#035 - Checkers: King Me! (Forever)

Realised thumbnails might help the videos... bear with me as I figure out a style I like.

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC Type-In)

Genre: Board Game

Developer(s): Alan J. Segal

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

It's been a while since since I talked about the board game Checkers... or Draughts, if you prefer. In fact, it was one of the first games I ever wrote about - what I consider to be the first true video game ever created - back when computers were the size of houses and programming then was akin to the dark arts.

Twenty years on from then, it's a different story. Massive improvements in technology, computers decreasing in size and price and - most importantly, an easier way to code. Being able to make such a comparison makes it a great time to revisit the theme of the first video game.

Seeing as I didn't do so in that first article, I'll start with a brief introduction of the board game Checkers, a.k.a. Draughts.

A Brief History of Checkers

According to online sources, it's entirely possible that Checkers has a history dating back to 3000 B.C. However, just to temper the potential excitement that comes from a date like that, it's highly speculative. In reality, the best conclusions arrived to with some degree of certainty on Checkers' origins is that it's likely derived from an ancient game called Alquerque. That's also where you end up if you forget to take the left turn at Albuquerque.

May look familiar to some.

Alquerque dates back to the early-mid 2nd millennium B.C. (~1400 - 1000 B.C.) Sources seem mixed on this, but that's the general dating given. It was played across Egypt and the Middle East, being brought over to Europe through the Moors in Spain during their invasions in the early 8th century A.D.

From Alquerque, we fast forward a few hundred years and move north into France, and Checkers finally takes the form we all know today. Somebody in France in the 12th century got the idea to play Alquerque on a Chess board, and that's it - Checkers was born. Nobody seems to know who the individual was that did this, but I hope they got knighted, or whatever the 12th century French equivalent to that is. 

The rules for this new "hybrid" game - if I dare use such a term - were developed steadily over the centuries, with many regional variants also developing across Europe that deviate from the standard Checkers rules: a larger or smaller board, and non-diagonal movement are some of the distinctives to other variants.

Computer Checkers

Moving forward to the age of computers now. We've already seen the first attempt at making a Checkers computer game as arguably the first video game ever created, back in 1952 by Christopher Strachey (check the link at the start of the article for more about that one). Now, 21 years after Strachey's game, we have our second (or possibly third - there's another 1952 Checkers game out there that I might need to investigate...) go at making a Checkers computer game, written in BASIC, this time.

The lady looks utterly thrilled...

This Checkers game is yet another of the many games from David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games book. Although, he isn't the author this time. Alan J. Segal is the credited author, of whom we regrettably, once again, know nothing about. Don't even know if he was a high school student, university student, professor - diddly squat.

We haven't had one of these in a while, but this is also one of those annoying instances where the game was significantly modified between the original edition of 101 BASIC Games and the 1978 microcomputer revision. I determined that I'd be happy to still play it here in the 1973 coverage as it's still the same game at heart. Steve North and Lawrence Neal of Creative Computing (Ahl's post-DEC company) just modified some (note: some) bugs out of the game, like fixing being able to double or triple jump without threat of losing your own piece instead. They also programmed in a way for the game to know who's won. I would've thought that that would be... important for a video game, y'know?

The opening screen is also too big to fit in one photo.

Oh, but there's even more to say about the game, after I started playing it. The typical Checkers ruleset only allows pieces to move diagonally forward. Diagonal movement is still the case in this game, but it doesn't prevent backwards movement. So you can basically cheat to win, as the computer will never move a non-kinged piece backwards. I did this in my first playthrough, as I couldn't remember whether Checkers rules allowed for it or not. Keep in mind, I like to do my first playthroughs before I do any research. I didn't win my first attempt - it got into an unwinnable position, so I reset, and won my second attempt, using backwards movement. Once I started looking into how Checkers is supposed to be played, only then did I know for sure that backwards movement wasn't in the standard ruleset. There's also a rule that requires you to jump a piece if there is an opportunity to do so on your turn. This is also not enforced in the game, either. Once I began my research in official Checkers rules and strategies, I imposed on myself the standard ruleset in the interest of honouring how Checkers is meant to be played.

