1. Identify the basic elements in a game of your choice (actions, goals, rules, objects, playspace, players).
Game: Chopsticks
Actions: Hit the other persons hand with one of your hands, or recombine your hands
Goals: don’t lose all your fingers
Rules: Each turn you can either add the number of fingers on one of your hands to one of your opponents hands, or swap some number of fingers between your two hands. Then, all hands are processed as fingers = fingers % 5.
Objects: All of each players fingers.
Playspace: The two hands of the people playing.
Players: 2 people, each with 10 fingers
2. As a thought experiment, swap one element between two games: a single rule, one action, the goal, or the playspace. For example, what if you applied the playspace of chess to basketball? Imagine how the play experience would change based on this swap.
If you gave chopsticks the playspace of chess, you could create a strange game sort of like twister but for hands. Instead of the two players holding their hands towards each other, they would instead place their hands on a chessboard such that each finger occupied one square on the board. They would then still “hit” the other players hands to cause them to gain fingers but only when their fingers were adjacent to each other on the chess-board. This would create a much more complicated and difficult game, especially due to the anatomical constraints of only being able to position your fingers in certain ways.
3. Pick a simple game you played as a child. Try to map out its space of possibility, taking into account the goals, actions, objects, rules, and playspace as the parameters inside of which you played the game. The map might be a visual flowchart or a drawing trying to show the space of possibility on a single screen or a moment in the game.
When I was little I played a lot of Ghost. This is a turn-based game where players take turn adding letters to a string with the following elements:
Actions: add a letter to the word
Goals: don’t form a complete word, cause your opponent to form a complete word
Rules: Each turn you must add one letter to the word. The letter you pick must cause the word to be a substring at the beginning of some valid word. If the word after you add the letter is a complete word in the dictionary, the game ends and you lose. Otherwise, it is the other players turn. If the letter you add causes the string to no longer be the substring at the start of some valid word, then you lose.
Objects: The 26 letters in the alphabet, the words in the english language
Playspace: The string of letters being formed, in the memory of both players
Players: 2 or more, the people adding letters to the word
The space of possibility for this game is the space of all possible strings of letters that are at the beginning of some word. In theory, the true space of possibility is actually any combination of letters, as long as neither player realizes that there is no valid word to be constructed with them, but in practice any invalid states are usually discovered and resolved to a loss for whoever entered the bad state. Another factor of the possibility space is which words both players know, which influences what the substring can be and which letters they might choose in the future. While this could be drawn out, the best way to express the possibility space seems to be simply as slot for each letter: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ….
4. Pick a real-time game and a turn-based game. Observe people playing each. Make a log of all the game states for each game. After you have created the game state logs, review them to see how they show the game’s space of possibility and how the basic elements interact.
Realtime Game: Bloons Tower Defense
The game state in bloons is controlled by three main factors: the number and type towers the player has, the time elapsed / state of the enemy balloons, and the health and money of the player. The state of the balloons you are defending against increases in difficulty pretty continuously as the game progresses, while the defenses make discrete jumps as the player adds or upgrades their towers. This large possibility state can importantly be described by one of two options, that either the player has enough towers to defend against the current amount of balloons or they do not, at which point their life is reduced. Another interesting feature of the game is that state is extremely fluid as resources can be interchanged, for example towers can be instantly sold and converted into other towers, and money can be spent very quickly to entirely overhaul the board and move around the possibility space quite drastically.
Turn-based game: Go
The game state in Go is quite difficult to describe. It increments very slowly and clearly, with each change to the state being “one new stone is placed on the board” (as well as any resulting captures.” How this stone affects the relative position of each player is often quite unclear until the game resolves itself more clearly later on.There are some clear moments of resolution where the possibility space collapses: when a contested group is found to be definitively alive or dead, the relative standing of the two players and the outcome of the game can become much more clear, but each of these moments are built towards slowly by individual stone placements. One interesting thing about go is that for each action, the possible moves is extremely large compared to many games, but this possibility space is often not taken advantage of on any given turn. While each player can technically go anywhere on the board, they will end up playing in one small area of the board for periods of time as wherever your opponent played is likely to be where its most valuable for you to play as well. In this way the possibilities for any one move is technically large but is in practice quite small, as only a few responses make sense in many situations. Score is often also extremely unclear until the very late stages of the game, meaning that the game state is highly correlated with score but there is no actual calculable score until the very end.
