Welcome to Episode One of The Mechanics of Meaning. You might have thought that, for the first episode, we would take a look at a really story-heavy, narrative- driven game, but no. Today we're going to talk about Dice Wars: a browser-based flash game made by a site called GameDesign.jp.
It's a great little strategy game, super addictive, and lots of -- Yeah. Yeah, I'm serious. Yeah -- where are you going? Hey, come back here! Please! Please play roulette here ! Okay, I know this might seem like a strange choice, but trust me: Dice Wars does some really interesting things with its gameplay. Plus as you can see the design is very minimalistic, so we don't have to work as hard to untangle the gameplay from the visuals, the audio, and so on. Talking about dice wars will also let me introduce some fundamental concepts that will come in handy for discussions of more complicated games later on, so it's actually a perfect subject for our first episode. Okay? Good, then let's get started. First, we need to talk about how the game works. Before we get into it, I encourage you to try the game out for yourself and make your own impressions. There are links down in the description, and this is your last chance to go into the game with a blank slate. So, how does one play Dice Wars? At the main menu, you choose the number of players -- sort of a mislabel since it's actually one player against one to seven computers -- and then you hit "Play". The game presents a randomly generated map with regions and dice distributed between yourself and your opponents, and asks if you accept this starting point. Click "no" and it'll generate a new board that will hopefully be more to your liking. Click "yes" and the game begins. The turn order is random so some of your opponents might go before you, but when it gets to your turn, you click on one of your purplish blue territories and then click an opponent's territory to attack. You each roll your dice and add up their value. If the attacker gets a greater number than the defender, the attacker wins and takes over that territory, leaving one die behind. If the attacker's number is less than or equal to the defender, the attacker loses all but one of their dice. You can attack with any territory that has more than one die and borders and opponent, and you can attack as many or as few times as you want during your turn. When you decide to end your turn, you gain dice equal to your largest number of connected territories, which are then randomly allocated. Each territory can have up to 8 dice, and if you max out all of your dice, any leftovers are banked for your next turn. The goal is, quite simply, to take over the entire map. We're going to come back to this later, but for now, it seems clear that these are pretty simple mechanics. There's nothing too inherently complicated or intricate about the game, but the mechanics work together to create a cohesive and compelling experience, which will become clear as we talk in more detail about two key elements: chance and strategy. Chance or randomness is often treated as the opposite of strategy: when someone is an expert strategist or planner, we even say that they don't leave anything to chance. And at a certain black and white level, this contrast makes sense. Imagine that I asked you to play a very simple game with me: I flip a coin and you guess whether it will land on heads or tails. If you guess correctly, you win. If not, you lose. We could play this game over and over again, hundreds or thousands of times, and it probably wouldn't matter if you guessed heads every time, or alternated between heads and tails, or anything else. There is no strategy that will help you win at this game. It's just pure chance. Even in games that aren't completely or entirely random, chance is still seen as antithetical to strategy because it's an element that we cannot control, that we can't 100% account for. Since strategy is all about control and planning, chance is often viewed as a negative. We see this a lot in video games with players bemoaning the RNG, or random number generation, that can influence many different parts of a game, like the equipment and items you get, how much damage an attack does, or if the attack even hits. On the flip-side, there's a game that doesn't have any form of chance in its game design whatsoever, and it's often held up as the pinnacle of strategy. Of course, I'm talking about chess. Chess is sort of distilled strategy. Every single game of chess has the same component parts, so to speak: the same board, same pieces, same movements. Players can strategize purely based on their choices and those of their opponents. There is uncertainty, perhaps, as to what one's opponent will do, but not randomness. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a short story called "All the King's Horses." It's a compelling story about chess, strategy, and Cold War geopolitics, and I'd like to share a quote from it here, specifically from the character Barzov, a Russian major: "'it's a very distressing thing about chess,' said Barzov [...]. 'There isn't a grain of luck in the game, you know. There's no excuse for the loser.'" Dice Wars is decidedly not like chess in this regard, and is very upfront about its incorporation of randomness. Dice is right there in the title, after all, and it shows in the basic gameplay. In chess, if you take an opponent's piece, you always win that battle; it doesn't matter if it's a pawn attacking a queen or vice versa. In Dice Wars, though, victory is almost never a guarantee. Here are the ranges of possible rolls for every number of dice from 1 to 8. Note that victory is literally only guaranteed in two specific circumstances: when attacking one die with either 7 or 8 dice. In all other cases, victory may be very probable, but not certain. You could employ the optimal strategy in Dice Wars and still lose. There's a very low probability of that happening, but it's still possible. There are plenty of potential excuses for the loser, as Barzov would say, but Dice Wars is a single-player game. You're really only making excuses to yourself. Besides, Dice Wars is still fair: all the players / computers have the same mechanics for success and failure. It is also still a strategy game: your plans and choices might not exclusively determine whether you win or lose, but they certainly affect the likelihood of a win or loss. What is strategy, after all, but a series of if-then statements? "If my opponent makes X move, then I will respond with Y." Even trying to think ahead and predict your opponent's actions just means flipping the script and imagining you were your opponent. "If my opponent does Y then I will respond with Z," and then you plan to counter Z. The strategic behaviors in Dice Wars and chess are functionally very similar; it's just that the sources of uncertainty (the ifs) are different. Chess focuses solely on your opponent's choices, while Dice Wars incorporates random chance. Humans generally tend to be better at understanding and evaluating conscious agency and intentions than raw probability. We're pattern finders, after all, and we excel at interpreting or imagining reasons behind phenomena or behavior. Randomness thwarts us because there is no pattern, no agency, no intention, no reason. This is why so many players bemoan RNG in video games, and some of them even jump to the conclusion that the game is rigged against them somehow. That pattern, that intentional behavior, is more readily imagined than chance just not going their way. These ideas and principles will be really important for us going forward because games tend to use both random chance and active decision-making in their games in different forms and for different purposes. In Dice Wars, for example, you control your own choices and can predict how your opponents will behave, but the dice rolls are always random. It's important to know and distinguish these types of mechanics so we can evaluate how they shape the game and the player's experience. Specifically for Dice Wars, these factors mean that players will almost never be able to guarantee a particular outcome, but they can affect the probability of successful outcomes as they learn the game and how to strategize, which brings us to our next topic. Dice Wars tells you almost nothing about how the game works. When you start the game, you get two short sentences of instruction that are mostly about the controls, and that's it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorSammy McAlister is author of this blog and travel blogger at Eleventy Traveler Blog. She was born on April, 23,1990 in Chicago, Illinois, US. Sammy is also: Creator. Travel scholar. Reader. Social media ninja. General troublemaker. ArchivesCategories |