But, don't just think that only you, the player, can cheat. The computer can also cheat, but in a far nastier manner. While North and Neal fixed some of the bugs in Segal's original code, they didn't fix everything. There happens to be one very nasty glitch that they didn't fix, which allows the computer to spawn effectively an infinite number of king pieces. I'm dubbing this the "Infinite King Glitch." Only the computer can effect this glitch, where the game, instead of moving the computer's piece to the back row to be kinged, instead spawns a new, kinged piece on the board, with the piece that was supposed to be kinged not moving at all. I had a game occur where the computer spawned six kings with this glitch.

"Infinite King" glitch in full flight. Continuously being spawned by the X on 1,1

One small mercy is that the computer is quite the incompetent Checkers player. It starts every game with the worst possible starting move - I believe it's 24-20 in official terminology; 1,5 -> 0,4 in the game's terms - allowing you to counter with the best possible starting move (called 11-15; it's 2,2 -> 3,3 in this game), giving you an immediate advantage. Once I learnt how to play the game properly, this made beating the computer all the more easy.

Even computers fall victim to the Checkers noob trap.

What was less easy was wrapping my head around the control scheme of the game. Unlike official Checkers terminology, Segal's game does not number each of the playable squares on the board from 1 - 32. Instead, it uses the cartesian co-ordinate system - though a confusing implementation of it. One might expect the bottom left point of the grid here to be 1,1, but it's actually 0,0 here. This put me in a spin regularly throughout my first few rounds until I got the hang of it - constantly having to do mental math in my head, making sure I was inputting the correct co-ordinates I was moving a piece to. To make matters even worse, I couldn't figure out at first how to stop a piece after jumping, and ended up crashing the game. The game can't detect whether a jump is a single, double, or triple, and it expects you to input negative co-ordinates to cancel the jump. Because I'm daft sometimes, I didn't see that the in-game instructions tell the player this.

The issues don't end there, though. The more I played, the more technical issues I ran into with Checkers. One game, I was doing quite well, giving the computer a good thrashing, when the game suddenly decided it didn't want to be played anymore. The below picture tells the story:

I guess the computer got grumpy from losing.

There I was, making another jump, capturing another computer piece, when the "!NEGATIVE ARRAY DIM" line shows up. The game had crashed. Just as I was about to win, too! How rude. I don't know what the terminology means - I'm no programmer - so if anyone does know what this BASIC error means, please let me know in the comments.

Despite all this, you may be able to tell that I played quite a lot of this Checkers game. I think I maybe played for a couple of hours all up. It turns out, I actually quite like Checkers as a board game. It's one of those funny games, where you play it as a kid and don't think much of it. Growing up, one might see it as a simple game that doesn't have much to offer. I know I did. It turns out I was wrong on that point. While it doesn't quite match the strategic depth of a game like Chess, Checkers offers a surprising amount of depth in its strategy and ways of playing. The research I did on Checkers strategy, which can be found here, if you'd like to understand more about the game yourself, opened my eyes up to what Checkers truly has to offer as a game of strategy.

I'd consider that a downright thrashing.

As a result, despite how truly broken Segal's Checkers game is, I found myself strangely addicted to it. The broken-ness was more a point of laughter and derision than it was a source of frustration, because I couldn't help but chuckle at the absurdities present within the game.

All that in mind, the scores ended up being quite lopsided for this game:

Time Played: 2 hours

Difficulty: 4 (Mild)

Between the computer being a bit of a dim Checkers player, and the ability to cheat, it's not terribly difficult to win, but does at least require some thought and awareness of what's going on. The computer can still jump you if not paying attention.

Gameplay: 4

Whilst I discovered that I really enjoy Checkers as a board game, this computer game version leaves a lot to be desired. Technically, it's a mess, and doesn't enforce basic rules, allowing the player to effectively cheat. And again, the computer is not very good at the game. One later port of the game compares the computer's competency to a six-year old playing for the first time. In short, source game = good, implementation = terrible.

