The year was 1995, and CompuServe’s online service cost $4.95 per hour. Yet thousands of people logged into this virtual world daily.
WorldsAway was born 20 years ago, when Fujitsu Cultural Technologies, a subsidiary of Japanese electronics giant Fujitsu, released this online experiment in multiplayer communities.
It debuted as part of the CompuServe online service in September, 1995. Users needed a special client to connect; once online, they could chat with others while represented onscreen
as a graphical avatar.
I was already a veteran of BBSes (I even started my own), Prodigy, CompuServe, and the Internet when I saw an advertisement for WorldsAway in CompuServe magazine (one of my favorite
magazines at the time). It promised a technicolor online world where you could be anything you wanted, and share a virtual city with people all over the globe. I signed up to receive
the client software CD. Right after its launch in September, I was up and running in the new world. It blew my young mind.
For the last few months, I’ve been GMing a GURPS campaign (that was originally a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st-edition campaign, in turn built upon a mixture of commercially published and homegrown
modules, including, in turn, an AD&D module…) for a few friends.
So far, it’s included such gems as a player-written poem in a fictional language, another player’s drawing of the most-cinematic action sequence they’ve experienced so far… and the opportunity, during a play session that
coincided with a player’s birthday, to explain the layout of a ruined tower by presenting them with a cake baked into the shape of the terrain.
“So we’re… here?” asked a player, jabbing with his finger at the cream-filled section of the tower at which he was standing.
But mostly I wanted to make this post so that I had a point of context in case I ever get around to open-sourcing some of the digital tools I’ve been developing to help streamline our
play sessions. For example, most of our battle maps and exploration are presented on a ‘board’ comprised of a flat screen monitor stripped of its stand and laid on its back, connected
via the web to a tool that allows me to show, hide, or adapt parts of it from my laptop or mobile phone. Player stats, health, and cash, as well as the date, time, position of the sun
as well as the phases of the moons are similarly tracked and are available via any player’s mobile phone at any time.
A rare instance of us using a paper-based battle map. Despite the fact that we play in-person, we’ve used digital tools to save table space!
These kinds of tools have been popular for ‘long-distance’/Internet roleplaying for years, but I think there’s a lot of potential in locally-linked, tabletop-enhancing
(rather than replacing) tools that deliver some of the same benefit to the (superior, in my opinion) experience of ‘proper’ face-to-face adventure gaming. Now, at least,
when I tell you for example about some software I wrote to help calculate the position of the sun in the sky of a fictional world, you’ll have a clue why I would do such a thing in the
first place.
As you may know, I’ve lately found an excuse to play with some new web technologies, and I’ve also taken the opportunity to try to gain a deeper
understanding of some less bleeding-edge technologies that I think have some interesting potential. And so it was that, while I was staffing the Three Rings stall at last week’s NCVO conference, I made use of the
time that the conference delegates were all off listening to a presentation to throw together a tech demo I call Steer!
A player uses their mobile phone to steer a car on a desktop computer, using nothing more than a web browser.
As you can see from the GIF above, Steer! is a driving game. The track and your car are displayed in a web browser on a large screen,
for example a desktop or laptop computer, television, or tablet, and your mobile phone is used to steer the car by tilting it to swerve around a gradually-narrowing weaving road. It’s
pretty fun, but what really makes it interesting to me is the combination of moderately-new technologies I’ve woven together to make it possible, specifically:
The Device Orientation API, which enables a web application to detect the angle at which
you’re holding your mobile phone
Websockets as a mechanism to send that data in near-real-time from the phone to the browser, via a web server: for the
fastest, laziest possible development, I used Firebase for this, but I’m aware that I could probably get better performance by running a
local server on the LAN shared by both devices
The desktop browser does all of the real work: it takes the orientation of the device and uses that, and the car’s current speed, to determine how it’s position changes over the time
that’s elapsed since the screen was last refreshed: we’re aiming for 60 frames a second, of course, but we don’t want the car to travel slower when the game is played on a
slower computer, so we use requestAnimationFrame to get the fastest rate possible and calculate the time between renderings to work out how much of a change has
occurred this ‘tick’. We leave the car’s sprite close to the bottom of the screen at all times but change how much it rotates from side to side, and we use it’s rotated to decide how
much of its motion is lateral versus the amount that’s “along the track”. The latter value determines how much track we move down the screen “behind” it.
The track is generated very simply by the addition of three sine waves of different offset and frequency – a form of very basic procedural generation. Despite the predictability of mathematical curves, this results in a moderately organic-feeling road
because the player only sees a fraction of the resulting curve at any given time: the illustration below shows how these three curves combine to make the resulting road. The difficulty
is ramped up the further the player has travelled by increasing the amplitude of the resulting wave (i.e. making the curves gradually more-agressive) and by making the road itself
gradually narrower. The same mathematics are used to determine whether the car is mostly on the tarmac or mostly on the grass and adjust its maximum speed accordingly.
