism, after all, kids (or others) decide what to build, and controls the whole world of the LEGO people, even their actions! But, its a toy, its creative, and its fun. Similar, Maxis prefers the term "Software Toys" for Sim-anything, because it is a toy, for users to manipulate toward whatever goal is wanted, whether size, a theme, beauty, etc.
Personally, I think seeing "teaching [bad-thing-X]" in such games as a sign of taking things way too seriously.
Back to the orignal point: Sim*, like Lego, is generally non-zero; you cuold, based on your attitude, make it otherwise, but as long as you are happy with it.
Natalie Portman is ugly.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
TRIBES (aka DARWINOPOLY) by Steve Jackson Games
In Tribes, players are a bunch of cavemen trying to grow a lot of healthy children. Even though there is a winner (the player with most healthy adult offspring in the end!), the game is hardly zero-sum as all players are pitted against nature in a fight for survival.
Limited resources in this game primarily means the members of opposing sex in the tribe, and food. So there can be some zero-sum aspects to it as well.
Civilization by Avalon Hill
The original Civilization that existed before computer version is pretty competitive, but alongside the limited resources (=land) there is also the unlimited resource of cultural/technological advancement. These two are combined by trading (land gives you goods -> trading goods wisely generates points -> you can "buy" cultural advancement)
BTW, even though the game mechanics are not zero-sum, the game can still be competitive. The goals set to players (or ones that the players set to themselves) determine the competitiveness, for example: are you aiming to suppress your adversaries with maximum efficiency, or are you just trying to build a esthetically pleasing game for yourself.
Is there an alternative [way to determine the winner]?
I don't know. It's been something like ten years since I've played, and I can't remember exactly how the game is scored. I was trying to allow for the possibility that "highest net worth" wasn't the official victory condition, though in retrospect, I should have known better.
To your point, of course [Monopoly] is zero-sum, because of the rule that everyone needs to go bankrupt but the winner.
No, no, no! The distinction between "zero-sum" and "non-zero-sum" is not "one winner" versus "multiple winners". It is a reflection on the nature of the game, not the outcome.
Other posts have pointed out that no-bank poker is zero-sum, because the amount of money held by all the players doesn't change over the course of the game; if I win a dollar, it's because you lose a dollar. Similarly, Risk is zero-sum, because the number of occupied territories on the board is fixed (all territories must be occupied, and players may not share). Again, for a player to gain a territory, another play must lose it.
Monopoly may or may not be zero-sum (it depends on if victory is measured as having the most properties or the most money), but the number of winners is not a factor.
ask anyone who plays dnd why they play. i can almost guarantee it's not to win - there's usually a main objective of the adventure, but the adventure is the fun part - that's why we play.
-e
this
"Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don't think it's all that important, since SimCity's political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder."
-Quoted from Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games. A summary of Will Wright's talk, by Don Hopkins, at http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/simcity/WillWright. html
In the context of that essay about SimCity:
The anatomy of a simulation game:
There are several tightly coupled parts of a simulation game that must be designed closely together: the simulation model, the game play, the user interface, and the user's model.
In order for a game to be realizable, all of those different parts must be tractable. There are games that might have a great user interface, be fun to play, easy to understand, but involve processes that are currently impossible to simulate on a computer. There are also games that are possible to simulate, fun to play, easy to understand, but that don't afford a useable interface: Will has designed a great game called "Sim Thunder Storm", but he hasn't been able to think of a user interface that would make any sense.
On the user model:
The digital models running on a computer are only compilers for the mental models users construct in their heads. The actual end product of SimCity is not the shallow model of the city running in the computer. More importantly, it's the deeper model of the real world, and the intuitive understanding of complex dynamic systems, that people learn from playing it, in the context of everything else about a city that they already know. In that sense, SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt are quite educational, since they implant useful models in their users minds.
On the simulation model:
Many geeks have spent their time trying to reverse engineer the simulator by performing experiments to determine how it works, just for fun. This would be a great exercise for a programming class. When I first started playing SimCity, I constructed elaborate fantasies about how it was implemented, which turned out to be quite inaccurate. But the exercise of coming up with elaborate fantasies about how to simulate a city was very educational, because it's a hard problem!
The actual simulation is much less idealisticly general purpose that I would have thought, epitomizing the Nike "just do it" slogan. In SimCity classic, the representation of the city is low level and distilled down compactly enough that a small home computer can push it around. The city is represented by tiles, indexed by numbers that are literally scattered throughout the code, which is hardly general purpose or modular, but runs fast. It sacrifices expandability and modularity for speed and size, just the right trade-off for the wonderful game that it is.
Some educators have asked Maxis to make SimCity expose more about the actual simulation itself, instead of hiding its inner workings from the user. They want to see how it works and what it depends on, so it is less of a game, and more educational. But what's really going on inside is not as realistic as they would want to believe: because of its nature as a game, and the constraint that it must run on low end home computers, it tries to fool people into thinking it's doing more than it really is, by taking advantage of the knowledge and expectations people already have about how a city is supposed to work. Implication is more efficient than simulation.
People naturally attribute cause and effect relationships to events in SimCity that Will as the programmer knows are not actually related. Perhaps it is more educational for SimCity players to integrate what they already know to fill in the gaps, than letting them in on the secret of how simple and discrete it really is. As an educational game, SimCity stimulates students to learn more about the real world, without revealing the internals of its artificial simulation. The implementation details of SimCity are quite interesting for a programmer or game designer to study, but not your average high school social studies class.
Educators who want to expose the internals of SimCity to students may not realize how brittle and shallow it really is. I don't mean that as criticism of Will, SimCity, or the educators who are seeking open, realistic, general purpose simulators for use in teaching. SimCity does what it was designed to and much more, but it's not that. Their goals are noble, but the software's not there yet. Once kids master SimCity, they could learn Logo, or some high level visual programming language like KidSim, and write their own simulations and games!
Other people wanted to use SimCity for the less noble goal of teaching people what to think, instead of just teaching them to think.
Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don't think it's all that important, since SimCity's political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.
Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like "which ontological urban paridigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?" He replied, "I just kind of optimized for game play."
Then there was the oil company who wanted "Sim Refinery", so you could use it to lay out oil tanker ports and petrolium storage and piping systems, because they thought that it would give their employees useful experience in toxic waste disaster management, in the same way SimCity gives kids useful experience in being the mayor of a city. They didn't realize that the real lessons of SimCity are much more subtle than teaching people how to be good mayors. But the oil company hoped they could use it to teach any other lessons on their agenda just by plugging in a new set of graphics, a few rules, and a bunch of disasters.
And there was the X-Terminal vendor who wanted to adapt the simulator in SimCity into a game called "Sim MIS", that they would distribute for free to Managers of Information Systems, whose job it is to decide what hardware to buy! The idea was that the poor overworked MIS would have fun playing this game in which they could build networks with PCs, X-Terminals, and servers (instead of roads with residential, commercial, and industrial buildings), that had disasters like "viruses" infecting the network of PC's, and "upgrades" forcing you to reinstall Windows on every PC, and business charts that would graphically highlight the high maintanence cost of PCs versus X-Terminals. Their idea was to use a fun game to subtly influence people into buying their product, by making them lose if they didn't. Unlike the oil company, they certainly realized the potential to exploit the indirect ways in which a game like SimCity can influence the user's mind, but they had no grip on the concept of subtlety or game design.
Continued in context at:. html]
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/simcity/WillWright
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Properly done, it is a game where everyone one wins. It breaks down when it moves away from that.
Certain education and non-traditional therapies move in this direction as well. Unfortunately, many educators, politicians, and social science types got into a game of "my government funding" or "my special interest group".
Culture building requires some sort of artistic sense, and a dream for some sort of future. A man without a future to look forward to is dead. Imagine a culture made of such men.
for that matter, take a look at the last book review.
It is very interesting in this context.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If only it was a delusional cult of satanic rites and rituals....
D&D is about playing and not winning.
:)
Nonsense. This moralistic teaching of cooperation is easily undermined. Winning more skittle than the next guy is fairly easy:
That's the moral extreme this game teaches. How clever, we've learned that by winning another persons trust and then exploiting it, we can get ahead! Not to mention that you could also win 30 points by simply using opposite strategies each round. If you're really lucky your partner can't eat skittles for religious reasons and chooses "cooperate" everytime so that you end up with 50 points.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
In the example given (which is the way it is often played in a classroom - 10 rounds), defecting makes sense only in round 10. Defecting in round 9 will yield the same result for the winner as cooperating from start to finish (assuming his opponent isn't going to play nice once screwed). So there really is no incentive to defect before the final round.
Therefore to win you merely have to convince your opponent that you are going to go with the flow so that you both "come out winners" - and screw him at the end.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Isn't chess non-zero-sum.
If you lose a pawn, the opponent actually gains nothing.
Zero sum games are the rare ones if you ask me.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
> Um, have you ever played chess?
Yeah, my dad was regional champ when he was younger. He taught me some, but would always beat me even if he gave me a 1 rook advantage.
> If my opponent loses a pawn, I am usually thrilled.
Because your opponent has lost something.
Your reaction is entirely reasonable.
> How can this be, if I've gained nothing?
Because your opponent has lost something.
> I have, in fact, gained an increased chance of > winning the game.
To be a pedant, not if (a) you had no chance of winning the game (b) your opponent had no chance of winning the game (c) neither of you had any chance of winning the game.
You're effectively saying that a pistols at dawn duel is a zero sum game. Despite the fact that before the game there are 2 live people, and after the game there is only one. The opponents loss is the oppenents loss, it's only a percieved win as it's not your loss.
If you and your opponent had to play chess and the winner got a liver transplant that you both desparately needed, then it would be closer to a zero sum game, as your victory would actually benefit you.
If the game wasn't a standalone game, but was part of a tournament, where each game counted then yes, you have gained something - one point. It's a zero sum game in that context as the three outcomes are
1-0, 1/2-1/2, 0-1. However, I meantioned no such tournament.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
You are right about that. However, your opponents loss isn't _materially_ your gain. To be strictly zero-sum you'd need to gain a pawn _or_ it would have to be in the rules that every turn someone must lost 1 pawn. See my other reply, and the duel paragraph.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I'm not jumping sides, but I notice others are disagreeing with you on things you're totally right about, so I feel obliged...
On the tournament scoring 0-1, 1/2-1/2, 1-0 level chess _is_ a zero sum game.
Proof - add up the scores, they always sum to 1.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
And just to throw my two-cents in on a possible non-zero-sum game: most MUDs. In general, cooperating on a mud results in increased efficiency and a net status gain for the cooperating players.