Controls: 3

I found the game's control scheme somewhat unintuitive, and quite cumbersome. The grid starting at 0,0 I found terminally confusing, and I constantly made co-ordinate errors, even after playing it for a couple of hours.

Visual: 2

The visualisation of the Checkers board is appreciated. The squares are spread out not too close, nor too far apart to make the board easy to read.

Functionality: 2

I think this the worst game I've reviewed so far from a technical basis. And this version has even less bugs than the original. From the Infinite King glitch, to the game not acknowledging the basic Checkers rules, to just crashing randomly - this game is quite broken. Playable, but broken.

Accessibility: 2

All of the above makes the game hard to recommend. Unintuitive controls, glitches, you name it. It's not completely impenetrable, as I think most people know the basic gist of Checkers, so the game saves itself from a worse score there.

Fun Factor: 6

It's bizarre, how oddly fun this game is. It's utterly broken, poorly programmed, yet somehow attractive and slightly addicting. It may have helped if the computer was a more formidable opponent, but for a novice such as myself, it proved enough of an acceptable challenge to make me want to come back to try and beat the computer again - with the added challenge of preventing it from triggering the Infinite King glitch.

The amusement that Checkers gave me unfortunately isn't enough to truly redeem it in any sort of fashion. It only gets a score of 19, which puts it with the rest of the 19s at the bottom of E tier. Of course, Checkers sits at the top of that pile because I actually had fun playing it, unlike the rest of that sorry lot. Still, it's a terrible, incompetently-put-together attempt at computer Checkers that I don't recommend you try.

#034 - Bullseye: Never Tell Me the Odds

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC Type-In)

Genre: Sports

Developer(s): David H. Ahl

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

We are staying in the sports arena this week. This time it's a slightly less-flashy and far less dangerous sport compared to bullfighting. Darts is... an odd sport to me, to say the least, but one that has a cult following (as far as I can tell,) particularly in the United Kingdom. While odd, I have come to appreciate it, through my research for this article, as a neat sport that combines a physical skill (throwing) with a mental skill (speed arithmetic) that also doesn't require you to have a perfectly sculpted athlete's body to be good at. My beanpole figure certainly appreciates that - it's the throwing that worries me.

This digital interpretation of the sport, written by David Ahl for 101 BASIC Computer Games, runs just a little bit differently to the Darts I think most readers would be familiar with. It's a heavily simplified take on the sport that omits several rules and mechanics seen in the real thing.

The original Bullseye page. I'm waiting for Porky Pig to pop out of the centre of that image.

It's like this: the dart board in Ahl's Bullseye (oddly similar name to Bull) only has zones of 10, 20, 30 and 40 points - and you can also miss for 0 points. The aim is to get to 200 points first, which is relevant for the multiplayer side of the game, which I'll get to in a moment. 

In professional Darts, the score counts down from 501 or 301, and has all the numbered sections from 1 - 20, double and treble (triple) sections, and the two-sectioned bullseye of 25 and 50 point zones. The winning throw in the standard 501/301 rules also must be a double. All of that is omitted in Bullseye. That being said, I still think that the spirit of the original game is somewhat present in Ahl's Bullseye, and isn't completely unrecogniseable.

Now, the multiplayer. It's very clear to me that Bullseye is designed around its multiplayer component. This game's taking some inspiration from PLATO, it seems, as Bullseye is a big multiplayer game. How many players can throw per game? 

20. Twenty. 

For an early 1970s text-based BASIC game, that's completely unheard of. The only other game I can think of that allows more than 2 players to compete is Horserace, which allows a measly 10 players to bet per race, in comparison to Bullseye's 20 shooters lining up to throw. I don't know if anyone ever tried this with 20 people, I can only imagine it taking a long time to get through everyone, especially with how slow the old mainframes were compared to modern computers.