In order to help provide a visual sense of the player’s speed, I added dashed lines down the road (dividing it into three lanes to begin with and two later on) which zip past the car
and provide a sense of acceleration, deceleration, overall speed, and the impact of turning ‘sideways’ (which of course reduces the forward momentum to nothing).
This isn’t meant to be a finished game: it’s an experimental prototype to help explore some technologies that I’d not had time to look seriously at before now. However, you’re welcome
to take a copy – it’s all open source – and adapt or expand it. Particular ways in which it’d be fun to improve it might include:
Allowing the player more control, e.g. over their accelerator and brakes
Adding hazards (trees, lamp posts, and others cars) which must be avoided
Adding bonuses like speed boosts
Making it challenging, e.g. giving time limits to get through checkpoints
Day and night cycles (with headlights!)
Multiplayer capability, like a real race?
Smarter handling of multiple simultaneous users: right now they’d share control of the car (which is the major reason I haven’t given you a live online version to play
with and you have to download it yourself!), but it’d be better if they could “queue” until it was their turn, or else each play in their own split-screen view or something
Improving the graphics with textures
Increasing the entropy of the curves used to generate the road, and perhaps adding pre-scripted scenery or points of interest on a mathematically-different procedural generation
algorithm
Switching to a local LAN websocket server, allowing better performance than the dog-leg via Firebase
Greater compatibility: I haven’t tried it on an iPhone, but I gather than iOS devices report their orientation differently from Android ones… and I’ve done nothing to try to make
Steer! handle more-unusual screen sizes and shapes
Anything else? (Don’t expect me to have time to enhance it, though: but if you do so, I’d love to hear about it!)
There’s a wonderful tool for making web-based “choose your own adventure”-type games, called Twine. One of the best things about it is that it’s so
accessible: if you wanted to, you could be underway writing your first ever story with it in about 5 minutes from now, without installing anything at all, and when it was done you could
publish it on the web and it would just work.
A “story map” in Twine 2. Easy interactive fiction writing for normal people.
But the problem with Twine is that, in its latest and best versions, you’re trapped into using the Twine IDE. The Twine IDE
is an easy-to-use, highly visual, ‘drag-and-drop’ interface for making interactive stories. Which is probably great if you’re into IDEs or if you don’t “know better”… but for those of us who prefer to do our writing in a nice clean, empty text editor like Sublime or TextMate or to script/automate our builds, it’s just frustrating to lose access to the tools we love.
Plus, highly-visual IDEs make it notoriously hard to collaborate with other authors on the same work without simply passing
it back and forwards between you: unless they’ve been built with this goal in mind, you generally can’t have two people working in the same file at the same time.
Now THIS is what code editing should look like.
Earlier versions of Twine had a command-line tool called Twee that perfectly filled this gap. But the shiny new versions don’t. That’s where I came in.
In that way that people who know me are probably used to by now, I was very-slightly unsatisfied with one aspect of an otherwise fantastic product and decided that the
correct course of action was to reimplement it myself. So that’s how, a few weeks ago, I came to release Twee2.
Twee2’s logo integrates the ‘branching’ design of Twine adventures with the ‘double-colon’ syntax of Twee.
If you’re interested in writing your own “Choose Your Own Adventure”-type interactive fiction, whether for the world or
just for friends, but you find user-friendly IDEs like Twine limiting (or you just prefer a good old-fashioned text editor), then give Twee2 a go. I’ve written a simple 2-minute tutorial to get you
started, it works on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and just-about everything else, and it’s completely open-source if you’d like to expand or
change it yourself.
(there are further discussions about the concept and my tool on Reddit here, here, here and here, and on the Twinery forums here, here and here)
My geek-crush Ben Foxall posted on Twitter on Monday morning to share
that he’d had a moment of fun nostalgia when he’d come into the office to discover that somebody in his team had covered his monitor with two layers of Post-It notes. The bottom layer
contained numbers – and bombs! – to represent the result of a Minesweeper board, and the upper layer ‘covered’ them so that individual Post-Its could be removed to reveal what lay
beneath. Awesome.
Unlike most computerised implementations of Minesweeper, the first move isn’t guaranteed to be safe. Tread carefully…
Not to be outdone, I hunted around my office and found some mini-Post-Its. Being smaller meant that I could fit more of them onto a monitor and thus make a more-sophisticated (and
more-challenging!) play space. But how to generate the board? Sure: I could do it by hand, but that doesn’t seem very elegant at all – plus, humans make really bad random number generators! I didn’t need quantum-tunnelling-seeded Minesweeper (yes, that’s a thing) levels of entropy, sure, but it’d still be nice to outsource the heavy lifting
to a computer, right?