Ultimately, the trade only benefits the winner. As such, it's still a zero-sum game. However, it's still an interesting game and certainly qualifies in the category of "games where you scheme, trade, manipulate, negotiate, etc.", which (to me) are more interesting than something "straight-forward" like checkers. You really can't say, "If you don't jump me, I'll make it worth your while latter on."
Monopoly used to be my favorite of these games. It's popular enough that it's easier to find players, but to really do well, you need to cook up a series of trades that're superficially beneficial to your trading partners but ultimately much more beneficial to you.
Of course, after I repeatedly kicked ass and took names, all the other players wised up and started refusing to trade with me under any and all circumstances, which more or less made the game pointless.
But there are some hybrid games. It is hard to classify them. My favorite example is Chaosium's Arkham Horror board game. The players do keep score, and there is a possible winner at the end of the game. That said, the real purpose of the game is to save the world. If the players don't cooperate, it won't happen (even if they do cooperate, it might happen anyway). Nobody wins if Cuthulu takes over the world!
It is interesting to figure out why this game does not feel like a zero-sum game, compared to something like Trivial Pursuit (where answering the question does not really "take-away" from the other players). I think this is because of the strong mutual requirement (saving the world) is enough to override some of the normal competitiveness of the game.
DDR is definitely a game of skill. Where the point isn't to win or lose, but to look good while playing!!
Screw that person the last round, you win 32 skittles, other person has 28
Aha! You're making the assumption that the number of rounds will be predictable, i.e. you know you will only be arrested ten times. This would not be true in real life. You don't know if you will be arrested again with the same person, and hence cannot say 'This is the final time I will be arrested. I will inform.'
Simply make the number of rounds unpredictable. At the end of every round, throw a dice. If it comes up with a six, you end the game. Any other number, and you play for another round.
If you have a class of thirty pupils, that's twenty-nine permutations of people. Easily long enough for the skittles not won due to a game ending early to pan out, due to the obvious effect of random data's averages.
But maybe thte game is getting a little complicated now...
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Most RPG's fit the bill though some variants of Amber Diceless RPG do come to mind as zero sum.
However I do remember the option to play Quake2 cooperatively. Depending on play that would be non zero or zero. The truth of the matter is perspective. I've known roleplayer (the term for them is used very loosely) that treated the game in a zero sum fashion. We didn't use the term,but that is what it amounted to. I play Q3A, but never "win", but then I don't expect too. I'm happy with getting in several frags. Your perspective can change the results greatly, from an internal/emotional point of view.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Sim City is a good example of a non-zero sum game.
No, it's not. SimCity is, according to its creator, a toy and not a game. The primary difference being that SimCity doesn't have an intrinsic goal. You can set goals for yourself, but that's you using SimCity to play a game, much as you can use a ball to play games.
>The Skittles game described above is a zero-sum
>game: Some number of Skittles come into the room
>(with the teacher) and the same number of
>Skittles leave the room (with the teacher and
>the kids). Note that the teacher is part of the game. Wrong!! The teacher is _not_ part of the game. The only reason why he is part of the game are the laws of physics. What makes the teacher "play" is that Skittles have to be brought by someone, but if they were rewarded with, say, a rock from the floor, the teacher would not be playing, and on your scheme, the floor would be, but the game woul remain the same. Zero-sum games have nothing to do with conserving resources, it is about gain and loss, I do not think the teacher feels he has gained anything because he has more Skittles than if the kids were smarter. Maybe he now thinks that he is better than them, but that would be sad..
Hi, : ;
I suggest a very (very) old game coming from China, the Game of Go. Whereas chess is a battle (you have to kill the King), Go is a war (you have to conquer territory, battles are a mean, not a goal).
Like chess, Go is spacelly limited, but the number of possible games is incredibily huge (something around 10^600).
When a weak player meets a strong player, this one can have a handicap : this means the game won't be so easy for the strong one, and not so difficult for the weaker one : so everyone is happy to play.
Although rules are really simple, the game in itself can be very very complex : then the goal may not be to win, but to do a nice game, an elegant game.
For more informations, have a look at
The Internet Go Server, to play online
this page to have a nice introducton.
Final word : Go is around 3500 years old.
... belongs to another class of non zero-sum games not mentioned yet? IMHO it develops exactly the analytical skills needed to become a good programmer - and that's what all of modern human-kind wants to be .. right ? ... right ?!
Global Nuclear Warfare(tm)
A fantasic non-zero sum game for the whole world to enjoy.
For 2-4 players, age 45+.
Children are encouraged to watch and learn so they can play if they grow up.
The seminal work on this topic. Carse talks in depth about both winnable and continuous games.
A review excerpt from Amazon:
An extraordinary book that will dramatically change the way you experience life. Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life, the games we play in business and politics, in the bedroom and on the battlefied -- games with winners and losers, a beginning and an end. Infinite games are more mysterious -- and ultimately more rewarding. They are unscripted
and unpredictable; they are the source of true freedom. In this elegant and compelling work, James Carse explores what these games mean, and what they can mean to you. He offers stunning new insights into the nature of property and power,
of culture and community, of sexuality and self-discovery, opening the door to a world of infinite delight and possibility.
"An extraordinary little book . . . a wise and intimate companion, an elegant reminder of the real." -- Brain/Mind Bulletin
A) Any point scored it a point allowed by the other team
that's trivially true, in the sense that if my opponent scores, then i failed to prevent him from scoring. and it doesn't make it zero-sum.
B) The result is a victory for one team and a loss for the other.
Again, that doesn't mean the game itself is zero-sum. Apparently (and surprisingly) hardly anbody on slashdot knows what the hell zero-sum means. It means there are no other resources besides those possessed by the players of the game. My gaining a resouce necessitates me taking it from you. Sports (by my reasoning) don't qualify, because both teams start at zero, and both teams gain points (and don't lose them).
/bluesninja
I think this ask slashdot question conflates the ideas of "competition" and "zero-sum". Take, for example, common childrens games like hide-and-seek or tag. These are competitive games, but the are not zero-sum. The existence of a winner and a loser does not equal zero-sum (when the sum you're talking about is 'fun' or even 'points') Take basketball: zero-sum game? No. Points aren't scarce; your opponent getting a point doesn't take one from you. That's the definition of zero-sum. Even losing at a competition doesn't negate or take away the enjoyment you had while playing the game. A zero-sum game like this would mean that for my opponent to have more fun, i would have to have less. I've never experienced this phenomenon while playing chess or monopoly, even when I'm being beaten like a drum!
Furthermore, competition is fun and healthy, and I don't agree at all with the implication of the question that competition turns kids into win-at-all-costs sociopaths. Competition is a healthy encouragement to increase one's abilities. There is a great deal of (implicit) competition in the open-source community, and this is a great motivator to increase one's skills, and find one's "niche" in the community at large.
/bluesninja
Solitaire games in which the goal is to play out all of one's cards sometimes work much better if more people are playing. In those cases, the goal of the game is to play out first. One can play alone (hence Solitaire) but the odds of "someone" (ie the only player) playing out are lower.
Obviously, i beat Cliffe's ass one too many times in Quake, so he went insane :(
I don't think this is strictly a zero-sum game, and it's a little esoteric for children, but the point to Go is less about capturing territory than it is about exploring you and your opponent's philosophies and strategies.
my $0.02
Averye0
--o You're just jealous cause the voices talk to me and not to you! o--
Forgive me for being blunt, but you have no idea what you're talking about.
Mathematically, a zero sum game is one with a finite number of possible moves.
There's absolutely no requirement that a zero-sum game have a finite number of possible moves.
Thus, the person that moves first always has the advantage, and technically should always win.
WTF are you talking about?? Even in games which do have a finite number of moves, that doesn't mean the first player has the advantage. There are any number of two-player games known where the game is known to be a theoretical win for the second player. In fact, just a few sentences later you indicate that you are aware of a game which, while having a finite number of moves, is not a theoretical win for the first player:
Tic-Tac-Toe is another zero sum game. Finite number of moves, but the rules of tic-tac-toe make it such that it will almost always end in a draw,
Dude, you really need to lay off the crack.
In case you need me to spell it out for you any clearer, you state:
Mathematically, a zero sum game is one with a finite number of possible moves. Thus, the person that moves first always has the advantage, and technically should always win.
Tic-tac-toe has a finite number of possible moves. Thus, according to your statement, the first player at tic-tac-toe has the advantage, and should always win. Just four sentences later, you state:
Finite number of moves, but the rules of tic-tac-toe make it such that it will almost always end in a draw, because the number of moves are very limited.
(I know, I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls.)
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
I'm afraid you're mistaken--Diplomacy is zero-sum. It may teach cooperation in the short term (because none of the seven players alone has enough power to win, at the start of the game), but ultimately there can be only a single winner. How many pieces the game has has nothing to do with it.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Um, have you ever played chess?
If my opponent loses a pawn, I am usually thrilled. How can this be, if I've gained nothing? I have, in fact, gained an increased chance of winning the game.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Now you're getting into questions of how we measure game results. If you measure it by who-won-and-who-lost, then pistols at dawn is a zero-sum game. If you measure it by who's-alive-and-who's-dead, it's not.
But such arguments can be applied to any game under the sun. If you measure the results of a chess game, not by who-won-and-who-lost, but by how-much-each-player-enjoyed-the-game, then certainly chess is not a zero-sum game.
But since this argument can be applied to any game under the sun, what's the point?? That's not what game theorists mean when they say zero-sum, and that's not what was meant by the person originally asking the question.
If you measure the result of a chess game by who-won-and-who-lost, I still maintain that the loss of a pawn by one player (if the position is such that the player is worse off for having lost the pawn) is a gain by the other player.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
True. However, that's not what game theorists mean when they say zero-sum. Further, by that rationale, no games are zero-sum (although some may be negative-sum, like Russian roulette!), so if that's what was meant by the person asking the question, he wouldn't have had to ask the question in the first place!
From a zero-sum perspective, it doesn't make sense to play against people who are not worse than you or to give worse players an advantage, since both of these obviously reduce the chance that you'll win.
No, because the question of whether to play the game at all (or which game to play, which is what you're really deciding when you decide to give a handicap) is outside of game theory--game theory (and thus the question of whether the game is zero-sum or not) assumes from the start that the game will be played. Even if you could analyze it by game theory, that statement would only be true if "losing the game" were a worse outcome than "not playing the game at all," which is not necessarily a warranted assumption.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
The results of a game of chess are not measured by how many pieces you have on the board.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Excellently put. While some non-zero-sum games are entirely cooperative, many non-zero-sum games have both cooperative and competitive elements.
