Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chess is known all over the world and has been played profession-
ally for hundreds of years. Massive numbers of thick topics have been
written about chess strategy, and famous games have been memorized
and scrutinized. The game Go is like chess in this respect, but even more
so—it has been played for literally thousands of years (over 4,000 at least)
and it's been solved to a much smaller degree than chess.
Many people don't realize it, but a lot of new abstracts come out
all the time. In fact, there are free websites that frequently publish new,
online versions of abstract games for you to check out (one of my fa-
vorites is BoardSpace.net). I also recommend looking into homemade
print-and-play abstracts.
It's always harder to create something simple that's also interesting.
For this reason, abstract games tend to be the most difficult games to cre-
ate. Further, they tend to be hard to market, as a lot of people—sadly—
won't give abstract games a chance due to the lack of theme. Hopefully,
as people become wiser about the true nature of games being
inherently
abstract, this will not be the case in the future.
Avoiding Solvability
In 2002, Omar Syed and Aamir Syed developed
Arimaa
, a two-player
abstract game that was designed to fix what they saw as the problem with
chess. The game's creation was inspired partially by the famous chess
game between top player Gary Kasparov and Deep Blue, the chess com-
puter, wherein the computer was victorious. The concern was that chess
had been solved, at least partially. And it's true: computers
have
partially
solved chess.
Whether or not this development affected the world of chess, or even
whether a potential full solution for the game would affect that world,
isn't really the point. The point is that abstracts do have a tendency to
become solvable. I used chess as an example because although it is not
one of the more solvable abstracts, solution looms on the horizon for
even that deep, fantastic game.
Many games have already been solved, such as the popular abstracts
checkers and
Connect Four
. Once a game has been solved, this obviously
causes huge problems for it. Of course, actually
using
a solution is some-
times quite a process, depending on the game. But the fact that someone
could
use the solution makes competitive or online play somewhat im-
possible. You could still probably do a
Words with Friends-
style online
play, in which you only play against friends on Facebook, but a solved
game lives with a harsh cap over its head.
