Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

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The author lead me well, I had the same thought before he said it: Backgammon is a good balance between strategy and randomness, the perfect game.

I've been thinking about games as "shaped randomness" lately. Choose the right distributions, pick the right mechanics, stick some art on top to stimulate people's imagination and you have the ingredients of a good game.

Just rolling a dice is fun. What will it roll? There's a kernel of fun there, not much, but something. Add some art, like Snakes and Ladders, and you have a legit game that has lasted for centuries. Finally, add some actual decisions to the game, and now we have something really interesting.

I've also been viewing games through the lens of interaction and watching. I like to interact and make choices, but I also enjoy passivly watching the story unfold. The auto-battler genre shows people can enjoy games where 80% of the game is just watching the consequences of your choices unfold in a nice spectacle.

Interesting perspective.

I’d add:

- “Hard problems” are often good game mechanics. Think traveling salesman or bin packing

- There are player archetypes. They each want different experiences. The collector vs the masterer.

- Emotion has to fit somewhere in the picture. It’s not just paint on top of mechanics. More likely the reverse is true. “Fun” isn’t an emotion.

- On distributions, too much randomness quickly becomes boring. Too little can be bland. It’s like a spice. How much is called for will vary by dish.

I fail to define what is "fun". I fail also to determine the limit of what is an emotion and what isn't. Emotion must have an effect on my brain, and maybe cause some behavior.

Joy and sadness are emotions, they do encourage specific and somehow different behaviors.

It seems like "fun" is local, and "joy" global. Also "fun" seems to be more immediate and have a specific (shorter) lifespan.

Fun seems to be linked to a situation. When the situation ends, fun ends.

You perfectly identify what is fun while the cause of joy can perfectly be unclear or complex.

But does that make "fun" something else, in nature, than joy ?

After playing 10,000 games of Backgammon on my phone, I disagree.

Backgammon lacks hidden state.

Hmmm. Is hidden state inherently good or does it serve the same purpose as randomness?

From an individual perspective, an opponent playing unknown cards from their hand isn't much different than a complex and well balanced RNG in some single player game.

I find backgammon extremely boring despite being fun in theory. I'm not saying it's a bad game, but it doesn't do anything for me versus a decent RPG, even an old one.

So I think the answer, as Betteridge's law would predict, is no.

Good ol' Betteridge, destroying fun conversations everywhere.

(There's a place to choose words carefully. Talking about games doesn't have to be one of them.)

As for RPGs. They're just backgammon, with more pieces, a bigger board, and some art. But yeah, I probably like a good RPG better than backgammon as well. But no RPG has lasted 5,000 years like backgammon has, so which game is better?

Better to whom? I prefer RPGs. My criticism was aimed at the concept of "perfect game", that's why even a great game like Ocarina of Time isn't an unanimity.

RPGs aren't just backgammon, there has been innovations in game mechanics and the understanding of fun in the last several decades. For instance, idle games would be thought impossible a while back, yet they are probably more popular than backgammon among the youth. Idle games are not backgammon, in many of them there isn't even a way to lose.

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