1978 edition. That kind of dart would definitely be illegal.

While Bullseye takes a simplified approach to the scoring, how it manages how you throw the darts is a little more interesting. At the most basic level, it reminds me a lot of Dartmouth Championship Football or PDP-10 Timesharing Basketball's design. There are three different throws you can choose from: 

1. Fast overarm.
2. Controlled overarm.
3. Underarm. (I have never seen anyone throw underarm before. Is this really a thing?)

And the results of your choices are... not random! Yes! Unlike those other two games, each throw has been coded with specific odds, so there's a real choice this time. In the most basic terms,

1. Fast overarm has the highest odds of a bullseye, but also a 50% chance to miss.
2. Controlled overarm is the most reliable and least likely to miss, but also least likely to get a bullseye.
3. Underarm is slightly less consistent than Controlled Overarm - more likely to miss, but also more likely to score a bullseye.

However, I discovered, while preparing for the video, that there's in a fact a coding error present in Bullseye. Whilst the odds above are the intended design, there's a mistake that causes Fast Overarm and Underarm to have the same odds. I thought at first that this was a copyist's error, that whoever copied the code down for Vintage BASIC made a mistake, but no - it's actually printed in the book! Look at the above picture of the 1978 edition page. Line 190 is the offending line - it goes,

190 ON T GOTO 200, 210, 200

I've italicised the mistake. That second 200 is meant to be 220. That's the part of the code that tells the game you've selected throw 3, and to run the odds in the lines below. Selecting throw 3 incorrectly tells the game to go to throw 1's odds on line 200, instead of throw 3's on line 220. Oops. The good news is that this is a very easy fix, even if you don't know programming. You can open the file up in Notepad, and just change that incorrect 200 to 220, and everything will run as intended. Coding lessons with OGC!

[Disclaimer: I don't know how to code BASIC. I take no responsibility for errors made during my lessons.]

Bullseye's intro screen. Don't believe everything you read.

Anyway, now that that's dealt with, back to the game. Each throw presents a different level of risk & reward (with the code fixed,) which is especially great for multiplayer, as you could adjust your throwing strategy depending on how other players' throws went. Go big if you want to try and get ahead, or play it safe if you don't need a bullseye to win. 

Controlled Overarm will get you points - but not the big points.

In solo play though, it doesn't really matter that much. I'll provide the full odds table at the end of the article - to avoid spoilers - but I will say that there's no point in going for any throw other than the Fast Overarm. That's simply because it has the highest odds of a bullseye, at 35%. Yes, the in-game description does lie to you about that one - it's not perfectly 50-50, which I assume, based on the way the odds are designed, is for balance (see the table at the end.)

Go big or go home - way more fun.

If you want to get a "perfect" game - the equivalent of a real-life "9 dart finish," which in Bullseye is instead a "5 dart finish," (5 x 40 = 200) your odds are around 1.5% with the Fast Overarm. I've seen much worse odds in other games, so that doesn't bother me too much. Shiny Pokémon, anyone?

You'll see in the video at the top that I had a few goes at hitting the 2% 5 dart finish. How did I do? Well, watch and find out! I'm also trying something new with the videos in commentating them and doing some extra editing. I expect that not everyone who reads the blog watches the channel, and vice versa, so it might be good for the YouTube-only side to get some extra information on the games, provided they can tolerate my voice. Anyway, let me know what you think on that change.

The odds for the 5 dart finish are very low, but what about Bullseye's chances of getting a good score? Let's find out now.

Time Played: 25 minutes

Rounds are very short in solo play - 20-30 seconds - but I did play it quite a bit trying for a 5 dart finish.

Difficulty: 1 (Brain-dead)

There's really nothing to it from a skill perspective.

Gameplay: 4

I very much appreciate that the throws are distinct rom one another, leaving opportunity for strategic choice - mostly in multiplayer. However, I don't think there's enough difference in odds between Controlled Overarm and Underarm (see table below) for there to be much of a strategic choice between the two. Underarm is just better. Unfortunately, it all falls apart in solo play, as there's really no choice at all once you know the odds. Nor is there much point to even playing it.