For a real-life example, look at industry organizations made up of a number of companies in the same industry. While the companies may compete within the industry, at the same time they work together towards those goals which benefit all members of the industry.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Yes, it does, and yes, you're absolutely right, the game could change so that in the future it's no longer true that all the rules are changeable. Nomic could turn into a game of chess, even.
It's related to an interesting philosophical question: can an omnipotent being revoke his own omnipotence? That is, is he condemned to remain "omnipotent" forever, in which case he is not truly omnipotent? Or can he will himself to no longer be omnipotent--in which case, perhaps he truly is omnipotent at the moment, but there is no guarantee he will be so in the future.
If you're interested in this sort of question, I recommend The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Law, Logic, Omnipotence, and Change by Peter Suber, inventor of Nomic.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Agora, one of the longest running nomics on the net, has had for long periods of its history no defined way to win the game at all. (Currently, it does, but most of its players seem supremely unconcerned about winning the game.)
(Note: if you've played other rule-changing games, Nomic is different from most of them in a subtle way. Most rule-changing games have a central unchangeable core of rules, which typically include the rules about how other rules are changed. In Nomic, all the rules, including those about how the rules are changed, are subject to change.)
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Neither is correct. A zero-sum game is one where an improvement in the standing (which I'll deliberately leave vague, but you can think of it as "chance to win") of one player necessarily results in a worsening of the standing of another player. Even though, when one team scores two points in basketball, the other team does not lose two points, it is still zero-sum because that score reduces the chances of the other team. And even though two players can cooperate in Diplomacy to improve the position of both, they can do so only at the cost of another player.
OTOH, all those people pointing out that RPGs are non-zero sum are entirely correct. It is possible to perform actions which improve the position of all players in the game simultaneously. Even if you count the gamemaster as a player, it's still non-zero sum. The gamemaster's ultimate goal is neither coincident with the players' (if, above all else, he wanted the players to reach their goal, he could make it insanely easy for them to do so) nor opposed to it (if he wanted to stop them from achieving their goal, he could do that as well). The gamemaster's goal is to create an interesting game, and that is neither directly coincident with nor directly opposed to the players' goal.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
http://www.antimonopoly.com
sulli
RTFJ.
To your point, of course it is zero-sum, because of the rule that everyone needs to go bankrupt but the winner. If you play the short game (richest player wins) it's more of a race to collect bucks. I for one prefer to play to the end, as the competition is more fun - but it does take longer.
sulli
RTFJ.
- gaining karma doesn't hurt others
- moderators increase your karma if your story amuses them, and only reduce it if it annoys them - so nobody is happy to make you lose
- you can always try again if you reach +50 or get bitchslapped
- anyone can play! it's free and fun for the whole family!
I challenge The Community to come up with something better...
sulli
RTFJ.
One example of a zero-sum/non-zero-sum game that I found hilarious was the old Dune board game distributed by Avalon Hill and designed by the Cosmic Encounters folks. In Dune you have a diplomatic phase brought on by a random Nexus card. If everyone allied with every other player, by the end of the turn all of the strategic areas would be owned by the Big Alliance and everyone would win. Guess how many times that happened...... Frankly, most any game can be played to be non-zero-sum. A good example would be multi-player Civ, where theoretically each player's Civilization could peacefully trade Caravans and technology and advance far faster than non-cooperative players. However, the mindset is not likely there- guess it's the eternal struggle of the individual gameplayer's place in the baboon troop versus beating all those other baboon troops.....
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
I see what you mean, in the sense that by cooperating, both players are better rewarded, but they still come out even. To an aggressive guy like me, the definition of "winning" is "to beat everyone/everything else". Having 14 skittles vs 9 for the opponent is better than having 30 skittles each because it defeats the point of the challenge since no one has been found superior. This whole non-zero sum stuff just doesn't grok.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Pointless game. One can never lose if he/she/it always chooses to compete. Best case, the opponent chooses to cooperate and you get 5.. worst case, the opponent competes as well and you both get only 1 (which doesn't advance you at all, but neither does the opponent). The concept itself shows promise though.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
the majority of computer games are non-zero sum games, as they are solitare (single player) games, and by definition non competitve.
Any additive game is a non-zero sum game. In other words, games that focus on development rather than acquisition. In the computer world you can think of Sim City and its clones, as well as some simple strategy games like Railroad Tycoon (available for Linux) with out competitors. Personally the more fun development games for me growing up where role-playing games. Yes, I am confessing to my sad youth of Dungeons and Dragons, Traveller, et al. but these games made sure that players where cooperative, imaginative, resourceful and still allowed players to maintain their individuality. Of course, the game co-ordinator (or Dungeon Master) was critical to the success/fun factor of the game and luckily my brother was a good one (no magic lightning bolts from the sky just because you pissed off the DM!).
Solaristrum: One who has spent way too long staring at the Sun
Swoogan
Swoogan
sigs are for losers...and ppl who can think of one.
Tamagotchi is about as positive-sum as it gets.
Bucky invented a game called "World Game" which has the intent of enabling people to envision a positive-sum world.
--rhad_the wumpus hunter
that game rocked!--i miss the wumpus...
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
My favorite was drinking Candyland. Yery difficult, since we pretty much made the rules up as we went along. Even though there was a limited beer supply, I'd say it was a zero sum game, because all players participated in creating the rules, and, in the end, Candyland is a lame, non-skill game unless you add some extra challenges.
The Chicken game is non-zero sum.
All you need is two cars, a road, and two teenagers.
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
I think good sex is definitely non-zero-sum, for both participants.
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
This is a game that my friends and I invented at a party. It's really simple, and we set the core rules up after just one round. First you get everybody in a circle(you don't have to but it just makes it go easier), then you have everybody write down 3+ questions and 3+ answers, they do not have to match each other, just no one word things like "Why?" and "Yes", and you need to make as many questions as you do answers and visa versa. Then you put all the questions in one hat, and all the answers in the other. You pass the hats around and 1 person draws 1 question, and the person next to him/her draws an answer. Then the question is read exactly how it is written on the paper, and then the answer is read. Note that it will make little or no sense 50% of the time, but of the other 50% that does work it is soooo very funny(especially at 4AM, or after a few shots). The trick to making it work well is to use as general a question and answer as possible, it seems to work better that way, and no one word questions or answers, even though they may work some times it just isn't normally funny.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
If you are about phantasy, games that happen in your mind, try (kind of ancient) MUDs (MultiUserDungeons). You can find the biggest list here. The games are quite entertaining, much like the Sim Stuff, you can marry, you can choose a profession, even extend the games as a wizard. You interact with people you never met, you can be someone you always wanted to be (or just be yourself). If you are more into visual entertainment you might want to try other worlds (new stuff, not so much imagination required) like Everquest or Ultima Online. Have fun exploring ...
Whose Line Is It Anyway.
It's a game where the points don't matter. The host just assigns points to people randomly. Which is part of the fun.
I think that would be classified as a non net-zero game.
Everyone is there to have fun.
Is Wumpus the shameful part, or is it the fact that you write VB?
Addiction in a few million bytes.
You *can* conflict (and you certainly must defend) but prosperity is achieved through a careful balance of scientists and entertainers in your cities, a good ecological and urban planning strategy, and massive use of trade routes.
It is competitive, but it is not zero sum.
And it accounted for far too many hours of my University time....
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Aris
When I did had not time any more to play RPG, I stayed subscribed to one RPG magazine just for the fun of reading the scenarios and games description.
Reading a good scenario for me is exactly like reading a good book : what's interesting is to see the scenario creator's mind at work, and because RPG is so close to storytelling.Another thing is : playing doom, quake, fps just for the sheer fun of exploring an unknown world and for the sightseeing pleasure. Granted, it might wear out quickly, but I'm not so sure it wears out more quickly than playing the games itself.
I remember some user-created doom wad that really created some breath-taking sight, especially when it came to wicked architecture with platform hanging in mid-air, bottomless pits and neverending slopes.Those powerful 3-D games/rendering platform are really nice playground for apprentice gods/architects.
[Pruneau
How about teaching kids to sing, or to play a musical instrument? Playing music or singing with others is cooperative, and something they can also do alone. This really is something for which the reward is in the playing, not in reaching some goal. It is also much more fulfilling to do with a group.
As a kid we used to have a couple of board games by a sort of new-agey company. They were cooperative and environmentally oriented. In one you played as beavers, trying to store up food for the winter and build a dam, and the other was bees.
Unfortunately I can't remember the names of the games or the company. I have no idea if they are still around, either.
Although only one person gets to go to "Millionare Estates", they don't get there by taking from the other players, they get there by doing stuff themselves. There are a few problems with it, but it wouldn't take much to dispose of most of those (like make duplicates of the salary cards, so two people can have the same salary.)
Jenga is often not a zero-sum game. I know we often play to try and collectively build the highest tower more than to not be the loser. This makes it more cooperative than competitive.
Also, even when playing the game competitively, moving a block to the top creates more blocks that others can move, even though it removes one (or two, or three) blocks from the set of blocks that they could have moved earlier. I.E. NOT zero-sum, since moving blocks up creates new resources (movable blocks) as it uses them.
Hockey, at least in the NHL, can have a positive sum outcome. In the NHL, a team gets 2 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, and 1 point for an overtime loss.
Your theory accurately describes Paolo Freire's "Banking Concept of Education," where students are simple receptacles of information which the teacher "fills" during lecture, thus making them "smarter."
This is a pretty drastic situation, and it amazes me that it's being ignored to this level... It's all about letters and percentages. And even if you oppose the system, you have to let yourself be harnessed by it, just to survive...
Sad, but true.
--------------
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$_='hfflbwfsbhfzp vs';s/(^.{4})(.{7 })(.+$)/$3 $2 $1/
They also happen to be very popular!
I think any constructive long term game is non-zero sum; people have already mentioned the Sim games. There's also Civilization, the ThemeX games, and a bunch of other management/resource type games.
While they are definitely competitive, they aren't zero sum.
Then there are actually games like QuakeArena in which players ally themselves into teams. While teams may be zero sum, within a team itself the game is non-zero sum, with cooperation, strategy, and interaction dictating the effectiveness or lack thereof of a team.
Louis
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
If you want to take games in a slightly different context, they make the learning of certain lessons fun and enjoyable. If a game isn't fun, it isn't a game.
Here are games that are fun that teach us things:
Monopoly/Chess/Checkers/Risk==strategy
Twister==How to interact with people of the other sex
The game doesn't have to be presented as an object lesson for it to be an effective one, right?