Yes, I’m quite aware of the irony of using a computer to generate a paper-based version of a computer game, why do you ask?
So naturally, I wrote a program to do it for me. Want to see? It’s at danq.me/minesweeper. Just line up some Post-Its on a co-worker’s monitor to work out
how many you can fit across it in each dimension (I found that I could get 6 × 4 standard-sized Post-Its but 7× 5 or even 8× 5 mini-sized Post-Its very comfortablyonto one of the typical widescreen monitors in my office), decide how many mines you want, and click
Generate. Don’t like the board you get? Click it again!
I set up the first game on my colleague Liz’s computer, before she came in this morning.
And because I was looking for a fresh excuse to play with Periscope, I broadcast the first game I set up live to the Internet. In the end, 66
people ended up watching some or all of a paper-based game of Minesweeper played by my colleague Liz, including moments of cheering her on
and, in one weird moment, despair at the revelation that she was married. The internet’s strange, yo.
Anyway: in case you missed the Periscope broadcast, I’ve put it on YouTube. Sorry about the portrait-orientation filming: I
think it’s awful, too, but it’s a Periscope thing and I haven’t installed the new update that
fixes it yet.
Now go set up a game of Post-It Minesweeper for a friend or co-worker.
Rust, a 2013 indie survival game from Facepunch Studios, plays like a
cross between Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto. Players find themselves “born” into a mysterious wilderness, naked and alone, forced to forage for resources and to craft
clothing, supplies and shelter for themselves. They must contend with starvation, hypothermia and animal attacks, but by far the most dangerous threat comes from other players who
roam the island.
When the game was first opened up, all players were given the same default avatar: a bald white man. With the most recent update, Rust’s lead developer, Garry Newman, introduced
different avatars of different racial origins into the mix. However, they did so with a twist — unlike typical massively multiplayer online role-playing games, Rust does not
allow players to choose the race of their avatar. Instead, they are assigned one at random. Newman
explained the change in a blog post…
What’s the hardest word to guess, when playing hangman? I’ll come back to that.
Whatever could the missing letter be?
Last year, Nick Berry wrote a fantastic blog post about the optimal strategy for Hangman. He showed that the best guesses
to make to get your first “hit” in a game of hangman are not the most-commonly occurring letters in written English, because these aren’t the most commonly-occurring
letters in individual words. He also showed that the first guesses should be adjusted based on the length of the word (the most common letter in 5-letter words is ‘S’, but the most
common letter in 6-letter words is ‘E’). In short: hangman’s a more-complex game than you probably thought it was! I’d like to take his work a step further, and work out which word is
the hardest word: that is – assuming you’re playing an optimal strategy, what word takes the most-guesses?
The rules of hangman used to be a lot more brutal. Nowadays, very few people die as a result of the game.
First, though, we need to understand how hangman is perfectly played. Based on the assumption that the “executioner” player is choosing words randomly, and that no clue is given as to
the nature of the word, we can determine the best possible move for all possible states of the game by using a data structure known as a tree. Suppose our opponent has chosen a
three-letter word, and has drawn three dashes to indicate this. We know from Nick’s article that the best letter to guess is A. And then, if our guess is wrong, the next
best letter to guess is E. But what if our first guess is right? Well, then we’ve got an “A” in one or more positions on the board, and we need to work out the next best
move: it’s unlikely to be “E” – very few three-letter words have both an “A” and an “E” – and of course what letter we should guess next depends entirely on what positions
the letters are in.
There are billions of possible states of game play, but you can narrow them down quickly with strategic guessing.
What we’re actually doing here is a filtering exercise: of all of the possible letters we could choose, we’re considering what possible results that could have. Then for
each of those results, we’re considering what guesses we could make next, and so on. At each stage, we compare all of the possible moves to a dictionary of all possible
words, and filter out all of the words it can’t be: after our first guess in the diagram above, if we guess “A” and the board now shows “_ A _”, then we know that of the
600+ three-letter words in the English language, we’re dealing with one of only about 134. We further refine our guess by playing the odds: of those words, more of them have a “C” in
than any other letter, so that’s our second guess. If it has a C in, that limits the options further, and we can plan the next guess accordingly. If it doesn’t have a C
in, that still provides us with valuable information: we’re now looking for a three-letter word with an A in the second position and no letter C: that cuts it
down to 124 words (and our next guess should be ‘T’). This tree-based mechanism for working out the best moves is comparable to that used by other game-playing computers. Hangman is
simple enough that it can be “solved” by contemporary computers (like draughts –
solved in 2007 – but unlike chess: while modern chess-playing
computers can beat humans, it’s still theoretically possible to build future computers that will beat today’s computers).
