AGDC: Games Are Math writeup

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Sep 182009
 

Xemu’s Long-Winded Game Industry Ramblings :: AGDC ’09: Raph Koster on Games and Math is a liveblog of the talk I gave a couple of hours ago here at GDCAustin.

The talk was first a very brief intro to game grammar approaches, followed by digging into the math behind very common game mechanics that have stood the test of time, and then lastly a look at some of the “bugs” in human cognition that games tend to exploit. It was supposed to be an intermediate talk, not superadvanced, so I hope I hit the right levelof complexity for everyone!

The room was pretty packed — 300 people, I am told! There’s also commentary on Twitter if you go looking.

I will try to get the slides up soon.

  3 Responses to “AGDC: Games Are Math writeup”

  1. jrgibson says:
    September 20, 2009 at 7:03 pm

    Hi Raph,

    In your talk, you mentioned that you liked the game Strategic War. I did some looking, and the only mention of it that I could find was in this 2009 paper from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics which describes several math games.

    From the paper:

    Strategic War – for 2 players
    This game is played with a standard deck of playing cards. Players begin the game by separating the four suits. Each player chooses a suit and receives all the cards of that suit. (It is easier to play if the chosen suits are of the same color.) A player’s cards are her armament. A third suit is chosen, and those cards are the spoils of war. The fourth suit is not used.

    In all three of the suits used, aces are low and are worth one point only. 2’s through 10’s are worth their face values, jack are worth 11 points, queens are worth 12 points, and kings are worth 13 points.

    The spoils of war cards are shuffled and placed face down between the players. The top card is then turned up and each player chooses a card from his hand with which to try to win the face up card. The players put their cards face down on the table in front of them. A player may change his mind about what card to play until the moment when both players have a card face down at the same time. At that point, they turn their cards face up and the player with the higher card wins the face- up card from the spoils of war pile. She places that card in front of her face down, and both players place their used armament cards face down in front of them in a discard pile. (For a game that requires some strategy but less memory, leave all played cards face up.)

    If there is a tie, neither player wins the spoils of war card.

    After all the cards have been played, the player with the higher total of the spoils of war cards wins.

    Is this the game that you were talking about?

    Thanks,
    — Jeremy

  2. Raph says:
    September 20, 2009 at 8:56 pm

    I wouldn’t say I said I liked it, just that it was an example of that particular math problem. 🙂

    The variant I know did not use the spoils of war pile. Basically, it was like classic War where you shuffle the deck, split it, and each run through it until all the cards are in the hands of one player — except that in strategic war, you have a hand, and you choose which card to play against the opponent.

  3. I’m the guy who’s always late « Lakitu's Dev Cartridge says:
    April 30, 2011 at 6:00 pm

    […] Koster points out several times (1 2 3) a game is basically an interface to solve an inner math problem.  The underlying mechanic is […]

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