Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
competition is to think of a puzzle with a solution that a number of
agents are attempting to find, or reach. This solution cannot be shared
among the agents, however—once one of them finds it, the others lose.
The element of competition is the most important feature separating
contests from puzzles.
Competitions are won or lost, whereas puzzles are solved or not
solved. That's a big difference, since winning means that other agents
lose. In a way, competitions sort participants by superiority. For in-
stance, if there are two people working to solve a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle
together, the solution is shared by both. There's no way for these people
to lose against the puzzle, or against each other—and if they choose to
stop solving the puzzle or get stuck, they still have not lost to the puzzle.
In contrast, if you give each of the two players the same 500-piece jigsaw
puzzle and tell them that the first one to complete the puzzle wins, then
it becomes a contest.
Contests also do not have to feature parallel achievements among its
agents; there are some competitions in which one party has to achieve
one goal before another party achieves a completely different goal. In
most cases, though, all conditions cannot be met simultaneously, and so
these kinds of contests are still competitions.
Moreover (and this is not specific to contests), agents do not have to
be human: one agent can be the game system itself, as in the coopera-
tive board game Pandemic (which, by the way, is indeed a game) . In this
game, between two and four players work together to save the world
from four deadly viruses that are threatening to destroy humanity. There
are different victory conditions for the viruses and the humans. The first
to meet their victory conditions win, and the winner is always either all
of the human players or the viruses.
Both agents can actually even be the same human being, as is the
case in a game with a high-score system. When you play Tetris , Galaga ,
or Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup with the objective of trying to beat your
previous high score, you're actually competing against yourself. This is
also the case for some racing games ( Super Mario Kart is a good ex-
ample) that allow you to compete against your ghosts, which are precise
recordings of your performance. And many of us use contest-type sys-
tems to improve our workouts. (Can you beat last week's 30 push-ups
this week? If you can, then you win; if you can't, then you lose.)
Contests are also usually simpler than games or puzzles, and quite
often have a time, strength, or dexterity element. Knowing what the so-
lution is usually isn't part of a contest, although it can be, as it is in an
Easter egg hunt.
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