Zen Hangman asks the really important questions. If a man has one guess left and refuses to pick a letter, does he live forever, or not at all?
Now that we can simulate the way that a perfect player would play against a truly-random executioner, we can use this to simulate games of hangman for every possible word
(I’m using version 0.7 of this British-English dictionary).
In other words, we set up two computer players: the first chooses a word from the dictionary, the second plays “perfectly” to try to guess the word, and we record how many guesses it
took. So that’s what I did. Here’s the Ruby code I used. It’s heavily-commented and
probably pretty understandable/good learning material, if you’re into that kind of thing. Or if you fancy optimising it, there’s plenty of scope for that too (I knocked it out on a
lunch break; don’t expect too much!). Or you could use it as the basis to make a playable hangman game. Go wild.
The hardest three-letter hangman words. “Sly” is particularly… well, sly.
Running the program, we can see that the hardest three-letter word is “xxv”, which would take 22 guesses (20 of them wrong!) to get. But aside from the roman numeral for 25, I don’t
think that “xxv” is actually a word. Perhaps my dictionary’s not very good. “Oak”, though, is definitely a word, and at 20 guesses (17 wrong), it’s easily enough to hang your opponent
no matter how many strokes it takes to complete the gallows.
Interestingly, “oaks” is an easier word than “oak” (although it’s still very difficult): the addition of an extra letter to a word does not make it harder, especially when that letter
is common.
There are more tougher words in the four-letter set, like the devious “quiz”, “jazz”, “zinc”, and “faux”. Pick one of those and your opponent – unless they’ve seen this blog post! – is
incredibly unlikely to guess it before they’re swinging from a rope.
“Hazing foxes, fucking cockily” is not only the title of a highly-inappropriate animated film, but also a series of very challenging Hangman words.
As we get into the 5, 6, and 7-letter words you’ll begin to notice a pattern: that the hardest words with any given number of letters get easier the longer
they are. That’s kind of what you’d expect, I suppose: if there were a hypothetical word that contained every letter in the alphabet, then nobody would ever fail to (eventually) get it.
Some of the longer words are wonderful, like: dysprosium, semivowel, harrumph, and googolplex.
When we make a graph of each word length, showing which proportion of the words require a given number of “wrong” guesses (by an optimised player), we discover a “sweet spot” window in
which we’ll find all of the words that an optimised player will always fail to guess (assuming that we permit up to 10 incorrect guesses before they’re disqualified). The
window seems small for the number of times I remember seeing people actually lose at hangman, which implies to me that human players consistently play sub-optimally, and do not
adequately counteract that failing by applying an equal level of “smart”, intuitive play (knowing one’s opponent and their vocabulary, looking for hints in the way the game is
presented, etc.).
The “sweet spot” in the bottom right is the set of words which you would expect a perfect player to fail to guess, assuming that they’re given a limit of 10 “wrong” guesses.
In case you’re interested, then, here are the theoretically-hardest words to throw at your hangman opponent. While many of the words there feel like they would quite-rightly be
difficult, others feel like they’d be easier than their ranking would imply: this is probably because they contain unusual numbers of vowels or vowels in unusual-but-telling positions,
which humans (with their habit, inefficient under normal circumstances, of guessing an extended series of vowels to begin with) might be faster to guess than a
computer.
I’ve got a new favourite game, this week: Movie Title Mash-Ups (with thanks to Cougar Town). Ruth and I sat up far too late last night, playing it.
Here’s how you do it:
Cougar Town characters playing… no, wait… this is that OTHER game they play.
Movie Title Mash-Ups
Take two movie titles which share a word (or several words, or just a syllable) at the end of one and at the beginning of the other. Shmoosh them together into a combined movie title,
then describe the plot of that movie in a single sentence by borrowing elements from both component movies. See if anybody can guess what your mash-up movies were.
Here are some examples. The answers are ROT13-encoded, but if you’re reading
this post directly on
my blog, you can click on each of them to decode them (once you’ve given up!).
