Games and Economies
On Games, Part 1: Games as Market Economies
This is the first in a series of articles about frameworks for thinking about games and game design.
“Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
— Bernard Suits
I remember playing Exploding Kittens for the first time last year and being pleasantly surprised. It was a cute, funny game with enough mechanics for the players to feel competitive, and enough randomness to generate unexpected events and major upsets. The game took me 5 minutes to learn and 10 minutes to play (close enough to the numbers stated on the box). I watched myself go from never having played before, to becoming invested in a single game, to wanting to play several games in a row.
I was also surprised to learn how much criticism the game received. Scrutiny on the $8 million that the game raised on Kickstarter aside, I found several game design forums tearing the game to shreds. Commenters said the game was boring, completely random, devoid of strategic depth, and lacked any redeemable qualities whatsoever. Other gamers rose to the game’s defense. They claimed it was a harmless party game that resonated well with its audience and was a stress-free way to pass the time with friends.
It was jarring to see how my own experience of playing the same game could be so completely different from the experience of others. Different groups of people seemed to talk past each other — some focused purely on the flaws in the game mechanics, others debated the intended audience, and others still held different genres of games to different standards. It was fascinating to observe how competing definitions of “good game design” abounded and were defended ardently.
Games run deep with people. They inspire fervent emotional reactions in their players, and this is no accident. Game design has had a quiet renaissance over the last decade. Game design classes have popped up in many universities, and with more people playing games on their consoles, computers, and phones than ever before, game designers have access to a treasure trove of data that gets the design of individual game mechanics down to a science.
While the quality of any individual game like Exploding Kittens can always be hotly debated, the upshot is that games on average are getting better. They are increasingly designed to give us hits of dopamine with the right frequency, at the right times, in the right amounts so that we stay engrossed till the end and come back for more. They are faster to learn, simpler to engage with, quicker to play through, better balanced, and often more beautiful.
The game design literature is eclectic — and largely consumed only by enthusiasts. Game design touches on fundamental questions of why human beings play, how games facilitate our integration into social groups, and what constitutes “fun”. It tries to explain why I might enjoy a game like Exploding Kittens but hate the TV show The Bachelor, even though they are both multi-round games of elimination with hidden information. (Ok I lied, I love The Bachelor.) Many topics in game design have been covered in impressive detail by some exceptional thinkers. I’ll highlight a few for the curious reader:
- Frameworks for defining the critical ingredients of a game (a good overview here: http://acagamic.com/game-design-course/the-formal-systems-of-games-and-game-design-atoms/)
- Frameworks for distinguishing “games” from “activities”, “experiences”, “play”, and “entertainment” (Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun is the seminal work on this)
- Frameworks for thinking about what makes games fun, and different types of fun (Marc LeBlanc is the pioneer here: https://theangrygm.com/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-of-fun/)
- Frameworks for designing and fine-tuning your core game loop as a designer (too many great articles about this, I will include just one: https://gameanalytics.com/blog/how-to-perfect-your-games-core-loop.html)
- Frameworks for thinking about how different types of players want different experiences out of a game: Bartle’s taxonomy, Keirsey temperaments, and Bateman’s DGD1 (a great summary as well as an attempt to unify these frameworks can be found here: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6474/personality_and_play_styles_a_.php?print=1)
The Extra Credits YouTube channel is also an endless source of bite-sized game design wisdom: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB9B0CA00461BB187
This is the first in a series of articles about game design. My goal is to talk about game design at a higher level of abstraction so that it might interest a broader audience. These articles draw on my experience playing, designing, and building communities around a wide variety of games for the last eight years.
I want to set the stage by proposing a framework for thinking about games as market economies, where different teams in a game start off with some initial wealth and must transact in a metaphorical marketplace till one team wins. I have found that this way of thinking about games captures many nuances of what makes games different. The analogies to economics shed light on what constitutes a “fair” or “balanced” game, what skills a game demands of its players, and how we might become better players ourselves once we understand the value of our own resources. In the next few articles, I’ll apply this framework to specific genres of games to start chipping away at the question of why the same game can elicit such a wide range of responses.
Some preliminary definitions
A currency is any aspect of a game that, if different in quantity across teams, has a direct impact on the outcome of the game. A currency might be the value of your hand in a round of Texas Holdem, the amount of time left on your chess clock, or the number of cards left in your hand in a game of Uno. I deliberately choose the word currency to evoke the analogy of an actual currency, like US dollars, with the implication that players start a game with different currencies in different amounts.
Game mechanics are the rules and constraints players must abide by to play the game. In the currency framework, game mechanics act as a vehicle for currency exchange. Currency can change hands between teams (transfer) and/or may be converted into a different type of currency (conversion) within the same team. Game mechanics create and facilitate the events where currency exchange can happen.
The game ends when a particular condition — the win condition — is reached for a particular currency, and some rule is applied to particular currencies across teams to determine the winner. For example, a game of soccer ends when the “time” currency runs out for each team, and the winner is the team with the most “goals” currency.