Controls: 5

Very standard for a text-based BASIC game.

Visual: 2

Bullseye gets a bonus point for having some very neat and tidy text formatting.

Functionality: 4

There is an error in the source code that ties throw 3's odds to throw 1's. It's an easy fix that I picked up on only after I did these scores initially and was preparing for the video. Line 190 is the offending piece of code, for anyone wondering. It's a pretty easy fix, even if you don't know BASIC programming.

Accessibility: 3

I think it's fairly standard for a text-based game. One could maybe make an argument for it being a little more accessible, seeing as it more a numeric-based game, rather than a reading-based game.

Fun Factor: 4

I'm really just scoring it up for the multiplayer potential. I genuinely think this would be a decent time with a group of friends. Personally, I think I had more fun dissecting the throw odds than actually playing the game.

Bullseye's dart throw lands it a score of 22 and into the E tier. It was tied with Dartmouth Championship Football - before I found the coding bug. Now it sits just below it, right next to Bull, funnily enough. That's the cost of having bugs in the game - throwing away free points in my metric. This also marks the 50th game registered in the Tier List.

And finally, as promised, here's the full odds table. If you're wondering how I got this - the 101 BASIC Games pages provide the calculations, with Underarm as the example throw. Just look at the source code on the page over, switch the numbers and - presto! - you have the odds for all three throws. "SPT" indicates the average "Score Per Throw" of each throw type:

Different, but also not different.

My "balance" remark earlier was a little hint to the reality that each throw comes out, on average, exactly the same. You might think this results in an "illusion of choice" scenario, but it in fact does not. If you tested each throw 100 times, you'd come out with a result that looks like the table, but in real play, it doesn't work like that. The way I see it, there's not much point ever going Controlled Underarm unless you really want to make sure you get that winning throw and don't miss. But there is rationale for choosing either Fast Overarm or Underarm, depending on your proclivity for risk-taking. This all only applies to multiplayer, by the way. I'm still only ever going Fast Overarm on my own for that 5 dart finish.

There was surprisingly a lot to talk about with this game. I don't mind it

What's In a Game?

The recent article on Boomerang Puzzle got me to thinking about something. I remarked (rather strongly, at that) that I didn't think Boomerang Puzzle was a video game. Afterwards - and even during the writing process for that article - I got to thinking about what exactly is a video game? How do we define what qualifies as a video game, and what does not? So I decided that it was worth writing about, and here we are.

I'll propose a working definition of both a game and a "video" game in this article. Not only will it be helpful for me going forward, but I also want to present it for discussion. I'm sure I'll miss something, or you, reader, will come at it from a different perspective, which I wholly welcome. Discussion and debate are good and healthy things, provided they don't become hostile.

A Brief History of Games

It's a history blog - you know I'm going to delve into some historical data. The concept of games as a recreational activity is most likely as old as the human race itself (regardless of whether you hold to a creationist or evolutionary worldview.)

One of the oldest known games to us is the Royal Game of Ur, named after the great Sumerian city of Ur (in modern day Iraq) - the same city the Biblical character Abraham likely originated from. It was played all across ancient Mesopotamia as far back as 2,600 B.C., according to archaeologists - old enough for Abraham himself to have played it! It also made its way to Egypt, where a variant arose called the Game of Twenty Squares. Game boards were discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun, and even as far away as Crete and Sri Lanka.

Royal Game of Ur game board, dating back to 2,600 B.C.

The objective of the Royal Game is quite simple: get your pieces from one end of the game board to the other. It's pretty much the same core game objective as Backgammon. Two players play on the same board, consisting of 3 rows of squares, with both players sharing the middle space and owning one of the edge rows. Each player has 7 pieces that they must get from one end of the board to the other. Movement is done by using four-sided triangular dice. Two of the points on these triangular dice are coloured, giving a 50-50 chance of getting a coloured point facing directly up. On a player's turn, they would roll four of these dice, and however many coloured points they get is how many places they move on along the board.

