It’s good to revisit a familiar game, especially one that I’ve gotten rather acquainted with over the past few weeks. While not a terribly addicting game at its core, it is still a game of chance, and I would consider as one of the purest game of chance, as even other chance games like Blackjack, Texas Hold-Em, and even Rock Paper Scissors have at least a semblance of human agency. War, on the other hand, is an IRL automaton simulator, with the result of the game already predetermined as soon as the game is set up. Thus, really the game is over before it begins, and the chance plays out through the shuffling and splitting of the deck. However, as I have also played many other chance games, I think it’s interesting to compare why other games like those mentioned above feel more addicting compared to the helpless nature of War.
Most importantly, I think that the predetermined aspect of War makes it harder to be addicted. The rules compel players to take the next card off their deck and compare in a simple subtraction problem. There is no agency to be had, which makes players feel helpless. This decouples the player’s experience and skill with the progression of the game. Furthermore, quoting Schüll, “purposive obfuscation…is key to the seductive appeal of gambling machines.” However, as Schüll notes, these hidden odds are hidden in the “mystery chips,” not a physically-based game. Thus, one scrupulous enough could exhaustively calculate out the entire odds for the game down to every ply. Even without number-crunching, there are basic intuitions that players can use to make sense of the chaos, such as remembering the face cards that have already been played, which provides a bit of grounding for what cards players can reasonably expect.
I think this is reflected in the playing experience of War versus other chance games. When I played War, it felt like I was more of an observer than a player. Rather than feeling like I had any stake in the game, I felt disconnected, which removed a lot of the fun as a player who was supposed to be invested in the outcome of the game. This was similarly reflected in the other players. When playing War, we we’re all very neutral, and never emotionally attached to any result that happened. Contrast this to a game of pure skill like as Egyptian Ratscrew, where tensions are high and all players are hyperfocused on pattern matching, card counting, and honing their reaction times. Even those with chance, such as Blackjack or Texas Hold-Em, have agency that can dictate the amount of chance that a player receives, and allows players to make choices that influence whether or not they want to take a chance, such as in Blackjack with hitting or standing (especially at fringe values such as 16, where a lot of the decision may also be up to everyone’s revealed card and their expressions, something that is not present in War as players themselves cannot control their fate nor have any idea what cards they have in the first place, creating the perfect poker face scenario where no metagaming is even possible as a strategy), or Texas Hold-Em with the decision every turn to call, raise, or fold. Similarly to what I have wrote about with Blackjack, Texas Hold-Em have strategies for metagaming, and innate strategies within when players make choices. Even RPS has more claim to being a game than War. Even through its randomness, habits, personality, and a whole host of other environmental factors play into how someone chooses what they pick. This also leads to the conflation of skill and luck: since there is a mix of the two in these types of chance games, the success of seeing a high risk, high reward play pan out is attributed to the decision that the player made to choose that path rather than simply the cards falling in their favor. In the reverse case, players simply blame RNG for not conforming to their ideals. This is almost a perfect situation for players, because they can take credit for all the successful plays, and push the blame to natural causes that they have no say over for their failures. However, in War, there are no actions that players can take: players are simply a vessel from which the game state is slowly revealed. The complete lack of skill (except knowing math and how to flip cards) draw a clear distinction between operations of luck and skill in a way where all successes and failures are attributed to “luck,” an extrinsic quality of players that rational players would know is something beyond their control. This is why wins don’t feel satisfying and losses are also easily shrugged off. This is also why I hypothesize that there are a variety of spinoff versions of RPS as well as the existence Blackjack and Poker tournaments, since there is skill involved, as opposed to the lack of a competitive scene for War.