Currencies
Currencies fall into three categories:
- Power — the a priori value of all the resources on your team
- Influence —the value of your team’s resources in the context of the game
- Information — what your team knows about the current state of the game
Within each category, we can define currencies that reference specific mechanics of the game. For example, in a game of Mafia, your power would be the ability of your particular role in the game; your influence would be your credibility/ability to sway decisions within the group of players; and your information would be what only you know as a player (like your own role).
These three currencies are present in every game, but not each currency is always relevant. Currencies that are equal in quantity for everyone, and are unaffected by game mechanics, can be ignored in our analysis. For example, time is a type of power currency that is often used to define the win condition of a game — but if everyone has the same amount of time, then it is irrelevant. Similarly, in perfect-information games like chess, everyone can see the exact configuration of all pieces on the board, so information becomes an irrelevant currency.
In theory, the total value of all your currencies (power, influence, and information) can be boiled down to a single number, which roughly indicates your team’s likelihood of winning the game. For example, chess engines will evaluate the position for both players and give an evaluation — a single number — indicating how well both sides are doing.
Your individual skill as a player is not treated as a currency, because game mechanics do not alter your skill as the game progress. Rather, your skill is a measure of how consistently you are able to make favorable transactions with your initial wealth.
Within our framework of teams starting off with different currencies, we see that individual players can take on different roles throughout the game:
- Attackers reduce the currency of other teams
- Defenders prevent the currency of their team from being reduced
- Accumulators acquire currency for their team
- Liabilities can reduce their own team’s currency relative to other teams
- Arbitrageurs appropriate leftover currency created by inefficiencies in the game mechanics
Many games find ways to let players dynamically assume some or all of these roles. For example, in chess, individual pieces act as both attackers and defenders, the pawn-promotion rule allows pawns to act as accumulators, and the king is a liability.
Games with arbitrageurs typically require at least three teams so that one of the teams can profit off a conflict between two other teams. Games like Risk, Diplomacy, and Coup feature arbitrageurs.
Game Mechanics
Game mechanics allow teams to transfer and convert currencies. More on that later as we dive into specific genres of games.
Win Conditions
In the currency framework, any game has at most three types of win condition for a particular team:
- Race to the top: Be the first team to get the maximum amount of currency X.
- Race against time: Get the most currency X before every team runs out of currency Y.
- Race to the bottom: Be the last team to hit the minimum amount of currency X.
It is worth thinking through the implications of these win conditions. The vast majority of games have the first or second win conditions. These win conditions are the underpinnings of our most popular games and sports:
Race to the top
- Tennis/badminton/squash/racquetball/table tennis: be the first team to [reach X points]
- Chess: be the first team to [deliver checkmate]
- Pool: be the first team to [pocket your balls in the right order]
- Snakes and Ladders/Chinese Checkers/Ludo/any race: be the first team to [have all members cross the finish line]
Race against time
- Soccer/basketball/American football/(ice) hockey/handball: get the most [points] before every team runs out of [time]
- Golf/archery/darts/shot put/discus/javelin/long jump/high jump/ski jump/bridge/spades/curling/go: get the most [points] before every team runs out of [turns]
- Snooker/carom: get the most [points] before every team runs out of [items to pocket]
Race to the bottom
- Poker/Monopoly: be the last team to run out of [money]
- Mafia/Dodgeball/Fortnite/Musical Chairs/Ninja/Checkers/Survivor/The Bachelor: be the last team to run out of [players]
- Hide and Seek: be the last team to [be found]
Some games have multiple win conditions that span multiple currencies. For example, the video game Killer Queen has three win conditions: kill the opponent’s queen three times, completely fill your own team’s hive with berries, or hitch a ride on the snail at the bottom all the way into the other team’s goal. The point still stands that all these win conditions individually are races to the top.
You could imagine more complex games that mix different flavors of win condition. For example, the TV show Survivor is a race to the bottom, but comprises many mini-games that play more like races to the top or races against time.
Many games could be designed to have a different kind of win condition. For example, instead of running a 100m race, we could ask the runners to run as far as they could in 10 seconds, and the winner would be the person who ran the farthest. Or we could ask soccer teams to play until one team scored 2 goals. Beyond rendering those games less dramatic and enjoyable to watch, these changes would force players to rethink the tradeoffs between offense and defense in their play style, and may change the nature of the key skill being tested in the game. A game’s win condition is therefore implicitly calibrated to the kind of drama audience members want to see.
Before next time…
The parting observation before we dive into specific games — obvious, perhaps — is that a game’s win condition is not what gives a game its unique identity. Games with similar win conditions can be incredibly different from each other. This is intuitive to us. Many games are named after their core game mechanics (football, basketball, dodgeball, etc.). With some imagination we can see that games that use similar mechanics elicit the same kind of skill (e.g. snooker and carom both test your aim by making you sink objects into pockets).
What is less intuitive is that games can also be similar if they share similar currencies. Chess and Mafia have completely different win conditions and completely different game mechanics. I submit to you that they are, in fact, almost the same game, and that all relevant differences stem from just one difference — information is a relevant currency in Mafia and not in chess. In chess, you are the general of an army comprising soldiers with unique abilities, with perfect information about the battlefield. In Mafia, you are a soldier in an army with a unique ability but incomplete information about the battlefield, including the identities of your own teammates.
We will put this framework to good use and flesh out some of these ideas more in the next couple of articles.
