I wanted to respond to Kara's points about popularity. While Dark addressed the capitalism's pushing of one system over another equally good system, I think there's another aspect to consider.
Kara wrote: I think most of us would agree that regardless of what we ourselves, like, that how 'good' a game is depends on how many people play it and how long it remains popular. These tend to be good indicators of games. (End of quote) Take four examples: Monopoly Scrabble Chess Sorry All four are fairly commonly found games in the U.S. Setting aside the capitalism push and the fact that all four often appear in representations of family gatherings in popular culture, all four have a few things in common: 1. All take roughly 30 minutes to 2 hours or so to play. (please, don't send me your stories of the epic 3 day monopoly games or I'll be forced to send you mine) 2. All involve a mental effort to overcome through strategy, guile, or sheer pluck an opponent or opponents. 3. All have rules that are for the most part complex (I'll come back to Sorry which doesn't follow this pattern). 4. All four have a decent history. Scrabble I think is the newest of the four. (circa 1950s I believe. Sorry itself came out later, but games with the same general principle have been around for hundreds of years) 5. Each of them are games that have very clearly defined victory conditions. Sorry is the simplest, and was designed for kids. The idea is to get all your pegs around a board and back home without getting bumped back to the beginning. I personally hate this game, but it is a lot of fun when played with the right people or right quanities of alcohol. Chess is by far the oldest game in this list. It involves a complex group of rules and takes years and a certain amount of inate ability to be good at. You can improve at it by losing hundreds of games (I'm living proof of that) but it takes perseverance and a lot of losses. I think Chess probably represents the best case of Kara's game with history because it is popular argument. Scrabble involves a lot of different issues: board control, anagrammatic thinking, and optimal use of hooking your words to others. While spelling the word thyme is cool looking, it is likely to score far less points than the word red spelled in the right place above other words to form 3 words. Monopoly is simple enough to play adequately in about 20 minutes. However, the strategy of the game takes years to master, and there's been books written on it, as well as Scrabble and Chess. If there's a Sorry strategy book out there, my apologies to the author. One place where all these games suffer is in length of time played: usually played in social gatherings, they tend to stretch out inordinately long. They also have aspects that cause a lot of acrimony: i.e. the Monopoly players who will not trade, sell, etc or the Scrabble challenges against every word that is not see Dick run. All that said, I think there are commonalities to the games as outlined above. The reasons for their popularity are harder to judge. Very few people name any of those four as their all time favorite game. Most people will wax violently for or against them. However, "everyone" in the U.S. just about knows how to play one or more of them. Is this a case of the crowd saying yes though these games annoy the crap out of us we like them anyway? Or is it a case of games that have basically sound design gaining traction through careful advertising, marketing, and successful insertion into the popular consciousness? I would submit that while pushing a game thoroughly or with a gimmick can take it a certain distance, to actually become as Iconic as any of those four, it has to have a basically sound basis. Part of that sound basis is in the 5 points I made above. A good game provides challenges, demands forward thinking and innovation, is simple enough to play easily, and can either be put aside and played later or finished quickly. Take care, Jeremy -- In the fight between you and the world--back the world! Frank Zapa --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