So kids don't have to think about zero sum, or game theory, or that life is depressing or unfair and unhappy.
As an adult, it's very valid to try to shape the kids perceptions by trying to present them games that happen to teach them lessons. The kids don't have to know this, of course!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
If you target a game into the context of winners and losers, then you may be right;
But if you have 5 people playing and only one winner at any one time, is that zero sum?
1 winner - 4 losers = -3?
Like Q3Arena, for example, in which there can be teams of 5 on 5 playing capture the flag for 9 rounds. Sure, at the end of ten rounds there can only be one winner, but for each individual playing, the game is much more than zero sum, winning and losing.
It's the team play, the cooperation, the strategy, the resource and player allocation, the team to team interaction. It's couched in the traditional competitive zero sum winner takes all game, but the actual game itself is so much more than just being the winner of 9 rounds.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
I agree. For instance, Dutch Blitz (and other card games, particularly partner-based ones) are about getting the "highest" score, but lots of times we don't even bother -- because it's not the scoring part that matters/ that is fun. It's the playing part...
I am an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin. Last semester, the students in my econ class (intermediate microeconomic theory) were given the oppertunity to participate in a "research study." We were told that we would play a network based game against (with?) other players, and we could earn as much as $40 based on our and others good economic decisions.
Needing beer money, I thought 'what the hell'. They'd give me $5 just for showing up, so I went. There were spots for 40 people to participate. We had our pictures taken with a digital camera, and were assigned to computers.
The game itself was web-based. The rules were simple. The game was divided into 40 rounds; and every 8 rounds you were placed onto a new "team" of 5. In each round, each player had 20 units to "invest" and all 20 units needed to be invested. There were two possible investments, red and blue. The red investment always paid you 2 cents per unit and the blue investment always paid 1 cent per unit to every player on your team.
Before you choose your investment for a given round, you could see the faces of your teammates. Also, unless it was the first round of a given team, you could see how much each teammate had invested in blue (either 0-15 or 16+, not the exact amount) the previous round.
If everyone on all of your teams cooporated (blue investment) throughout the game, you'd all make $40 over the game. Of course, the dominant stratgey for any particular round is to invest all of your money in red (regardless of what your team mates do, you're better off). If, through out the entire game, your team mates choose all blue, but you always choose red, you could make $48. Investing in red, however, gives you're team mates the impression that you're 'screwing' them (profiting off their blue investment, but not returning the favor).
At the end of the round, you could see who had invested in blue (same as before, not the exact amount) and how much you had earned during the round.
It was a really interesting experiment for a few reasons. I was suprised how easily everyone co-operated during the start of the game. As the rounds went by, though, co-operation became increasing unlikely. It was also interesting that you couldn't see the exact amount anyone invested, just if they put more than 16 in blue. This probably led to players investing 'just enough' (16) to appear that they were 'team players'.
Also, we were not allowed to talk at all during the experiment. We were seperated into neighboring computer labs, so only half of the players were in the same room. The only way to identify your teammates was the little digital camera picture on the screen. Even with that little information, I began to form opinions about the various other players as the game progressed. It was interesting to remember someone who "screwed me" by taking advantage of my good faith blue investment and investing red. As players I recoginzed showed up on my later teams, I found myself trying to screw them on the assumption that they wouldn't be helping me anyway.
All in all, a very interesting hour. I did all right, made it away with about $33 (enought for beer and then some), so it was worth the time.
I don't know if you've ever seen the game show "Whose Line is it Anyway," but that is explicitly non zero-sum. The host introduces it by saying "The game where the points don't matter." He is likely to hand out thousands of points or zero on a whim.
Love is a non zero-sum, as I remarked to a woman friend while I and her husband were hugging her. "A good heart has lots of room in it."
Appearances to the contrary, a mutually destructive war is non zero-sum. The enemy may lose more than you, but you both lose.
-Gareth
While I concur that roleplay games are not zero-sum, I have to disagree with your assesment of Settler of Catan. seeing as there are only a limited number of resource hexagons, and only 3 players at most can access any single one, it can hardly be described as non-zero-sum. Oh, and the bit where you rob someone doesn't really help either :)
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
Remember this one from the old Calvin & Hobbes strips? I've never known a less zero-sum game in my life! The only rule is that there are no rules. Doesn't have to be strictly for children either, I think I'll go play a game right now with my beanie babies residing on top of my monitor.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
It's exactly what you're talking about... the process of playing it is it's own reward. It's totally abstract and non violent and almost non-lingual.
We've learned a lot from what users have been asking for in the past month of our initial release.
Even early on, we wrapped a scoring mechanism around it because people desired some sort of unit, or metric to measure their progress vs. the investment of time in playing.
We're a client/server game. All the level descriptions and behavior are downloaded from the net into our 3D client where the geometry is constructed and displayed. But it's not a multiplayer game, nor are there objects to shoot or things to shoot them with. Users have been asking why they can't see other players in our "world". No doubt the next thing they will ask for is a weapon so they can vaporize the other players and make them disappear.
I think that you see the kinds of games that you do because the majority of people can't function on a non-zero-sum environment.
Bill Romanowski
Especially the online version. There is an infinite supply of treasures, and monsters to fight. It is not uncommon for advanced characters to give less advanced characters usefull items with nothing expected in return. In fact, the ability to do this is an entertainment itself.
Other's I've heard mentioned I'm not so sure about, but how about Othello? Each person starts with an equal position, and while the board is a limited resource, it seems to me to fit the definition fairly well.
Chutes and Ladders fits, as well. The battle is to see who can get to the end first, and no person affects another.
How about Battleship? Everything is absolutely equal.
Trivial Persuit? Again, the battle is for completion, not resources.
Many of the crayon rail games would seem to fit (North American Rails, European Rails, Iron Dragon, etc.). As before, you battle for completion. (Okay, I guess medium/small cities can be called a resource, but I've had relatively few times when it mattered.)
I'm sure there are others I'm not thinking of...
Sean.
It's interesting to speculate on why that fad died out. To some extent, it was probably the last thing that would appeal to your typical whistle-chomping PE teacher. But, also, people just have a natural urge to keep score. I'm a lousy athlete and not especially competitive but I enjoyed my rec league hockey game last night far more than I ever did tossing a kid in a blanket under the direction of my hippie 4th grade teacher.
I play a lot of Starcraft with my friends. I actually like to loose, because you can learn out of it.
If I win, I think "Yeah, won. Enemy wasn't good enough. Yawn.". If I loose, I think "How could I have avoided this or that?", which usually takes some hours and a small change in my strategy (for example in detector placement or choice of units) in further games.
So, maybe kids should learn how to win and not just try to compare points.
But maybe that's just for strategy games...
I agree. D&D, MUDS and, for that matter, any MMG. The games themselves are designed to work like real life hence abilities, non-combat related skills, etc. Get the kids hooked on EverQuest or the like and make an enchanter, blacksmith, tailor....
What you want is Neal Stephenson's 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'. Unfortunately, current game design is not that good yet.
It's nota my planet, monkey-boy - Dr Lizardo.
While growing up in a small community in middle America where everyone knew everyone it was hard to escape a title of notoriety or in my case failure. As a child, if I competed in any sport related event typically I lost in both being chosen to play and actually playing.
However, once I arrived in high school the world changed from not getting picked to everyone played regardless. So PhysEd for me was different than most others. We had tests. We had two teachers. We had 30 students at most. And the weirdest thing was we played both competetive and non-sompetetive games.
I remember playing floor hockey, flag football, and basketball. All of which I came to enjoy and excelled in eventually. But I also remember playing New Games. A concept form southern Cali where the focus was on playing the game rather than being victorious.
I noticed that the concepts New Games taught us branched over into other games. I began to feel the same exhileration playing other games as I did playing New Games. I believe it was because New Games taught us to help each other and co-operate. Also, we learned that cheering others to perform often gave them the confidence to perform or at least to perfrom where they would have opted out.
IMHO, once someone realizes that ALL games can be played as Non-Zero Sum or Zero Sum games as a matter of thought rather than bounding rules ALL games have the potential to gain ethical and moral considerations which is in effect what those games attempt to promote.
Later,
Rivendahl
... there is nothing that has not already been thought
And yet you post to one of the most liberal places on earth - an OpenSource community board...hmmm.
... there is nothing that has not already been thought
...and we're all playing it right now. Unless, of course, you're dead.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Who cares? You're being anal, just go play Phantasy Star Online. ^_^
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POiT!
I also second the recommendations for D&D--I certainly had fun playing it when I was younger, and while there can be elements of competition, that's generally not the point.
It's non-zero sum. No one loses, 'cuz they give you all the answers anyway.
It would be way cool if they made it a zero-sum game though. How about if they put electrodes on the kids' tongues and give them a good zap if they don't figure out the puzzle in time? Or maybe ol' Blue himself could jump out of the screen and maul them. That dorky Steve guy should get mauled regardless... he bugs me.
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I take drugs seriously.
There is a relatively new board game based on Lord of the Rings. Its cooperative, and plays well (It was designed by reknowned German game designer Reiner Knizia) and feels like lord of the rings.
"It's because they're stupid. That's why everybody does everything."- Homer Jay Simpson
While never as a flexible as Calvinball, some friends and I years ago got into the habit of changing the rules of some games. Unlike Calvinball, we usually fixed the rules at the start of the game. Usually. The two best games we came up with were
1) the combination of SpeedBasketball and Foursquare
2) Monopoly with Crap!
I'll elaborate on Monopoly with Crap. To play, you need not only the standard board, but a deck of playing cards, a pool table, crepe paper, a baloon, a stairmaster, and a Dr. Seuss book. And a radio. Substitutions are encouraged.
The rules are altered thus:
* all properties are distributed randomly at the beginning of the game ("Communist Monopoly!" my girlfriend said). No houses are built.
* everybody gets a fixed sum of money ($300 - $500 works best) and doesn't receive anything when they pass go.
* when landing on a property, you draw (from the deck of playing cards) the number of cards equal to the first digit in the propert rental price. You then must run to the pool table (which is preferably kept in another room, or perhaps another building), and shoot the balls corresponding to those cards into the pockets. You can't return to the board until you do. If the person who owns the property is present, you must pay them rent before you go shoot pool. If not, you can stiff them.
*If your turn comes and you aren't present, your fellow players may steal $20 from your stash and put it in a pot in the middle.
*Anyone going to jail must go work on the stairmaster until the song that was going when they started is over. Then they must wait to play Baloon Volleyball (set up the court with the crepe paper) with the next person who finishes playing pool (who is required to play with them). They get out of jail if they win.
