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psysal: Causal Chains and Snowfall

January 25th, 2008 (Visited 1350 times) Tags:

This post using my grammar on soccer is exactly the sort of analysis I hoped would be possible. It’s so cool to see something like this out there.

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10 Responses to “psysal: Causal Chains and Snowfall”

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psysal: Causal Chains and Snowfall wrote on January 29th, 2008 at 11:18 am:

[...] You’ve been blogged on this post by Raph Koster, author of the “theory of fun” paper you’ve cited! http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/01/25/psysal-causal-chains-and-snowfall/SQUEE!(Reply to this)(Thread) psysal 2008-01-29 07:18 pm UTC (link) That’s cool! Thanks for the [...]

Reader Comments

Tim said on January 25th, 2008 at 6:05 pm:
It still doesn’t help me understand offsides :^)
Raph said on January 25th, 2008 at 8:11 pm:

“The person with the ball cannot be closer to the goal than all the defenders.”
Sean Bulger said on January 25th, 2008 at 8:57 pm:
Huh, so that’s how soccer works…

Pretty neat.
Tim said on January 25th, 2008 at 11:41 pm:
“The person with the ball cannot be closer to the goal than all the defenders.”

I CRY NERF!
Darniaq said on January 26th, 2008 at 6:03 am:
This at once is very logical and insightful into how often this sort of thinking doesn’t happen in games I find this method though survives addative game design (add features to a core system) better than it does subtractive (build a complex system of features and then remove some).
Eolirin said on January 26th, 2008 at 8:13 am:
This at once is very logical and insightful into how often this sort of thinking doesn’t happen in games I find this method though survives addative game design (add features to a core system) better than it does subtractive (build a complex system of features and then remove some).

This is true, but it’s not a very big problem if you built the game with this in mind to begin with. It’s not hard to be subtractive about the systems if you built them using the more addative method. It’s only when you start with a big complex system and then try to make it work from that top down level that it’ll break things if you’re not paying attention. But Raph typically talks about starting at the smallest “game” possible and working up anyway. And besides, having a chart like that makes it extremely clear what you can and cannot remove from your system. If you try to yank a dependency you’ll know that you’re likely to break the entire chain that relies on that dependency. And you’ll also know more clearly if you don’t need something… if there are more parallel paths to completing a task than you need, you can remove some of them without worrying, and if something doesn’t actually act as a dependency to your main goals you can consider removing it completely.
Inkling said on January 27th, 2008 at 1:06 pm:
Is there a place in the soccer analysis for things like this?

[organize team]
[develop procedures and strategies]
[establish team roles]

I’ve played New York City’s “Midnight Madness” puzzle hunt for the past couple years, and my team (Red) spends a lot of time before the game building the team, strategizing, and assigning roles. For many of us, this is half the fun of the game.

Maybe this is just equivalent to practice, and of course all games can be practiced. Failing to practice or strategize doesn’t change the nature of the game, so perhaps this sort of thing has no place in a strict analysis of the “objectives of how to win a soccer game.” Similarly, the structure of Midnight Madness remains the same even though other teams do not organize well.

But it seems to me that team- and community-building objectives are compelling goals for many game players, and are therefore relevant to a game designer using a game grammar to understand how people play.
Raph said on January 27th, 2008 at 1:24 pm:

Inkling,

Definitely. I have commented before how training is effectively a game nested in the larger game as well.
Michael Chui said on January 29th, 2008 at 1:59 am:
of course all games can be practiced.

Games of pure chance can’t be. But I’m not sure you’d call them games. Most definitions of “game” allow them, so I can see an argument either way.