—
Zombies claw their way out of a graveyard, and Batman spends most of the film hiding in the attic. Gur Qnex Xavtug bs gur Yvivat Qrnq
—
While trapped in an elevator at the end of October, a superficial man is hypnotised into murdering a bunch of high-school students with knife. Funyybj Unyybjrra
—
A crazy professor and a kid travel back in time in a souped-up car, where local bully Biff cuts off the kid’s hand and tells him he’s his father. Gur Rzcver Fgevxrf Onpx gb gur Shgher
—
Bill Murray has to live the same day over and over, until he can survive the zombie apocalypse by escaping to an island. Tebhaqubt Qnl bs gur Qrnq
—
A pair of alcoholic, out-of-work actors stay at the countryside house of a Monty, dangerous robot who has learned to override his programming. Jvguanvy naq V, Ebobg
—
An evil genie who maliciously manipulates words and misinterprets wishes opens a portal between Eternia and Earth, which He-Man and Skeletor come through. Jvfuznfgref bs gur Havirefr
—
A bunch of outlawed vigilante superheroes fight shapeshifters and werewolves as they investigate a mystical curse which threatens to shatter the fragile cease-fire between Dark and
Light forces in Russia. Avtug Jngpuzra
—
Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer hold a seance to communicate with subterranean humans who worship a giant bomb. Jung Yvrf Orarngu gur Cynarg bs gur Ncrf
—
A lion cub born to a royal family grows up, climbs the Empire State Building, and fights aeroplanes. Gur Yvba Xvat Xbat
—
James Bond is sent to investigate the murder of three British MI6 agents, who turn out to have been killed using a military satellite that concentrates the sun’s rays into a
powerful laser. (hint: both films are James Bond films)
Yvir naq Yrg Qvr Nabgure Qnl
Monopoly – the world’s best-selling board game – sucks. I’ve said it
before, but it bears saying again. I’ve never made any secret of my distaste for the game, but it’s probably worth spelling out the reasons, in case you’ve somehow missed them.
Monopoly (British Edition) in its current branding
Broadly-speaking, there are four things wrong with Monopoly: the rules, the theme, the history, and the
players.
The Rules
The following issues have plagued Monopoly for at least the last 75 years:
It takes a disproportionately long time to play, relative to the amount of fun it provides or skill it tests. A longer game is not intrinsically more-exciting:
would a 1000-square Snakes & Ladders be
ten times as good as a 100-square one? Monopoly involves a commitment of three to four hours, most of it spent watching other people take their turns.
It’s an elimination game: players are knocked out (made bankrupt) one at a time, until only one remains. This invariably leads to a dull time for those players
first removed from the game (compounded by the game length). In real-world play, it’s usually the case that a clear winner is obvious long before the game ends, leading
to a protracted, painful, and frankly dull slow death for the other players. Compare this to strategic games like Power Grid, where it can be hard to call the winner between closely matched players right up until the final turns, in
which everybody has a part.
It depends hugely on luck, which fails to reward good strategic play. Even the implementation of those strategies which do exist remain heavily
dependent on the roll of the dice. Contrast the superficially-simpler (and far faster) property game For Sale, which rewards strategic play with just a smidgen of luck.
It’s too quick to master: you can learn and apply the optimal strategies after only a handful of games. Coupled with the amount of luck involved, there’s little to
distinguish an expert player from a casual one: only first-time players are left out. Some have argued that this makes it easier for new players to feel like part of the game, but there
are other ways to achieve this, such as handicaps, or – better – variable starting conditions that make the game different each time, like Dominion.
There’s little opportunity for choice: most turns are simply a matter of rolling the dice, counting some spaces, and then either paying (or not paying) some
rent. There’s a little more excitement earlier in the game, when properties remain unpurchased, but not much. The Speed Die add-on goes a small way to fixing this, as well as shortening the duration of the
game, but doesn’t really go far enough.
The rules themselves are ambiguously-written. If they fail to roll doubles on their third turn in jail, the rules state, the player much pay the fine to be
released. But does that mean that they must pay, then roll (as per the usual mechanic), in which case must it be next turn? Or should it be this turn, and if so, should
the already-made (known, non-double) roll be used? Similarly, the rules state that the amount paid when landing on a utility is the number showing on the dice: is this to be a fresh
roll, or is the last roll of the current player the correct one? There are clarifications available for those who want to look, but it’s harder than it needs to be: it’s no wonder that
people seem to make it up as they go along (see “The Players”, below, for my thoughts on this).
Calvin and Hobbes demonstrate exactly what’s wrong with Monopoly, by demonstrating exactly what’s wrong with Monopoly players. Click for the full comic.
The Theme
But that’s not what Monopoly‘s about, is it? Its purpose is to instil entrepreneurial, capitalist values, and the idea that if you work hard enough, and you’re lucky enough,
that you can become rich and famous! Well, that’s certainly not its original purpose (see “The History”, below), but even if it were, Monopoly‘s theme is still
pretty-much broken:
It presents a false financial model as if it were a reassuring truth. “The Bank can never go bankrupt,” state the rules, instructing us to keep track of
our cash with a pen and paper if there isn’t enough in the box (although heaven help you if your game has gone on long enough to require this)! Maybe Parker Brothers’ could have simply
given this direction to those financial institutions that collapsed during the recent
banking crisis, and saved us all from a lot of bother. During a marathon four-day game at a University of Pittsburgh fraternity, Parker Brothers couriered more money
to the gamers to “prop up” their struggling bank: at least we can all approve of a bailout that the taxpayer doesn’t have to fund, I suppose! Compare this to Puerto Rico, a game which also requires a little thematic suspension of
disbelief, but which utilises the depletion of resources as an important game mechanic, forcing players to change strategies in order to remain profitable.