*The game ends when someone runs out of money. That person is then forced to read everyone else a Dr. Seuss voice. If the balloon has been helium filled, that person should inhale the helium first.
Variations are, of course, encouraged.
It usually generates enough sheer chaos and fast movement that it's fun. Lasts about an hour, depending on how much money you give out.
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I agree. You can anylze your underlying math stratiges for games to death, but there is some primeval joy from playing half life that no amount of anyalitcal statits will match. People like to win, zero-sum lets people win.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
-Z
Um...Isn't that kinda the definition of a loser though...
Not really (IMO). In Monopoly, there is definitely a winner and one or more losers (bankrupt is bankrupt). In Apples to Apples, everyone has usually collected some "Green Apple" cards, so they're ahead of where they started. It's not zero-sum because everyone has a chance to be ahead of their starting value (no Green Apples). A true Zero-Sum version of it would involve collecting Green Apple cards from the other players, and the Winner would be the person who got them all.
It's sort of like finance - the 'winner' is the guy who made the most money when it's counted (or the first one to reach a billion dollars, or whatever other goal is set), but all of the other players could also have gained money. Not losers, just not 'The Winner'.
We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams...
Games like Apples to Apples and most trivia games are not zero-sum. Yes, there is a winner, but there aren't really losers, just people who failed to win.
BTW, if you haven't played Apples to Apples, you have missed a treat. You can get it here (at my favorite online games store - Games and Gizmos, or at many other locations.
One more quick game review - if you haven't seen the card game Once Upon a Time , you are missing another great game - and one that's good for children as well as adults.
We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams...
You have taken a term from game theory, and tried to apply it in a social/economic sense. "Zero-sum" refers to a well-defined property of the payoff matrix of a game. What you are looking for is more of a distinction between "competitive" and "cooperative" games. In this case, trying to generalize the term is just an invitation to misunderstanding.
The best games tend to mix both aspects. This teaches the value of both sets of skills, in addition to the ways in which they interact.
I'd suggest that you get your kids involved in some team sports. Particularly those where one competes with others for a place on the team, and then cooperates with those same individuals to succeed in competition against other groups.
In the larger sense, consider this: if a game is truly "zero-sum" (in your sense, not the game-theoretic sense), no one would play it. Why would they play if they did not get anything out of it? In the real world, people play games because they derive some personal, emotional, or economic benefit from playing, apart from winning or losing in the structure of the game. I would suggest that the "zero-sum" characteristic is mostly irrelevant to teaching children what you want them to learn.
Consider the "game" of professional football. Nominally, the payoff matrix is zero-sum (one winning team, one losing team). However, each player on the field is paid more than an average American makes in a year. The players themselves net millions every week. The teams make money from the fans and the television rights. So who loses? The fans? They line up to pay money to see the game in person, or they sit through moronic TV ads to watch this "game". There must be some emotional satisfaction here (note that I don't insist that everyone enjoys pro football, only that those who do watch it derive some perceived personal benefit from doing so).
Looking at games as social/economic/emotional activities, they are both strictly zero-sum (assuming conservation of man-hours and appropriate valuations), and wildly non-zero-sum (in the emotional sense). Which means, of course, that the term is being misused.
I assume that you're looking for positive-sum games, here (that is, everybody "wins"), rather than negative-sum games (everybody "loses" - the only winning strategy is not to play). Unforunately, they tend to be fairly uninteresting (and, as mentioned above, they tend to turn into a competition into who can "win the most").
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
You against a plotline. Essentially puzzlesolving, so while I'm at it:
Puzzles! Crosswords, wordfinds, scrambles, etc.
Back to your regularly scheduled day.
-Nowt (or Owt?)
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
I have an absolutely perfect example of a non zero-sum game that is popular. I'm suprised no one commented on it so far. And if they did, and I missed it I apologize. And now for my stunning revelation. Super Mario Bros! Esp. on two player mode in Super Mario 3.
Certainly Escape Velocity can be non-zero-sum, although it looks like it varies depending on how you play the game...
DDR is great fun I agree, but being a scored game I have seen it quickly turn into a cutthroat competition. SOMe people play DDr just for fun, but most I know play obsessively, trying to get that SS rating on maniac level...
A better example of non-zero-sum games are things like SimCity as mentioned above, Riven and Myst as mentioned above, and Conway's Game of Life, all of which are more like simulations (Maxis calls them "computer toys" rather than "games").
Personally, I think the world could do well with more Lego, books, and other free-form "toys", than more Quake and football and other reptile-brain amusement. Though you gotta admit, petting the reptile brain feels nice. =)
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
If this was a zero sum game, there would be a way of taking beer from one person and passing it to another. I would assume then that the beer is staying in the cans... Then again, last time I was in the USA, I thought the beer had already been reclaimed from someone else anyway!
(this is not a
Ultima 6 is a good example of a non-zero-sum computer game. For those who don't know, it's a fantasy rgp type computer game where you are summoned to save Brintannia from the evil Gargoyles who are ravaging the land, but as the game progresses, you learn that the Gargoyles are not evil (they actually think *you* are) and the whole situation is the result of a massive cutural misunderstanding. In the end you teach everyone to respect each other and be friends.
Very NON zero-sum.
Eris
I can't believe no one has mentioned this hokey 70's invention! I never played it myself so I don't know the "rules" (if such exist), but I've seen the box plenty of times at Goodwill and the like. The cover says something like "The non-competitive game that everyone can enjoy!"
--
MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Linux. Both the user/haXor and the kernel win!
--rot13 twice for clarityLet's get drunk and delete production data!
This is not a zero-sum game!
If Natalie Portman dates you exclusively, she can't date me, and I lose...
The simulations have been mentioned (SimCity, The Sims) and role playing (D&D, Traveller, Ultima Online, Everquest).
Games that use differnt peoples input to create the outcome like the old mad libs. Or how about simulators like Flight Simulator. No points or scoring, but for many fun.
Hell, I think ding-dong-ditchit even fits.
If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
I end up playing games (the good ones) for the fun of it anyway. Grand Turismo and That damn space game that I can't remember the name of, for PS-One. I've played and won them both, but I continue to go back play the interesting parts again for the fun of it. It's always enjoyable to beat the big American sports cars with my super modified Honda Civic.
"We all know that Crap is King" - Don Henley
- land
- oil
- broadcast spectra
- licenses to limited privilege
- water rights
- vertical building rights
- other similar things
does NOT create value.Rather it confiscates value from the general populace which may have had access to the resource if it had not been artificially legally granted as an exclusive right of one party by another party. This was actually a fairly well understood economic principle until fairly recently (last 100 years) when certain economists bamboozled the public into believing that there were only two factors of production (labor and capital) instead of the more correct three factors (labor, capital, and natural resources).
The game Monopoly was originally designed to reflect the in-elasticity of natural resources and the effect of monopolizing them on the economy. In other words, whoever owns the resources wins the game...and that IS how the real world works. That aspect of the game is, however, not immediately obvious to most people indoctrinated in the modern misrepresented economic model.
A game, often, has it's point to decide a "winner" vs. a "loser". Therefore it is zero sum by definition -- there can be only one winner (brr-Highlander flashback). The things that are least zero-sum are creative. Some "party" games are not really zero-sum-centric becuase they the real point is to create a fun atmosphere, that benefits both "winners" and "losers"
Also, anyone who truly likes to play sports will tell you that winning is the icing on the cake. The thrill of competition, the exercise, the fun, the comraderie, these are all the best parts of sports. Losing when you poured your heart into it is more satisfying than winning casually.
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If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, forget 'em, because man, they're gone. -- Jack
One of the first things that you notice about humans are that we are competitive animals. We compete in everything.
/.ers hold RMS and ESR in such high regard? It is because they have made some of the most notible contributions to the Open Souce movement.
- who is bigger, faster, stronger.
- who makes more money
- who has had the biggest impact in the Open Source moment?
Why do
Which motivation has had the largest impact on Open Source - contributing to the gift culture or an attempt to overthrow Microsoft? Take Linux magazine which sports the line "The magazine of the revolution". A revolution is not a contribution to a "gift culture", it is an overthrow of the established. Its an attempt to win.
And as Al Davis says, "It's about winning, baby". Maybe this isn't the way things are supposed to be, but this is the way that things are.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
It is possible to play the game at home, or online (for free) at many MC game servers. Some even provide computer opponents for those without friends, associates, or patience.
"Once you understand Mornington Crescent, nothing else in your life makes any sense..." -- annon
If you think about it, participating in discussion groups is a bit of a non-zero-sum game. Everyone who plays has the opportunity to win (ie. learn something).
:)
Of course, Slashdot, by setting scores for various posts, has turned it back into a Zero-sum game...
Well, actually, though it's impossible to "win", it is possible to "lose". If you take out too much in loans, and bankrupt the city, you're removed from office.
I remember I used to play catch with my dad when I was younger. There was no loser there, it was just a good time and healthy!
This may not be considered a game by many, but isn't the purpose of a game to enjoy yourself as you *win*. So depending on someone's definition, there is no such thing as a non-zero sum game. Just non-zero sum activities.
Mr-Pope
"The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it." - Brian Kernighan
Check this out
The important and related definitions are the first few, and each one mentions a winner, or competition, or at least score.
Mr-Pope
"The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it." - Brian Kernighan
Have you never been around young (pre-school, kindergarten) children?
Play is learning. Games do teach.
Have a look at a book like You Can't Say "You Can't Play" for a great example of what some Kindergartners and their teacher learn when she decides to make a new rule; not for any particular game, but for *play in general*.
Sure, some of the worst games created are the ones that were designed above all else to teach particular lessons. Those ones are far too didactic to be fun. But even the fun games teach.
Even if these games weren't designed with lesson plans in mind, they still teach, or at the least encourage the independent development and exercise of these skills.I don't see anything wrong with someone casting about for games that suit a particular learning outcome. But yeah, make sure it can *also* be enjoyed.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
one must have "an external body" which would provide gain for players. All (well, most) examples here consider entertainment as a gain and from this point of view all games for kids are non-zero sum.
If you would like your kids to play _really_ non-zero sum game you will have to supervise it, to play role of this external body, like teacher did in this example. Unfortunately, most of the games for kids were invented to keep them busy with themselves and their parents free, so it is unlikely you will find any games of this kind on the market.
Really, it's not just about repeated playing with the same individual, but whether information about your past moves is transmitted on to future competitors.
