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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
Since the point of most RPGs is to work together.
(Unfortunately, the RPG industry does seem to be a zero-sum game....)
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?
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.
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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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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"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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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.)
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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.
Outdoor sport, takes some skill, fun, non-competitive.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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.
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.
For linux, there is LinCity.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mmmm.... Iocaine Powder...
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
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
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.
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'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.
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*).
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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)
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...
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?
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
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.
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!
Sex is a non-zero sum game. Though I don't recommend playing it with children.
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!
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! ;-)
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.
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
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.
...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"
Natalie Portman is ugly.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
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.
"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"
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.
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
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
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.
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Semantics. By your definition, role-playing games are not games, yet the vast majority of people still call them games.
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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.
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Trade benefits both of the people trading. At the cost of the others in the game. This is why Settlers of Catan requires three or more people. (IIRC, the rules include a two-player variant, but it isn't very interesting.) Still zero-sum.
The cost to the other players might not be immediately obvious. It's more clear in Monopoly. Suppose you are playing Monopoly with three or more players, and all the properties are sold and no one has a monopoly. Then, two players trade properties in such a way that they each have a monopoly. If the remaining players don't trade for monopolies soon, they will find themselves out of the game rather quickly.
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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.
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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.
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The results of a game of chess are not measured by how many pieces you have on the board.
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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.
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Prisoner's Dilemma and Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma are both interesting in their own ways, so there's a lot written about both.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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
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
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.
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
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...
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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!)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Supposedly, people hold theories because they model the real world. In the real world, we also have the same terrain limitation that the various Sid Meier games have (our space-fairing tech isn't good enough to make a difference, and Sid Meier's "Alpha Centuari" actually goes centuries beyond our current expansion technology). Thus, if terrain limitation means the game is zero-sum, then reality is also zero-sum, and the theory is flawed.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
When you're talking about a zero-sum game, you're necessarily talking about a "game" as defined by Game Theory, since the term "zero-sum game" is also defined by Game Theory. The necessary part of such a game is that rewards are available, and the zero-sum refers to the fact that the sum of rewards to all players is zero. That is, playing poker for money is zero-sum, since every dollar that someone wins is a dollar that someone else looses.
However, and sadly, people here are talking about games in the English sense, which is a broad category of activities defined God-knows-how, with no specific requirement for a "reward" for playing.
Of course, if you define the "reward" to be just the playing of the game, then any game is non-zero-sum ;)
I didn't pay for my operating system either
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...
--
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
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?
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.
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.
'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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