Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 15.
The Royal Game of Ur.
on dice rolling and racing around a track. A Roman game called tabula
bridges the evolutionary gap in a very obvious way.
I started with these ancient race games not only because they are
some of the oldest games we have on record, but because they show a
very distinct path of evolution. The question is, what are they evolving
towards? We'll revisit this question at the end of the chapter.
Gambling Systems
Most of the games listed so far do not hold up tremendously well for the
modern adult mind. In fact, some of these games provide literally no
choices for players. As I mentioned in
Chapter 1
, this renders these in-
teractive systems
contests
: they simply measure luck, for lack of a better
term. Modern games such as
Candy Land
and
Chutes and Ladders
are
akin to these games, and adults rarely use such systems. However, adults
do engage with such systems when there is money involved, which was
the case with many of the games listed above. From slots to roulette to
the lottery, there are many popular games that give players few or no
meaningful choices, yet adults still play them actively and with great ex-
citement.
Since gambling is not only a popular pastime but also a hot topic
both legally and morally, there has been much research on the psychol-
ogy of gamblers. A big reason that gambling games make any sense at all
is because of something that psychologist Ellen Langer calls
the illusion
of control
. We see examples of this in how players carefully and thought-
fully select lottery numbers, breathe on dice before rolling them, and
engage in other superstitious behavior. Of course, none of these things
actually have any effect on the outcome of such systems. So why do we
do it?
One reason may be that an evolutionary survival mechanism is at
work in a place that it shouldn't be. In the course of human evolution, it
was to an individual's advantage to see agency behind ordinary events.