Novak et al.(?) have a series of papers in Science/Nature (? they blur together at some point) where they demonstrate that "gossip" increases the likelihood of cooperation tremendously. The efficiency with which information on any given individual's past moves is transmitted to others is related to the rate of cooperation in a system. Other papers (I can't remember who--Olsson?) have suggested similar effects vis-a-vis ostracism, etc. Basically, when everyone knows who you are, it's in your best interest to be nice.
In fact, some talk about "second-order" cooperation--whether or not you pass on information you have about a defector.
Novak et al. introduce prisoner's dilemma with communication as a way of showing how altruism develops in a social population. In fact, there are probably some good arguments to be made that language evolved jointly with altruism--one drove the other to stability, so to speak.
Now, about *games*: I've always thought one of the biggest appeals of adventure games is their non-zero-sum nature. In adventure games/IF the point is all about exploration and discovery. You don't want to keep playing to gain resources of some sort (kills,cities,etc.), or to avoid resource loss of some sort (kills,cities,etc.), but rather to see what's behind the door or down the hole.
In the educational realm, the best one of these is Maptitude (amazon sells it), and while you compete with other people, it's all chance and knowledge instead of resources. I'm an adult, and it's challenging for me. My niece and nephew play it with their parents and like it, so it must be possible for kids to play. I've only played with other adults.
Try University Games and Rio Grande Games, and choose carefully! If you focus on games that either require some knowledge or that have larger chance factors (as opposed to strategy), you'll find that they're less limited by resources. The Game of the Year is one of the best ones, with not too much prior knowledge needed, lots of chance components (and reversals of fortune), and with most of the exchange coming from the bank instead of between players.
I suppose the other thing you could do that would increase the entertainment value of a competitive game is to choose a short game, so many rounds could be played. This works especially well among equal players, but that makes it good for adults after a casual dinner party. Set Games has a couple of really great games. Set for pattern matching, Five Crowns for sequences and number matching, and Quiddler for a "gin rummy" where you have to make words from your letters.
I can't promise that these aren't "zero sum" games, but there are more options, things with better odds for a friendly game. Games you can play with friends and still be friends with them afterwards, even if they lose.
I hate to break it to you but you've allowed yourself to be deceved by another (perhaps a little more subtle) simplicity.
The first problem with your scenario is game theory is completely dependant on all player being completely logical. Your kids were not because being completely logical is close to impossible for anyone or anything (it takes too long to consider all posibilities except for very simple games like tic tac toe.) If your best 2 kids were close to completely logical at least one of them would have defected on the last iteration and gained an extra skittle or 2. Then the system false apart due to reverse iteration logic (I'm not going to explain this because I think you know what it is).
The next problem is that the kids are only impressed by the 2 kids who got 30 each because that was more than everybody else; since 30 is only good because it is the most and to have the title of the most the title must be taken from someone else so technically your kids are still perceiving this as a zero sum game (everything gained is lost by another). In other words you win be getting more than everybody else where the non-zero summer would say you win by getting the most you could have gotton given the enviromental conditions present.
But you have pointed out something important that this discussion has not touched upon. The point is that to win a zero sum game in multiple iterations with more than 2 players each player is best off thinking of this game as a non-zero sum game. Let me try to be a little clearer. A player trying to get more points than everybody else ussually wants to use the stratigy that offers him/her the most points he/she can attain personally. Obviously a completely logical and infinite being would consider only how to get more points than everybody else but since we do not know how to ask such a being what to do we must make short cuts in logic ie use non-zero sum logic in zero sum circumstances.
If someone is using non-zero sum logic on a zero sum game (just like your winning kids) then why does the game have to be non-zero sum to teach kids the value of non-zero sum thinking.
One more thing I want to remind people is that game theory does demand that all players be looking out for their own best interests; this is true in both non-zero and zero sum games. Although there are non-zero sum games that cooperation can lead to greater success there are also non-zero sum games where defection leads to greater success. And vice-versa I can create a multiplayer non-zero sum game where players will have a better chance of winning if they cooperate.
All I'm trying to point out is non-zero sum does not necessarily mean nicer.
does anyone else find it interesting that the most obvious 'non-zero' type of game is based on reality.
It seems to confirm that, as is the post, reality is one of the few places that 'non-zero' is the norm, and the few places that reflect this are the sim world, reflecting that reality.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
"[Quake3 Team Arena is] couched in the traditional competitive zero sum winner takes all game, but the actual game itself is so much more than just being the winner of 9 rounds."
Yeah, I definitely agree. Even if my team loses, I can still feel like a winner if I personally did a good job for my part of the action. If it's a really close game and my team does a really great job but still doesn't win, I think we can all feel good about our performance.
I find value in the competitiveness of life. It keeps us strong as a species. Think of where we would be now, think of the advances that we might not be enjoying if it weren't for the competion that drives most of us to be better, stronger, faster...
actually, by losing a pawn, the player loses Territory. he gains this physically on the board. As in war - you kill the people in the town and you gain the town...
Just when I had managed to overcome the nightmares, you mention the Wumpus and ruin my life!
-p4
(c) All Rights Released.
There are a few empire based games I can think of that don't require total world domination:
1) Civilization (board game) You need a certain number of victory points but from what I recall you don't come anywhere near dominating the world. Also, conquest is very expensive for both sides.
2) Vinci In this game you are again going for victory points. This is done by creating a number of different civilizations throughout the game. The key is knowing when to abandon your current civilization and start an entirely new one. The way each civilization gathers victory points is randomly determined. No one civilization can come anywhere close to taking over the world.
3) Tigris and Euphrates This one has conquest involved but winning is tied to victory points, not world domination. And more specifically your score is the LOWEST total of the 4 kinds of points. So your goal is actually to achieve balance in various types of points, which is often not directly related to territorial control.
These games are all still zero-sum.
punchdrunk
The new Lord of the Rings board game is zero-sum. All players are working together as a team to defeat the game itself. There is one score for the entire team based on how far you get through the game and how many victory points the team collected.
There is a competitive aspect in that you can try and get a higher score than you did in previous games. But the actual game is zero-sum between the players.
It also happens to be quite fun.
punchdrunk
Kickass game.
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
Actually, I would consider the Sim City series to be a non-zero sum game. There is no way to "win" a game; the fun comes through effective management of your city. Of course, one might regard various things such as natural disasters destroying the entire city as "losing", but that depends on how you look at it.
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
The settlers of Cattan, aka. die seidlers von cattan, is a great game of resource ownership, that allows free trade. Competition for control of resource production is a dominant factor, but it's somewhat pointless to attempt to exclude others from common resources. Play the game, it's not exactly zero-sum. too much interaction between the players.
-GiH
Ah, tethal91 hits a critical point. The notion of "winners" and "losers" comes from the competition...after all, if you don't have a winner, how can you have competition? The sim games are not competitive in the normal sense; there is no other entity or "enemy" in any sense, figurative or otherwise. There cannot possibly be competition because there is only one person playing. The problem is that as soon as you have multiple people involved in a game, even if they are on the same team, you still end up with the sort of social behavior that creates competition.
Expand the notion out to a business for a moment, and imagine that the business is a legal monopoly to remove the concept of competing enterprises. Everyone is on the same team with the same larger goal, right? Obviously, yes. But does that mean that nobody competes? There are no office politics, no posturing for position, no desire to advance (and therefore compete against others who advance towards the limited number of higher positions)? Of course not. At some point, human nature enters the picture, and while a zero-sum game may be an exaggeration of the competitive nature that has been so critical to our evolution, there will always have to be a winner and a loser when multiple people are involved.
I think a non-zero-sum game is possible, but I doubt highly that it would be widely accepted. I genuinely believe that competition is human nature and that if the rules work sufficiently well that people are interacting without being able to compete, they will neither enjoy it nor feel at ease with it.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
This will be lost in the 600+ message shuffle, but Cosmology of Kyoto is an awesome "game" that is really more of an experience. Not challenging, but pretty. Check the underdogs for it.
The original poster asked for a game that his kids could play. Although it is considered a game by game theorists, prisoner's dilemna is more of a PUZZLE than a GAME because it has zero replay value and no kid would be interested in playing it.
Ok, which one of you kids broke the lamp?
You're both going to your rooms while I question you separately.
Age of Empires, trading in that game helps you out.
Moving at the speed of government.
Sim-city, sim-tower, etc are good computer-based games that do not focus on beating someone, but rather developing for 'the greater good.' Lots of puzzle solving games exists on and off the computer as well. But, if you want any kind of game with a winner, you will necessarily have losers.
There is no guarantee that the content has been read or understood.
How about the telephone game. No competition and learning about communication at the same time. BTW, the telephone game is where you have a lot of people and you tell a message to one person and they tell the next and so on until it gets to the last person and they say what they thought they heard. Then the first person tells what the message actually was. It makes for some pretty interesting changes in the message.
Ok this is a bit simplistic here but i keep seeing confusion about what a zero sum system is. For you to win. Someone MUST lose. So that if you "win" 40, the 10 other people you play with "lose" an average of 4 each... In otherwords, when the entire process is through, nothing is created or destroyed..hense zero sum. And to reiterate: For you to win, someone (or everyone else) has to lose.
Do you guys realize that the reason we desperately need non-zero sum games is the fact that US education IS a zero sum game.
Look up Standard Deviation ie bell curves, or normal distributions. In "real science" some events are observed to produce outcomes that fit these curves..though in "social science" assesment tools (ie Standardized tests) are created specifically to CREATE a normal distribution.
What this means is that kids go into the system pretty much equal, and the whole system is meant to "discriminate" (atleast 2-3 senses of the world actually apply here) between the students to produce the widest gulf between the highest and lowest scores.
Not only that, but teaching for tests does not actually train you for anything. No one learns anything important in school unless they teach it to themself.
But teachers have a solution for this! Assign so much work that even if people want to make up their own projects and research things they are into, they don't have time! Compel them to go to school so even if they have time, they are too tired by the end of the day. If they don't get tired, force them to do extracurricular Sh*t 24/7 and say if they don't they won't get into a "good school" and if they don't get into a good school they won't get a good job, and they won't be happy!
In otherwords, its a Zero Sum game. Even if you are lucky/insightful enough to realize you want to opt out of the game, you CAN'T. And if you are like me and were lucky enough to fool your teachers that you *know* something...you succeed...and then find out one day it was at the expense of everyone else.
Oh, and what about claims by politicians and school administrators that "we are going to increase standardized test scores?" Well basically you can't. Maybe you can for your school...one year.. But if you increase all the scores nationwide, the tests will just be recentered to produce the same %'s of each test grade.