Curiously, this same rule does not apply to the supply of houses and hotels, which are deliberately limited: the Monopoly world is one in which money is
infinite but in which bricks are not. This makes it more valuable to build houses when there are few resources (in order to deprive your opponents). In actual
economies, however, the opposite is true: houses are always needed, but the resources to built them change in value as they become more or less scarce. Watch the relative
perceived values of the huts available to build in Stone Age to see
how a scarcity economy can really be modelled.
The more houses I build on a street, the more each one is individually worth. Wait, what?
Also, it has a completely-backwards approach to market forces. In the real world, assuming (as Monopoly does) a free market, then it
is consumer demand that makes it possible to raise capital. In the real world, the building of three more hotels on this side of the city makes it less-likely
that anybody will stay at mine, but this is not represented at all. Compare to the excellent 7 Wonders, where I can devalue my neighbour-but-one’s goods supply by producing my own, of the same type.
It only superficially teaches that “American dream” that you can get ahead in the world with a lot of work and a little luck: this model collapses outside of
frontier lands. If you want to see what the real world is like, then wait until you’ve got a winner in a game of Monopoly, and then allow everybody else to
re-start the game, from the beginning. It’s almost impossible to get a foothold in a market when there’s already a monopoly in existence. This alternative way of playing might
be a better model for real-world monopolies (this truth is captured by the game Anti-Monopoly in a way that’s somehow even less-fun than the original).
You might shoot down any or all of these arguments by pointing out that “it’s just a game.” But on the other hand, we’ve already discovered that it’s not a very good game.
I’m just showing how it manages to lack redeeming educational features, too. With the exception of helping children to learn to count and handle money (and even that is lost in the
many computer editions and semi-computerised board game versions), there’s no academic value in Monopoly.
The electronic banking edition of Monopoly makes an already slow game even slower, unless you’re REALLY bad at arithmetic: in which case you should be playing with money so that you
can learn some arithmetic!
The History
You’ve seen now why Monopoly isn’t a very good game both (a) because it’s not fun, and (b) it’s not really educational either – the two biggest reasons that anybody might want to play
it. But you might also be surprised to find that its entire history is pretty unpleasant, too, full of about as much backstabbing as a typical game of Monopoly, and primarily for the
same reason: profit!
You can think of a baby as a Monopoly piece, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Click for the full comic.
If you look inside the rulebook of almost any modern Monopoly set, or even in Maxine Brady’s well-known strategy guide, you’ll read an abbreviated version of the story of Charles Darrow, who – we’re told – invented the game and then published it through
Parker Brothers. But a little detective work into the history of the game shows that in actual fact he simply made a copy of the game board shown to him by his friend Charles Todd.
Todd, in turn, had played it in New Jersey, to which it had traveled from Pennsylvania, where it had originally been invented – and patented – by a woman called Elizabeth Magie.
Home-made “Landlord’s Game” boards, like this one, were popular in the early part of the 20th century.
Magie’s design differed from modern interpretations in only one major way: its educational aspect. Magie was a believer in Georgian economic philosophy, a libertarian/socialist ideology that posits that while the things we create can be owned,
the land belongs equally to everybody. As a result, Georgists claim, the “ownership” of land should be taxed according to its relative worth, and that this should be the
principal – or only, say purists – tax levied by a state. Magie pushed her ideas in the game, by trying to show that allowing people to own land (and then to let out the right of others
to live on it) serves only to empower landlords… and disenfranchise tenants. The purpose of the game, then, was to show people the unfairness of the prevailing economic system.
Lizzie Magie’s 1904 patent application shows a board with familiar features like streets for sale (which can then be rented out), stations, taxes, utilities, and the “public park”
(free parking).
Magie herself approached Parker Brothers several times, but they didn’t like her game. Instead, then, she produced sets herself (and an even greater number were home-made), which proved
popular – for obvious reasons, considering their philosophical viewpoints – among Georgists, Quakers, and students. She patented a revised version in 1924, which added now-familiar features like
cards to mark the owned properties, as well as no-longer-used ideas that could actually go a long way to improving the game, such as a cash-in-hand “goal” for the winner, rather than an
elimination rule.
An early boxed copy of Parker Bros’ “Monopoly”.