There are some extra rules to make things more interesting, however. The basic form of the game has five special spaces on it - four on the edge rows, and one in the centre square. The edge squares give the player an extra dice roll, and the middle one is a "safe" square. This means that a piece that lands on it cannot be removed. That's where the other main rule comes in - the centre row. Since both players move their pieces along the centre, what happens if a piece lands on the square their opponent's piece is on? Like Backgammon, that piece is kicked off the board, and has to start its course all over again. With all the similarities to Backgammon, it's likely, according to historians, that this game was an ancestor of the family of games which includes Backgammon.

Another ancient game that's possibly even older is Senet. Senet originated in Egypt, possibly as far back as 3,100 B.C.! The rules of this game are more obscured to us today, but it's believed that the game itself had religious significance for the Egyptians. The objective of Senet is, like The Royal Game of Ur, to get all your pieces off the game board. Also like The Royal Game, Senet's game board is comprised of a board of 3 rows, but with 10 tiles in each row. Players would use "throw-sticks," sticks with one coloured side, to determine moves, and avoid hazards on the game board.

Senet game board for Pharoah Amenhotep III, circa 1,390 B.C.

We've already seen another ancient game in action on the blog, Mancala, in my Awari article from last year. Almost unbelievably, there's potential archaeological evidence of Mancala boards dating back to 6,000 B.C.!! This is a mathematical game played across almost the entire world, with variants in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Players take turns sowing "seeds" (stones) into their houses on the game board, with the aim being to capture more "seeds" than your opponent by the end of the game. Rules vary wildly by region, with Kalah, the Western variant Awari was based on, being one of the simpler ones.

Modern Mancala.

All of these games have several common factors, which are the defining characteristics of what a "game" is as its core.

Core Components

All the games I've mentioned above all have several shared components that make them a game. These components are fairly consistent across games historically, and so work as a suitable base from which to define a "game" and, extension, a "video game."

1. Objectives

A game is an objective-based activity. This is fairly self-explanatory. There's always some sort of end goal to be achieved in order to win a game. The Royal Game of Ur and Backgammon's common objective is to get all your pieces on, across and off the board before your opponent does. Chess and Checkers require you to capture all of your opponent's pieces to win. Every kind of sport has an objective, usually scoring more points than your opposition.

Video games are the same in this regard. In an RPG, the chief objective is often to defeat some sort of big-bad to restore peace to the land, such as defeating the Dragonlord in the original Dragon Quest (or Dragon Warrior, if you prefer,) or saving the world from being destroyed by Lavos in Chrono Trigger. Racing games mostly have the same simple objective - win the race. Strategy games, whether real-time or turn-based, ask you to acquire and spend resources to defeat your opponents before they defeat you. Puzzle games - solve the puzzle. The list goes on. Failure to achieve an objective usually results in some form of punishment, like losing a life or losing hard-earned progress, although less so today; there tends to be less harsh consequences for failure in more modern games, but failing objectives is still possible, in most cases.

Even a game like Minecraft, which started life as an open-ended sandbox that doesn't necessarily fit neatly into this category still has objectives - survive, gather resources to create better means of survival, and explore the world. Later on it was given a technical "End" goal (*wink*), but the game doesn't truly end, even after completing this objective.

2. Game "Board"

Every game has a "game board" in some fashion or another. Physical board games are obvious, but even digital and card games have a form of "board" that the game is played on that defines the setting of the game. A real-time strategy game like Age of Empires, or even an RPG like Skyrim has a game map - the digital "board" that the game takes place on. Platformers have their level maps, and so too first/third-person shooters. Puzzle games have more obvious boards in a lot of instances - just look at the grids Match-3 puzzlers like Bejeweled or Jewel Quest are played on. Some of them look like Chess or Royal Game of Ur boards.