A good non-zero-sum game would be an Education system where everyone had the freedom to pick what they needed to learn, and teachers would work with each student until they mastered what they wished to accomplish. (obviously with smaller schools...or just mentors..i mean, why do we need to lock kids away and rule their life with bells and supervision and assigning them numbers based on arbitrary and meaningless standards)
Oh and for you reference, I test between 130-150 on SAT scores, graduated highschool in the top 25 in my class, and got a 1380 on my SAT's and 780 on my Physics SAT II.
But really, as I learned in First semester Philosophy... I really know nothing. And all that stuff in the paragraph above says is "I learned the rules of the game despite them being hidden from me (i mean, anyone can learn to fake intelligence on multiple choice tests) And all of us really know nothing too. In a zero sum game, that means we are screwed unless we can convice people that we know something. But in a non-zero sum game (of life) all it would mean is "Cool. I know nothing, I guess i can learn now"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com
"Nurtured by love" - Suzuki
Basically search for stuff on how people *really* learn. Its amazing. Short of severe genetic disorder or extreme brain damage, most people are capable of what is commonly called "genius" in many different fields.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
Just because a kid understands game theory doesn't mean that it isn't fun for them. I'm highly annoyed at those who think that understanding something can EVER ruin it.
I'm sure that every astronomer is FAR more appreciative of the beauty of a night's sky than someone who thinks that the "Big Dipper" is actually something in itself.
I've usually found that removing the magic from a subject does nothing but make it more enjoyable.
Maybe I'm just different.
Basically, it encourages a cooperative strategy.
You know that saying, how you always kill the one you love? Well, it works both ways.
#1.) I can not off the top of my head answer your question.
#2.) I must commend you, this is probably the most intellectual and interesting question that I have ever, EVER, seen on slashdot.
Really, just needed to say that.
Zero Sum games are integrated into our daily thought. I win, you lose.
I've never really thought much about this conceptually, but I guarantee you that my day will now be filled with thought of this...
________________________________
________________________________
"I'm the King of the Trolls!"
"Zero Sum" is a poor choice of words. What Cliff was trying to point out was the great distinction between games -- where an opponent's loss is your gain, in some way -- and the capitalist world, where you are unlikely to get as rich by making other people poorer as you can by making other people richer.
Many games aren't strictly "Zero Sum" in the sense that when I get +1 point you get -1, but in virtually all games an opponent's loss is your gain -- if only because with one less chess piece he's less likely to win. Out in the real (capitalist world), you are unlikely to get as rich by making other people poorer as you can by making other people richer. But there are a whole lot of people that don't realize the difference --not just quasi-socialists and kleptocrats, but also many corporate leaders...
Myst...the journey is the reward.
Cue The Sun...
SimCity, SimCity2000, or SimCity3000. All three are meant to be played without blowing 'the other guy' up. I think this is what the original guy who asked the question about zero-sum/non zero-sum games was getting at. And to answer all those who have posted before me, everything has a 'goal'. You build things in SimCity to aqcuire more money to build more things. You play a football game to acquire the higher score, thereby winning the game. Some games are just more open-ended than others, such as SimCity, MUD's, and role-playing 'games'.
And any good puzzle game for that matter.
There are plenty of games where there is no zero sum involved. You are free to generate as much "cash" (points) as your abilities can achieve.
In football, your scoring only indirectly (by using up time) prevents your opponent from scoring.
In baseball, even that doesn't apply.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
I think that Zero-Sum and competition (scoring)games are not one and the same. There's an old game called "True Colors" that is great fun. Pictionary, Scrabble and others are competitive, but do not require someone to lose somthing in order for someone else to win. IMNTBHO, Zero-Sum requires one party to lose something in order for the other to gain it.
Baseball is also a non-zero sum game, potentially infinite sum, its duration and state history limited only by skill, chance and the stamina of the players (although team size, substitution rules, and the economics of having enough equipment affect this as zero-sum components).
Its basic premise is to perform a skill in a chancy situation to create chaos and take athletic advantage before the other team can restore order, if necessary by terminating your participation.
It has an obvious athletic component, a less obvious tactical component, and an underlying strategic component. It imbues the participant's muscle memory with the concepts of probability and mechanics.
And it invented Sports Heroes, the Superstar, and the Insane Salary, thus expanding its gamesmanship beyond the field and the rules.
--Blair
The first two that come to mind are non-computer oriented. One is the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) -- living the life of Medieval nobles is the point [sorta, no spam].... The other is V:tM LARP (Vampire: The Masquerade - Live Action RolePlaying) -- group improv.... In both case, acting out a persona is the point.
I mention both of those because there is no "end goal". While your persona may be trying to accomplish something, that is specific to the persona you create -- thus YOUR motivations.
On the computer side of things... Hmm. That one is a bit more difficult... DikuMUD usually is setup so that a lot of people are trying to compete -- but you don't HAVE to -- your purpose could be completely different... Robot Odyssey did give you limited resources, and an end goal, but the reason you played was because it was intellectually challenging (thus bringing its own rewards when you figured out a puzzle)...
I personally play Medieval Madness (pinball) and Sega Air Hockey (go MULTIPUCK!!!) for entertainment, not because of scores. Well, not really -- I play both because I **LOVE** multi-ball/puck... I can care less about the scores, I just want multiball.
I would also have to say that any sport you play with your friends in the backyard (volleyball, tag in the swimming pool, etc) would probably qualify as entertainment-oriented more than score-oriented.
Perhaps you could give an example of the type of computer game that would qualify -- then we could brainstorm whether we know of anything like it...
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
It's a darn good question and i wonder if even the SimCity/Tower/Park suggestions actually fit the bill.
Floating (either the rise or fall) of valuations of a thing, service, etc can be difficult enough in the real world for children to grasp; I can only imagine the difficulities involved with abstracting it to the game level. most likely they would have to learn the new valuation system, etc.
While they have to do this with most games anyway (say the importance of stone in the later stages of age of empires II as opposed to earlier stages) I feel you are looking for a more advance application of valuation.
Not to mention what it would be like to code something like that. woohoo. sign me up.
bryan
There was an old bbs game that ran ascii graphics that was called Exitilus. Essentially it was a non-zero sum game desguised as a zero sum game. There was no real winner, unless one was set by some private agreed criteria. There was an incredible range of options, making it one of the greatest games I have ever played.
Ice age cometh...
And because the post reminds you of people who want to ban Halloween?
You're not even addressing the actual substance of a post at all. At least if you simply resorted to personal ad hominem attacks, you comments would be related in a direct way to the post. How is someone supposed to respond when you say they remind you of Ayn Rand? "No, I don't"? There is no rational response, but then again that's just because you have not attempted rational discourse in the first place.
I must say that when I saw the name "Kohn", I chuckled to myself.
I read a lengthy piece by Kohn about twelve years ago in an honors course at IU, and, if I remember correctly, Kohn had embedded in his own arguments against competitive societal arrangements the kind of logic that would draw one to conclude that any other kind of arrangements, given human nature, were impossible to achieve on any large scale. (ie - he shot down his own argument.)
The short of it - he's one of those "Coercive Utopians", which is the title of another book I read around that time, and which I highly recommend. (I don't remember the two author's names, but I'm sure it's listed on Amazon.com too.)
BTW, the most fun games I played as a kid were "positive sum" games.....we all came in more tired, more hungry, and in more pain than when we started!
HE is not silent; you're just not listening....
this is a perfect example of why americans are becoming a society of wusses. This it total over thinking by psychologists and the like trying to get people to believe that competition harms people. Also the psychologists and sociologiest that subscribe to this "competition is bad" idea are also probably the ones that always got picked last in gym class.... this is their form of getting back.
From the mind of a mad man
Personally, I'm a huge fan of the board game Diplomacy. Not sure if technically it fits the description since the game is shipped with a finite number of game pieces, but I'm under the impression that you can add your own as needed. The focus of the game is negotiation and strategy, and there is no element of chance (no die, cards, etc).
document.sig.music = "So is David Lee Roth back in Van Halen or what?"
It seems to me that games like TradeWars (remember TradeWars?) fit the bill -- you score by trading and interacting with other players (mostly by blowing them out of space, but hey -- it's tough to make a living these days). The focus of the game is trade and interaction, though, not in racking up points or acquiring as much property as possible.
The problem with games played "just for entertainment" is that they don't set a definite goal for the player, as the game becomres rather boring when you don't have a definite direction. I'd just as happily read a book...
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
This is an easy question to answer: role playing games. AD&D (now D&D), GURPs, etc. are all zero sum games. They are fun, exciting, etc. but the people play together, rather than against each other. Such games can also build imagination, creativity, vocabulary, and social skills.
-Michael (Aristotle@Threshold RPG)
Online Roleplaying at its Finest
-Michael
Threshold RPG
As far as Civilization/etc. go, I become more powerful when I wipe out my oppenents' cities.
Let me fill you in on an important fact, in case you are new to this country. America has achieved is greatness in large part by the competitive spirit of its inhabitants. Silicon Valley wasn't built by a bunch of CEO's sitting around having tea and playing Charades. It was built by a group of driven people whose sole intention is to drive their competitor into the ground. As a result, we see a better product. Kids know how to entertain themselves -- do them a favor and teach them how to compete fairly.
If the idea is to have a game that doesn't have a win/lose (thats assuming that it's the same as victory/defeat) then i would have to say that puzzles are the crowning glory of all zero-sum games.
As well as not having a win/loss streak going on, with the "players", there is a community factor because puzzles are usually done with the help of others.
"From of old, there are not lacking things that have attained Oneness." - Lao Tzu
We need competition to drive the machine.
Our current favorite is drinking yahtzee. My vote is still in on drinking twister, but I don't think it will fly with them. And would a drinking game be considered non-zero-sum if there is plenty of beer and zero-sum if there is a limited supply?
Admittedly, Zero Sum requires a different mindset in the players and unfortunately I don't think that said mindset jibes with todays consumers...=/
Not to mention the fact that in computer games, even networked games, we all boil down to statistics that can be measured and turned into some sort of badge of honor...
Plead sanity, then they'll know you're crazy...
D&D is a great non-zero game
A friend of mine created a card game called Bureaucracy. It apparantly took about 8 decks of cards to play, and 1 turn could last a long time with many cards played. The object was to get rid of all your cards if I remember correctly, but the rules were so bloated (like a real bureaucracy) that that was next to impossible but the rules make the attempts hilariously fun. I tried to get him to teach me, but he wouldn't because it takes so long. Kids would probably get bored playing and call it a draw. Does that count as a zero-sum game? :)
Sim City is a good example of a non-zero sum game. The idea is to build something new, not defeat others.
please let's not forget about my favorite game, catch. catch with a football, baseball, frisbee, fresh fruit, vial of ebola... anything.