Interestingly, when Parker Brothers first rejected Charles Darrow, they said that the game was “too complicated, too technical, took too long to play”: at least they and I agree on one
thing, then! Regardless, once they eventually saw how popular Lizzie Magie’s version had become across Philadelphia, they changed their tune and accepted Darrow’s proposal. Then, they
began the process of hoovering up as many patents as they could manage, in order to secure their very own monopoly on a game that was by that point already 30 years old.
The “Rich Uncle” character, from the Parker Bros’ game of the same name, would eventually come to be the familiar mascot of Monopoly.
They weren’t entirely successful, of course, and there have been a variety of controversies around the legality and enforcability of the Monopoly trademark. Parker
Brothers (and nowadays, Hasbro) have famously taken to court the makers of board games with even-remotely similar names: most-famously, the Anti-Monopoly game in the
1970s, which they alternately won, then lost, then won, then lost again on a series of appeals in the early 1980s: there’s a really enjoyable book about the topic, and about the history
of Monopoly in general. It’s a minefield of court cases and counter-cases, but the short of it is that trade-marking “Monopoly” ought to be pretty-much impossible. Yet somehow, that’s
what’s being done.
What’s clear, though, is that innovation on the game basically stopped once Parker’s monopoly was in place. Nowadays, Hasbro expect us to be excited when they replace the iron with a cat or bring out yet another localised edition of the board. On those
rare occasions when something genuinely new has come out of the franchise – such as 1936’s underwhelming Stock Exchange
expansion, it’s done nothing to correct the fundamental faults in the game and generally just makes it even longer and yet more dull than it was to begin with.
The Players
The fourth thing that I hate about Monopoly is the people who play Monopoly. With apologies for those of you I’m about to offend, but here’s why:
Firstly, they don’t play it like they mean it. Maybe it’s because they’ve come to the conclusion that the only value in the game is to waste time for as long as possible (and let’s face
it, that’s a reasonable thing to conclude if you’ve ever played the game), but a significant number of players will deliberately make the game last longer than it needs to. I
remember a game once, as a child, when my remaining opponent – given the opportunity to bankrupt me and thus win the game – instead offered me a deal whereby I would give him some of my
few remaining properties in exchange for my continued survival. Why would I take that deal? The odds of my making a comeback with a total of six houses on the board and £200 in my
pocket (against his monopoly of virtually all the other properties) are virtually nil, so he wasn’t doing me any favours by offering me the chance to prolong my suffering. Yet I’ve also
seen players accept deals like like, masochistically making their dull pick-up-and-roll experience last even longer than it absolutely must.
Kill it. Kill it with fire. Image courtesy Daniela Hartmann.
Or maybe it’s just that Monopoly brings out the cruel side of people: it makes them enjoy sitting on their huge piles of money, while the other players grovel around them. If they put
the other players out of their misery, it would end their fun. If so, perhaps Lizzie Magie’s dream lives on, and Monopoly really does teach us about the evils of capitalism: that the
richest are willing to do anything to trample down the poorest and keep them poor, so that the divide is kept as wide as possible? Maybe Monopoly’s a smarter game than I think: though
just because it makes a clever point doesn’t necessarily make a board game enjoyable.
It’s not that I’m against losing. Losing a game like Pandemic is endless fun because you feel like you have a chance, right until the end, and the mechanics of games like Tigris & Euphrates mean
that you can never be certain that you’re winning, so you have to keep pushing all the way through: both are great games. No: I just object to games in which winning and losing are
fundamentally attached to a requirement to grind another person down, slowly, until you’re both sick and tired of the whole thing.
Nowadays, with computerised Monopoly games, you don’t even have to have friends to play. Which is great, because if you’re suggesting a game of Monopoly, you don’t deserve any.
The second thing that people do, that really gets on my nerves, is make up the damn rules as they go along. I know that I spent a while further up this page complaining
that Monopoly’s rules are pretty awful, but I can still have a rant about the fact that nobody seems to play by them anyway. This is a problem, because it means that if you ever play
Monopoly with someone for the first time, you just know that you’re setting yourself up for an argument when it turns out that their crazy house rules and your crazy house
rules aren’t compatible.
House rules for board games are fine, but make them clear. Before you start the game, say, “So, here’s the crazy rule we play by.” That’s fine. But there’s
something about Monopoly players that seems to make them think that they don’t need to. Maybe they assume that everybody plays by the same house rules, or
maybe they don’t even realise that they’re not playing by the “real” rules, but it seems to me that about 90% of the games of Monopoly I’ve been witness to have been punctuated at some
point by somebody saying “wait, is that allowed?”
The “Free Parking Jackpot” is probably the worst house rule for Monopoly that’s ever been invented. But it’s incredibly popular.
