- I’ve chosen to identify the basic elements for chess. The actions are to move your pieces and take your opponents pieces. The goal is to checkmate your opponent. The rules are the way that the pieces move and how to capture a piece. For examples, pawns can only move forward and can only capture to their direct forward diagonal. The objects are the pieces themselves. The playspace is the chessboard. Finally, the players are the two players, one playing white and the other playing black.
- If we were to swap the goal of chess with checkers, then the goal would be to take all of your opponent’s pieces without losing all of your pieces. In this case, sacrificing pawns or supporting pieces would be discouraged as all pieces would now be worth an equal amount toward achieving the goal rather than the king a piece that is more important than all other pieces. Players would likely have to play more defensively.
- A simple game I played as a kid was hopscotch. Players would jump to the end of the squares using any combination of the squares in a linear order. Here is a map of the space of possibility for the game hopscotch.
- An example of a turn based game is Pokemon Emerald (or any of the mainline Pokemon games, but Emerald is my personal favorite), while an example of a real time game is Pokemon Unite. In Pokemon Emerald, you and an opponent take turns doing one action each, which can be attacking using your current Pokemon, changing your current Pokemon, or using an item. In Pokemon Unite, you play as a Pokemon on a team with two other players against another team of three players. Players use their Pokemon to attack the other team’s Pokemon using moves in real time. In observing both of these games, I noticed that Pokemon unite has a bigger state of possibility for a few reasons. The first is that because Pokemon Unite is in real time, the action of killing an opponent’s Pokemon makes your opponent unable to act for a period of time. In Pokemon Emerald, however, every player is always able to act when it’s their turn even if their Pokemon just died. This creates a space of possibility in Pokemon Unite where any combination of players can be dong actions at any time. Additionally, because there is a 2D traversable playspace Pokemon United, players can be in different locations, whereas players do not move in Pokemon Emerald and the playspace is limited to one screen. However, one space of possibilities available in Emerald that is not available in Unite is having different Pokemon active than the one that you started with. Additionally, because the goal in Pokemon Unite is to score the most points on your opponent’s basketball-like goal, while the goal in Pokemon Emerald is to kill all of your opponent’s Pokemon, players in Unite tend to use attacking actions less often and use defensive actions, such as running away, more often. Finally, there are more players in Pokemon Unite, whereas in Pokemon Emerald, there are only two players (or one if you are playing against an AI). This means that the playspace must be bigger to allow for more players.