Card games mostly have pre-determined layouts of where the main deck goes, where the discard pile is (if applicable,) and where players place certain cards on the table in relation to other cards. Something like Solitaire has a fairly obvious game board. TGCs like Yu-Gi-Oh or the Pokémon Trading Card Game straight-up have mats to use like game boards.

3. Rules & Mechanics

Without rules, there is no order. Just pure anarchy. Some people might revel in that, but not I. Games certainly don't revel in the idea, either. For a game to be a game, it must have both gameplay mechanics, and rules governing the use of those mechanics. The mechanics are kind of like the physical pieces of the game, while the rules put limitations on their usage.

It's a fairly simple area to deal with in board games, and sports as well. The mechanics of Tennis are simply hitting the ball with the racket, with the objective of getting it past your opponent, or forcing them into an error. The rules are what points you get for forcing your opponent's error, how many points you need to win, how many times the ball is allowed to bounce, that the ball must stay in the court, etc, etc... Monopoly has money as a mechanic, and there are rules governing how money can and cannot be used. Of course, we always like to break the rules and cheat, or just come up with our own rules.

Video games, on the other hand, aren't so simple. Depending on the size and complexity of the game, there can be hundreds of mechanics, and thousands upon thousands of rules governing how they can be used. Often the rules and mechanics are far more tightly interwoven, which can result in the lines becoming blurred. Super Mario can jump, but how high? What happens if you tap the jump button instead of holding it down? That piece of equipment can only be equipped by x class in y slot, and has this much protection and that much weight - oh, and it has elemental resistances, too, and a +2 bonus to strength. You can gather food and wood in Age of Empires, but it specifically costs 50 food for a villager, and 30 wood to build a house. Plus, if you don't have houses, you can't get more villagers or other units. Cavalry units are a +2 to population instead of foot units being +1. That AoE example factors in the mechanics and rules surrounding resource gathering, unit production and population - all interconnected and working together. The rabbit hole keeps going deeper and deeper here, so I'll refrain from any more examples, otherwise I'll have to make this into a book.

4. Interactivity

I thought about this one later into the piece while driving home one night recently. One of the big differences between games and other forms of entertainment, like film, art and TV, is the interactivity factor. Don't just watch that sport on television - play it! 

With video games, interactivity is what makes them especially unique. It immerses the player in a world more than any film or show can. You're not watching Frodo Baggins' quest to take the one ring to Mt. Doom - you're playing it, like you're Frodo himself. You aren't watching a sport on TV, you're participating in a simulated match yourself, controlling the players and making strategic decisions. Video games allow the player to be directly involved in making choices that have consequences, either immediate or later down the line, depending on the type of game. If the media being viewed doesn't let you make interactive choices, it can't be a game.

5. It's Just Fun

Finally, games are meant to be fun. If it's not fun, it's work. Games are at heart a recreational activity, meant to bring pleasure, relief and rest after a hard working day. Unless, of course, your work is games, in which case I envy you, or if the game in question is a sport. Recreation and pleasure are certainly present with sports, rest... not so much.

There's certainly other benefits to different forms of games. Sports help with fitness, hand-eye coordination and (sometimes) teamwork. Board games and video games can build critical thinking and problem solving skills, as well as teamwork and social connections in multiplayer settings.

But, ultimately, games are meant for enjoyment. Fun, laughter, getting a good fright, showing off the newest cool thing you built in Minecraft - it's all meant to bring some form of entertainment.

But What About x Game?

Naturally, some exceptions crop up from time to time in today's gaming climate. With such a massively wide scope of programs calling themselves "games" these days, some are going to not neatly fit into the categories I've just described. So, what do we do with these? Are they still games, or something else?

First, let's talk about a game I've mentioned a few times - Minecraft. 

Minecraft doesn't exactly fit into category 1 of objectives. It doesn't exactly have a winning objective (The End notwithstanding,) and is functionally an endless sandbox. However, I think it's still a game. It has objectives, and the player also has freedom to create their own goals, or even their own minigames within it.

