On the Kinds of Games There Are
by Wayne Saunders
2006
All right, I’ll tell you up front that there are only two kinds of games: the ones I can afford, and the other kind. Oh, that’s not the kind of distinction you were looking for? I suppose you wanted to know more about the games themselves and not so much about me. When game theorists think about the kind of games there are, they usually focus on what they call the “mechanics” of the games, the factors that make a game play one way rather than another—in the case of checkers, more like a battle and less like a race. Such distinctions don’t seem very personal: the combativeness of checkers has nothing to do with how I feel about the game or whether it fits my budget, and everyone who plays it is likely to find combativeness one of the best ways of describing it. Checkers is a “war game,” and, along with chess and Risk and all the other games that have you try to eliminate your opponent’s pieces, it represents a kind of game appearing on the “taxonomy,” or list of types, compiled by many hobbyists, along with “race games” (Parcheesi), “territory games” (go), “deduction games” (Clue), and various other types.
And yet I like my first distinction, too. Most game collections are assembled by casual players, not professors—I have been both—and should be made to fit the whims and passions that warm us in an often chilly world. Intellectual curiosity is only one of the reasons collectors try to sort through their holdings. Another reason is their need for purpose, focus, and meaning. Someone with an idea about the kinds of games there are probably also has a good idea about her preferences for some of them over others; she is focused on collecting and playing those games, they become part of the purpose of her life, and in their own way they give it meaning. (No, I’m not going to admit they are “just games.”) If she is aware of the category, “games one played as a child,” she can decide if her childhood games are worth making into a special mission. If she has especially enjoyed some “games that have lots of rules but are easy to learn,” she may try to search for more games combining those two characteristics. Even if her prey is as nebulous as “games making one glad to be alive,” she has an objective that cuts precisely between games that do and don’t gladden. Is this last category objective enough to be considered a “type” of game? Of course it is. Even if she is the standard by which they’re measured, the games that ultimately satisfy her do it on their own merit: she can’t turn an unsatisfying game into a joyous experience just because she wants to. (Unless she’s a saint, but that’s another kind of magazine.) “The games I, the author of this article, can afford” is likewise an objective category; it’s just one that happens not to interest anyone but me.
The suspicion is that games of the last sort aren’t “objective” because they’re based on personal situations or feelings that lack real status. But such an idea really over-simplifies what actually happens. Sometimes we fall in love with a handful of games and only gradually come to see the categories of factors that make them special. Sometimes we start at the other end, with a theoretical understanding of the kinds of games there are, and then fall for certain ones the more we know about them. Both extremes are dramatic, but life usually comes somewhere in between: we play some games we enjoy, then, in speculating on the reasons for our pleasure, we play other games that test our hypotheses. Gradually we learn through thoughtful experimentation just what types of games turn us on, and we collect them and play them and even preach them if we must.
Along with intellectual curiosity and personal focus, however, is a third, more mundane reason to sort out the kinds of games: collectors or players with large collections need to know how to navigate their extensive holdings, that is, how to arrange them on the shelves and how to find them when they want to. Libraries and museums have the same problem, which they try to solve academically by arranging their materials in an order corresponding to the “real” order—natural or historical or pedagogical—that structures the materials when no one is looking. The old Dewey Decimal System was not just a location device but a metaphysical system locating all known topics of conversation by principles that were presumably independent of the circumstances under which the conversations were begun. But such an ideal is impossible to hold. As a philosophy teacher, I used to pester the librarians of my college for putting Plato in the literature section while locating his student Aristotle more “properly” in philosophy; but the library system had its point, too, and one sympathetic functionary obligingly compromised by putting some Plato in both places! According to Terry Belanger in his illuminating booklet, “Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books” (Oak Knoll Press, 2003, p. 13), one great library in Geneva was recently found to locate Marx’s Das Kapital close to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland “because they are both fantasies.” If even the most “objective” collections fall to idiosyncrasies, what is the lowly game collector to do when confronted by his need to find on the shelf a game he is “likely to win,” or wants “to relax by,” or “to introduce someone else to games with”?