-jim
and that white whale... it still gives me the creeps.
Just because we happen to live in a pocket of negative entropy doesn't mean that we shouldn't prepare our children for the day when our borrowed time starts to run out.
I think making more zero-sum games is the responsibility of the game making giants like Milton-Bradley. Do you really want them teaching our children to dream of something for nothing?
Ben
Ben Schumin :-)
I'm sorry if I'm a traditionalist, but aren't games about having fun?
Why do they have to teach us about zero sum?
They shouldn't teach us anything.
I think that's the most important lesson. Games are about escapism - tell your kids that the best thing to do in life is to go out and enjoy it, and they'll be doing pretty well. If you stopped trying to teach them things they'd be a lot happier.
Think like that.
Don't try and take the fun out of it for them. Kids who grow up thinking about game theory and who are taught that life is depressing and unfair (non-zero) will not be happy.
Just play cards with them.
Read them a book.
Take them to the movies - anything but depressing games.
Always a good read, and makes you think as well.
Open Source would end up on the positive site, if anything on that chart.
Most of the play time of my youth was spent in the middle of a floor, surrounded by a vast sea of Lego building bricks. My friends and I would spend hours building things together. We'd combine our sets during sleepovers to construct huge [mansions | Moonbase Alpha | village | Ark II | whatever ].
It was through cooperation and construction that we turned a floor of blocks into something cool we could play with. Actually, we didn't much play with our creations: it was the act of creation that brought us all the joy.
Lego was our first introduction to the concept of specifications: when we'd each build different wings of a house, we'd phone each other up and make sure "The East Wing is 9 blocks tall and 40 dots wide, with a 4 dot door in the middle."
Though both games have point scoring systems and are acquisition oriented (during initial play), the games, much like the real-world sport, inspire individuality and creativity. The Free Skate portion of the game and THPS2 level design portion are almost pure zero-sum, playing to make something or playing just to have fun.
When you get into pure strategy games like checkers and chess and Go and Abalone and Othello and countless others, there's a much higher immersion factor. Everything is concentration and intensity. Much like any competitive sport, your success hinges entirely on *your* performance. There is true measure between you and your opponent, and that is where your instinctive competitiveness kicks in, and it makes the game that much more intense, particularly in games where every piece you lose makes it harder for you to win.
However, this is also a test of sportsmanship. The ability to realize that you are playing a game just like any other. And that is something that should be taught early on. Sometimes you have to lose a whole lot before you can win.
As far as the connection between games and "mentality," I believe the games we play are a reflection of *us*, and not the other way around.
I disagree about the pawn, in some chess games this is the difference between losing and winning.
Or snowboarding!!??? I love any game that looks cool! I used to love playing 720 for nintendo...but hated the time limit and the bees...I just enjoyed skating around and jumping the ramps. That's my 2 cents. ;)
MMMMMMMMMmmm!!! Router! It's what's for dinner!
'Twas the night before Christmas / At Schrödinger's house;
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'Twas the night before Christmas / At Schrödinger's house;
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Most games I know of that avoid the zero-sum paradigm are driven by improvisation or recall. Theatre games like "Freeze Tag" or "Yes, and..." fall into the first category, while trivia games fall into the latter. Some versions of these games have points or serial player elimination added to provide an arbitrary end point, but these aspects are often arguably extraneous. There have also been a couple card games released recently, most notably "Flux", where although there are zero-sum aspects, the rules are changed dynamically during play -- forcing more dynamic kinds of strategic thought.
Remembering those days of youth, I am compelled to bring up the wonderful game of mad libs for slashdot approval. This is a game that has no winner, is beneficial to the minds of all who play, and can inevitably get profane while played by the 10-15yo set. It's also great to develop mad libs... a test of imagination. Thanks to www.sinfest.net for the inspiration!
Spin the bottle Truth or Dare
personally my favorite is drinking games!!!
The old computer game MULE easily qualifies. It involves 2-4 players sent to colonize a planet -- buying plots of land and erecting farms, mines, or solar energy plants.
It can be played as a straight competition -- 4 players competing over limited land and physical resources. But it becomes clear after only a few sessions that your personal success is _enhanced_ by fostering the success of your colony-mates. Sell energy to a player with lots of mines, and h/she will be able to produce a lot of metal, sell it off-world, develop more mines and buy more of your energy.
Monopolize food supplies, and sell the food to your neighbors. Starve them, and they stop producing and run out of money, rendering your food valueless.
The game simulated the economies of scale -- tiles of like industries placed next to each produce more than tiles far from similar industry.
Ultimately, the game transcended the shallow goal of cut-throat self-interest, because the only way to retire stinking rich was to cooperate to build the best possible colony.
It was perhaps the best simulation of basic economics that has ever been produced.
Rick R.
peripherals.guide@about.com
Thats one example, the winner has more. Some others: starcraft against the computer (goal get all the tiberium, don't actually kill them) pyramid amway schemes (oh wait that is zero-sum) Code-a-thon for world peace. Everquest...my god people buy that crap on ebay. any sort of bedroom game with the S.O.
Last year I wrote a piece on this very topic, sketching out some of the major features of the current paradigm shift (from a zero-sum to nonzero-sum world-view) and suggest them as design criteria for a new kind of game. Then I asked for suggestions for games that meet these design goals. A friend of mine provided a really clever proposal.
You can read the article here.
Here's the meat of the article:
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...The best, most "classic" games are little snapshots of a culture's mindset at a given point in history.
(I'm lazy so I'll assume three examples are enough to sell my basic theory).
I want to make a game that encapsulates the emerging culture of the early 21st Century. You will have your own thoughts about what that culture is, precisely, but I'll sketch out the trends I see. Read through them before you begin to think about how to materialize the concepts. Avoid becoming fixated on a single "solution".
Concept 1: Gaia
The new paradigm is one of complex, metastable, self-organizing systems.
Each age has its dominant metaphor: fire, water power, steam power, electricity, electronics, cybernetics. Now we see the world as interlocked self-organizing systems of diverse types: biological, technological, informational, and cultural. The most accurate label I can think of is the James Lovelock's term "Gaia".
Game design implication: A game such as I propose would involve:
Concept 2: Onward and Upward
Life is evolutionary, not entropic.
Most games involve the slow degradation of the enemies' capabilities until only one player is left alive. Evolution is more about increasing functionality, interdependence, and dynamic equilibrium. Sure, conflict and death play a part, but death's utility is getting the old out of the way of the new. These ideas are equally true in the Darwinian and personal/business/technological sense.
Game design implication:
Concept 3: Something for Nothing
The zero-sum world is giving way to a world of boundless wealth.
Physics has come a long way since Newton. Quantum mechanics is beginning to show space-time as a seething matrix of "zero-point energy" waiting to be harnessed. "Quantum bits" promise to hold an infinite amount of data, and "quantum tunnelling" hints we may find a way to move that data instantaneously. Synchronistically, the stock market is in an unprecedented "Big Bang" mode caused (I believe) by the market's shift from dependence on finite material resources (gold, oil, real estate) to an appreciation of the limitless creative potential of people.
Game design implication:
Components of game play (pieces, rules, players, etc.) could be added either by pure creation or the interaction of other game components (generating new pieces, new rules, children).
Concept 4: The New Gold Standard
You can't measure infinity with a meter-stick
With the advent of the Net's fast, free exchange of ideas, the monetary standard of the 21st Century won't be money (tokens to represent how much of the world's finite material wealth you command) but rather a person's ability to produce new ideas by creativity, augmentation, or synthesis. We ourselves have become the gold standard.
This allows -- no, requires -- a sort of a "Grand Unification" of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy. She understood the infinite potential of creative minds but mistakenly tried to measure it with a finite number (gold). "Wealth" is now not something you own (you can't own people these days). Philosophically this means you can have endless wealth once you abandon the compulsion to bottle it up.
Game design implication:
This runs counter to the three games I mentioned before (chess, Monopoly, and Go). They rely on competition and destruction of everyone's assets. I'd prefer the players cooperate in the gradual construction of some odd structure, be it mathematical, geometric, logical, representational, or even social.
Concept 5: Matter is the servant of Information
The difference between a diamond and carbon dust is the way it's assembled.
Our world is made almost entirely of only a dozen or so elements (with a tiny sprinkling of the rarer elements). Our alphabet has just over two dozen letters, yet Western literature is an inexhaustible flow of words. What creates diversity is the arrangement of these elemental pieces.
Game design implication:
The ideal form of the game should rely more on rules than on physical manifestation. Put another way, the flow of the game (toward a more "winning" state) is one of rearrangement, synthesis, and timing.
Concept 6: The world is fuzzy
Fuzzy logic is supplanting binary logic.
The new science of fuzzy logic allows us to see beyond simple black and white, positive-negative, or win-lose states.
Game design implication:
Possible manifestations:
Life, of course, is the ultimate expression of "the game" and we're already playing it. I'm looking for something less ambitious.
This article, asking for your help in creating a new thing out of no-thing, is itself a manifestation. Interestingly, we will "win" this iteration of "the game" by spawning another incarnation of the same principles. That almost qualifies it as a Dawkins replicator.
"Dungeons and Dragons" is also a good candidate. It's social, win-win, and involves the creation of entire worlds through an act of collaborative imagination. Unfortunately it is well-charted territory, and more time-consuming than I'd like.
The Winning Entry (so far):
"Collider Cuisine"
My friend Chris Richardson (in a stroke of brilliance) suggested a cooking game wherein players agree to meet and make a meal from random ingredients brought without any coordination. It precisely fits the spirit of my design parameters.
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I welcome comments.
Clay Dale
There is no spoon.
Or begin with mine at HipBone Games.
Epeus' question about games that get away from the old standards of zero-sum loss and win touched my deepest core of values. I recently wrote an article for The Games Journal (www.thegamesjournal.com) on the need for a new paradigm, Non-Predatory Games. As a game designer, I want to produce games people can enjoy for the sake of playing, friendly competition. My company already makes a few, but I am actively searching for new ideas. Our website (link above) shows several in the abstract strategy games section: Lemma, Kaliko, Quintillions, Octiles, Brace, Game of the Labyrinth for starters. I'd welcome input from all you enlightened thinkers on games that don't require capturing or killing or appropriation from the other player. We are developing a few ideas now. For the year 2001, I would so much like to publish a really good game in the new paradigm. We pay royalties to the inventors of games we produce. Anyone?
Kate (an action for every purpose; a purpose for every action.)