Plenty of other games are out there that buck the objective category also. Any kind of sandbox game would suit, SimCity, The Sims - anything without a precise, winning objective. One could even make an argument that many arcade games, like Galaxian or Pac-Man, are endless and without winning objective. However, these all still have some kind of objective. Whether that be to survive as long as you can, beat the high score, or save your city from an alien invasion... what, what? 

Another sort of game that might come up as a "what if" is "walking simulators." You know, games like Journey, Dear Esther or The Stanley Parable. There's not a whole lot to do, but just... walk around. There's still objectives, and these games do have an ending, so I think it's fairly cut-and-dry that they're games.

When it comes to interactivity, I've mentioned several times on the blog the phrase "illusion of choice." This is a term I use to refer to games where player choice is present, but doesn't actually affect the outcome of said choice - by it either being predetermined or completely random. The go-to examples here are Dartmouth Championship Football and PDP-10 Timesharing Basketball. These games have choices the player can make, but the outcome is entirely random - your choice is effectively irrelevant. Are we to still consider these games? I think so, because they still have all the other components of a game, and interactivity is still technically present; the player still has to make strategic choices, even if the outcome is random.

Where I would say the line gets crossed is with a program like The PDP 10 Timesharing World Series. That's a program I looked at way way back at the start of the blog. It's not a game, because you don't actually play anything in it. The only "choice" you make is choosing a seed number at the start of the program, which then simulates a preset game of baseball based on that seed. You don't pitch, don't bat, don't field - no interactivity at all, so not a game.

Even the aforementioned walking simulators win in this category - as they're all about interactivity. You walk through the world, interact with it, maybe solve puzzles if there are any present in the game, but you still get to choose where you go and how you explore the game world.

I don't think there's much in the way of exceptions to the "game board" category, so let's move on to some possible exceptions to the "fun" category.

Starting with that dreaded word... edutainment. Some games are intended for a purpose other than entertainment, which is learning. Education and computers have a long standing relationship that goes back into the 1950s and the formation of computing as a whole, so I think it was a natural inevitability that, once computer games started being made, creating games meant for educational purposes would occur.

Based on their intent, I'd still classify "edutainment" games as games. The purpose of educational games is to inject an element of fun into learning. How fun these games are is up to user discretion. I played educational games like Word Rescue and Math Rescue growing up like they were normal games, not even thinking about the educational aspect. Plenty of us, I'm sure, played Number Munchers while at school. We also had Math Circus, which was great fun.

What's determined as "fun" is more subjective than the other factors. I don't exactly find horror games to be much fun, but many others do. This component is more about authorial intent than the others. If the developer intended for it to be fun entertainment, then I'd still call it a game. Spreadsheets are not a game, however, as fun as I might find them. They are intended for non-recreational purposes - though we can still find recreational purposes for them... that is not what they were designed for.

I think that just about covers it for exceptions and objections I can think of. Please, if you can think of others, leave a comment.

Quick Recap

That does it for now. I just had the idea on a whim and thought, "why not?" These will be good bonus articles that I can put out every so often when I have an idea I want to air out. I have a few more drafted, so if this one works out well, I might consider posting more. There's also a new page on the sidebar where all my thinkpieces and special articles will be housed.

So, to recap, the defining components of a game I outlined were:

1. Objective-based.
2. Set on a "game board," with pieces, physical or digital.
3. All games have rule and mechanics.
4. Games are interactive - you have choice, and it matters!
5. They're meant to be fun!

What are your thoughts on these categories? Did I miss anything? This is open for debate - I'm not saying I'm an authority on this at all, just someone who has ideas wanting to put them out there. I did briefly look at what some other people had said about the topic, but all of these categories are formed from my own thoughts and experiences on the subject, in combination with the research I did on historical games. I'd be interested to know if my thoughts are similar to anyone else's.

If you made it this far, I'm impressed. Know that I appreciate you. Also... if you check back here on a Tuesday, there might be an extra surprise every-so-often. Keep your eyes peeled.