If these categories were silly groupings that nobody cared about, like “games that have red boxes” or that “remind one of the sound of a dragonfly,” we might overlook them in favor of a hard “mechanics” approach. But many of the “softer” categories are among the most useful. Some, like my budget-driven one, are highly personal, but others, like “games to relax by,” can find enough agreement in the general population as to become a marketing point. Some soft categories are notoriously hard to evaluate, but remain valuable in their suggestiveness. William S. Cobb, in his recent book, Reflections on the Game of Go (Slate & Shell, 2005), proposes, for example, that the Asian game of go is the more or less perfect game embodiment of the selfless principles of Buddhism and can be used, as it was by ancient Buddhists, to help understand that discipline. Of course, there have always been games with a religious theme: ancient Egyptian senet evolved over the centuries into an elaborate metaphor for one’s journey through the netherworld; snakes and ladders was originally a Hindu and Buddhist device for teaching children about karma and reincarnation; and some scholars even think many games, or even most of them, derived from oracles and divining techniques. American board games in the mid-1800s could be as pious as the American people were, and Bible quizzes and “pilgrimage” race games were liberally scattered among the hand-colored etchings and chromolithographed boards of nineteenth century Americana. It is relatively easy, at least in theory, to assemble a collection of games around a theme, say of religion. What is not so easy is to identify the attitudes players might have during various games, then to associate them with specific religious or moral or aesthetic practices. If go is Buddhist, what, then, is Yahtzee? Or, now, Chutes and Ladders? Could an entire collection be ordered around the subtle taxonomy of subjective attitudes?
There is no use in neglecting religion or aesthetics in games just because they introduce difficulty—they do that in “real” life, too, without anyone’s suggesting they aren’t worth the trouble. And if we try to substitute more secure ideas like historical context or play mechanics, we find we’re hardly any better off. For we still have to prioritize the many factors that make each game the object it is, and that innocent act of prioritizing is ultimately a subjective decision—or even worse, an intuition that never reaches a level of consciousness that would allow for a decision. Scrabble, for example, falls under the heading of an “American game.” But it is also a “word game” and a “tile-laying game” and an “imperfect information game” (players don’t know, except by rough inferences, what tiles the others hold) and a “pattern-finding game” and much more. Any one of these qualities could group Scrabble with a myriad of games that only partly overlap with other groupings. As an American game it can appear on the same shelf as Monopoly; as a word game it can be collected by the same person who collects Scattergories; as a tile-laying game it can be played by the players of dominoes; as an imperfect-information game it can be spoken of in the same breath as poker. Scrabble is an example of all these kinds of games, and yet these kinds produce different lists of groupings, and if we want to know which shelf to put Scrabble on, which games to group it with, we’re going to have to ask which group it most resembles, or, to put it another way, what kind of game it really is. And we may want to hide when the votes start coming in for different candidates.
Okay, we can try to strip off categories that are based on “external” relationships. Just as “games that I can afford” seemed too subjective, so “games invented in America” might seem a rather arbitrary category: Scrabble, we think, would have been essentially the same had it come from an out-of-work architect in Berlin or Melbourne. And the “word” theme can be replaced, at least in theory, by an arbitrary list of scoring symbols, which, after all, is what the words are to top tournament players. Even though the game’s broad appeal comes from its role as conveyor of the language, we want nothing less than essence of the purist kind. But no matter how many categories we manage to strip away from Scrabble, or from any game, there will always be others left behind that gnaw and claw each other for the position of alpha-category, with no one except us to decide which comes out on top.
None of this means mechanics categories aren’t important ways of organizing games. But the fact that there is more than one system loose in the literature should signal to us that game taxonomy is not the same as taxonomy in, say, biology, where types are firmly tied down to physical evidence for what evolved from what, and thus naturally move toward an evidential consensus on a unique result. Games are artifacts made by human artifice and can’t hope for experimental confirmation. David Parlett, in his rather comprehensive Oxford History of Board Games (1999), several times admits that key points of the taxonomy presented there depend on whether the absence of an element from a game would make the game seem fundamentally, or only inconsequentially, different. And he’s right: “seeming different” is as good as we can get when looking for patterns among human artifacts.
Parlett’s own scheme is an elaboration of the classic one worked out fifty years earlier by H.J.R. Murray involving the “race games,” “war games,” configuration games,” etc., mentioned above. Though Murray linked his categories to types of traditional human activities, such as racing and fighting, Parlett construes the categories more abstractly so as to accommodate newer games that have no ties to traditional peoples. Racing and fighting become merely helpful ways of characterizing the sorts of struggle we encounter in games that weren’t designed with real races or wars in mind. The games industry, on the other hand, favors a system based on levels of luck and complexity, presumably because the resulting categories identify different segments of the consumer market: 1) “children’s games” (such as Candyland) are simple and luck-filled to allow every child to play and win; 2) “family games” (Parcheesi) can interest adults with their increased complexity and decision-making while providing enough luck for children to win against them; 3) “abstract strategy games” (Pente) are usually simple enough for children to play at their own level but low on luck and deep in strategy for the adults to excel among themselves; 4) “gamers’ games” (Civilization) are both complex and luck-starved for the competitive hobbyist. Many other sorts of play mechanics are worth mentioning, including trajectory (whether a game builds to a dramatic climax or gradually accrues points, cribbage-like) and the level of interaction among the players. Some writers isolate “card games” and “role-playing games” as basically unlike anything that can be played on a board. Some see “two-player games” as special. Some want to know of a “game that can be played in under an hour.”
And me? I still want to know if I can afford it.
