Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
For instance, the rustling of a bush may very well not have been caused
by another (competing) human or a dangerous predator—but those who
learned to see it that way ended up with a higher chance of survival. It
may be that much of our superstitious behavior and even many of our
beliefs come from this survival mechanism. Regardless, the important
point to take away is that gambling systems such as nyout, in which the
player has no meaningful decisions to make, are contests, not games.
This is not to say that all gambling games are contests, however. Games
such as poker are certainly games, and of course any game can be turned
into a gambling game simply by wagering money on the outcome.
War and Territorial Games
Alongside these luck-based gambling systems, you also see the emer-
gence of war-themed games. Some are more abstract than others, and
all are usually grid-based strategy games. These games, along with tra-
ditional sports, form the foundation of our modern understanding of
games and my philosophy about what a game is.
One cannot write a book on game design without mentioning the
classic game Go, also known as weiqi or baduk . This is a territorial game
in which players place black and white stones in such a way as to capture
areas or groups of enemy stones. What's utterly fascinating about this
game is what an incredible amount of strategy goes into play. The game
Figure 16. Cows and Leopards, also known as Sixteen Soldiers, is a two-player
war game with an interestingly shaped board. The board shows that even in an-
cient times game designers understood the concept of discrete space and were
experimenting with different patterns, shapes, and configurations
 
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