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Can the game be fun if you can't win?

A topic by Papa J created Aug 02, 2024 Views: 78 Replies: 4

Viewing posts 1 to 2

Papa JSubmitted104 days ago(+1)

I was thinking about Monopoly and ideas for the jam. In Monopoly there is only one winner. If you adjusted the rules so that everybody wins and it’s not a zero sum game then the game goes on forever. This seems great in real life but it might not make a great game. Some ideas I had were to change the metric of success, that is to say don’t use dollars as your success metric. Because we measure dollars we optimize for dollars in this creates the zero sum game. One idea I had would be to create some agents that have a happiness between 0 and 1. The sum of the happiness of all the agents becomes your score. So if there’s one agent that has all the money they’re very happy and they have a happiness score of one while everybody else has a happiness score of zero for a total score of one. But if you could get all the agents to be a little happy say .5 then you would have a higher score than someone who just has a monopoly.

Jacob

maxclarkHostSubmitted104 days ago

yes, so, a dark georgism game would be all about winning the monopoly version. which is fine. one way to demonstrate the power of a truth is to show what happens when it is used for ill or for good. you know, i thought about a game today, which is "try to bus all the homeless people out of your city before the olympics start", which is what paris had to do.

there's a famous example of a game about setting up trains and then its revealed at the end, you were solving the nazi problem of efficiently transporting jews to concentration camps. idk if these games are good/change the world, but i'm willing to explore. that's one of the reasons i make art (aka games!).

Papa JSubmitted99 days ago

Alright, here is what I’m thinking about… One of my favorite games (if not my favorite) of all times is War Craft II. So I’m thinking about this kind of multiplayer RTS like War Craft II. Here is the difference, there is more than just Gold and Wood resources, maybe there is 20 different resources. The resources are very sparse and if you get wood you can build a fence around the land with the resource. Building this fence will prevent other players from being able to get this resource (unless they trade with the player that has it). Because there are many different resources this will promote trade where it is necessary. Maybe implement a taxation system that all the players can vote on every so often (this way the have nots can gang up on the haves). Seems kind of ambitious for a short Jam but I think I can get some of the mechanics going with programmer graphics.

maxclarkHostSubmitted98 days ago

yeah. i think base building, resource collection, crafting, are all just one step away from being georgist. if anything, the popularity of minecraft, factorio, valheim, all demonstrate how much people love working hard to create wealth. the key is demonstrating how to fairly share access to the playing field. for a jam game, i'm having trouble avoiding wanting to do online multiplayer...i'll probably opt with little ai people you have to make cooperate or something. i also think you could just make just about any old RTS and argue that it demonstrates how vicious people get when they don't have access to land. however, you would need to address overpopulation themes. which, in george's time, was called malthusianism.

Papa JSubmitted98 days ago

Just give all the female players Malthusian belts.

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George Jam

Can the game be fun if you can't win?