Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
You can discover a few important patterns in this chart. To start with, the long-term
trend of both players' main resource (material) is downward. As play progresses,
players will lose and sacrifice pieces. Gaining material is very difficult. In chess, the
only way to gain a piece is to bring a pawn to the other side of the board to be pro-
moted to another, stronger piece, which would lead to an increase of material. This
is a rare event that usually initiates a dramatic change of fortune for the players. If
we consider only the material, chess appears to be a battle of attrition: Players who
can make their material last longest will probably come out on top.
Strategic advantage is more dynamic in the game; it is gained and lost over the
course of play. Players use their material to gain strategic advantage or reduce the
strategic advantage of their opponents. There is an indirect relationship between
the different amounts of material the players have and their ability to gain strategic
advantage: If a player has more material, then gaining strategic advantage becomes
easier. In turn, strategic advantage might be leveraged to take more pieces of an
opponent and reduce that player's material. Sometimes it is possible to sacrifice
one of your pieces to gain strategic advantage or to lure your opponent into losing
strategic advantage.
NOTE This analysis
of chess is a high-
level abstraction to
illustrate an economic
principle using a
familiar game. classic
texts on the theory
of chess do not treat
it in economic terms,
because chess is about
checkmating the king,
not taking the most
pieces. however, our
illustration shows that
gameplay and game
progress can be under-
stood in economic
terms even if the game
itself is not about
economy.
A game of chess generally progresses through three different stages: the opening , the
middle game , and the endgame . Each stage plays a particular role in the game and is
analyzed differently. The opening usually consists of a sequence of prepared and
well-studied moves. During the opening, players try to maneuver themselves into a
position of advantage. The endgame starts when there are relatively few pieces left,
and it becomes safer to involve the king in the game. The middle game falls some-
where between the opening and the endgame, but the boundaries between the stages
are not clear. These three stages can also be identified from the economic analysis in
Figure 4.4. During the opening, the number of pieces decreases only slowly, while
both players build up strategic advantage. The middle game starts when players are
exploiting their strategic advantage to take their opponents' pieces; it is characterized
by a sharper decline of material. During the endgame, the material stabilizes again
as the players focus on their final attempts to push the strategic advantage to a win.
From Mechanics to Shapes
To produce a particular economic shape, you need to know what type of mechani-
cal structures create what shapes. Fortunately, there is a direct relationship between
shapes in a game's economy and the structure of its mechanics. In the next sections,
we discuss and illustrate the most important building blocks of economic shapes.
neGaTive FeedBacK creaTes an eqUiLiBriUm
Negative feedback (as discussed in Chapter 3, “Complex Systems and the Structure of
Emergence”) is used to create stability in dynamic systems. Negative feedback makes
a system resistant to changes: The temperature of your refrigerator is kept constant
 
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