Because I’m a bit of a rules lawyer, I pay attention to house rules. Free Parking Jackpot, in which a starting pile of money – plus everybody’s taxes – go in to the centre of
the board and are claimed by anybody who lands on Free Parking, is probably the moth loathsome house rule. Why do people feel the need to take a game
that’s already burdened with too much luck and add more luck to it. My family used to play with the less-painful but still silly house rule that landing
exactly on “Go!” netted you a double-paycheque, which makes about as much sense, and it wasn’t until I took the time to read the rulebook for myself (in an attempt, perhaps, to work out
where the fun was supposed to be stored) that I realised that this wasn’t standard practice.
Toothpaste For Dinner has the right idea. Click through to the original comic.
Playing without auctions is another common house rule, which dramatically decreases the opportunity for skillful players to bluff, and generally lengthens the game (interestingly, it
was a house rule favoured by the early Quaker players of the game). Allowing the trading of “immunity” is another house rule than lengthens the game. Requiring that players travel
around the board once before they’re allowed to buy any properties is yet another house rule that adds a dependence on luck and – yet again – lengthens the game. Disallowing trading
until all the properties are owned dramatically lengthens the game, and for no benefit (why not just shuffle the property deck and deal it out to everybody to begin with: it’s faster
and achieves almost the same thing?).
I once met a family who didn’t play with the rule that you have to spend 10% extra to un-mortgage a property, allowing them to mortgage and un-mortgage with impunity (apparently, they
found the arithmetic too hard)! And don’t get me started on players who permit “cheating” (so long as you don’t get caught) as a house rule…
Spot something in common with these house rules? Most of them serve to make a game that’s already too long into something even longer. Players who implement these kinds of house rules
are working to make Monopoly – an already really bad game – into something truly abysmal. I tell myself, optimistically, that they probably just don’t know better, and point them in the
direction of Ticket to
Ride, The Settlers
of Catan, or Factory Manager.
But inside, I know that there must be people out there who genuinely enjoy playing Monopoly: people who finish a game and say “fancy another?”, rather than the
more-rational activity of, say, the clawing out of their own eyes. And those people scare me.
Further Reading
If you liked this, you might also be interested in:
A recent article by Joshua Hedlund explains that Monopoly is (still) an outdated board game (he shares a lot of
my points, but I swear I’d almost finished writing this post before I discovered his)
Have you ever come across non-transitive dice? The classic set, that you can get in most magic shops, consists of three different-coloured six-sided dice:
A “Grime’s” style set of 3 non-transitive dice. Notice the unusual numbering.
There are several variants, but a common one, as discussed by
James Grime, involves one die with five “3” sides and one “6” side (described as red below), a second die with three “2” sides and three “5” sides (described as
green below), and a third die with one “1” side and five “four” sides (described as blue below).
They’re all fair dice, and – like a normal six-sided dice – they all have an average score of 3.5. But they’ve got an interesting property, which you can use for all kinds of magic
tricks and gambling games. Typically: the red die will beat the green die, the green die will beat the blue die, and the blue die will beat the red die! (think Rock, Paper,
Scissors…)
Seemingly paradoxically, the dice will generally beat one another in a circular pattern.
If you want to beat your opponent, have them pick a die first. If they pick green, you take red. If they take red, you take blue. If they take blue, you take green. You now have about a
60% chance of getting the highest roll (normally you’d have about a 33% chance of winning, and a 17% chance of a draw, so a 60% chance is significantly better). To make sure that you’ve
got the best odds, play “best of 10” or similar: the more times you play, the less-likely you are to be caught out by an unfortunate unlucky streak.
But if that doesn’t bake your noodle enough, try grabbing two sets of nontransitive dice and try again. Now you’ll see that the pattern reverses: the green pair tends to beat the red
pair, the red pair tends to beat the blue pair, and the blue pair tends to beat the green pair! (this makes for a great second act to your efforts to fleece somebody of their money in a
gambling game: once they’ve worked out how you keep winning, give them the chance to go “double or nothing”, using two dice, and you’ll even offer to choose first!)
When you pair up the dice, the cycle reverses! While red beats green, double-green beats double-red!
The properties of these dice – and of the more-exotic forms, like Oskar van Deventer’s seven-dice set (suitable for playing a game with three players and beating both of your
opponents) and like the polyhedral
varieties discussed on Wikipedia – intrigue the game theorist and board games designer in me. Could there be the potential for this mechanic to exist in a board game? I’m thinking
something with Risk-like combat (dice ‘knock out’ one another from highest to lowest) but with a “dice acquisition” mechanic (so players perform actions, perhaps in
an auction format, to acquire dice of particular colours – each with their own strengths and weaknesses among other dice – to support their “hand” of dice). There’s a discussion going on in /r/tabletopgamedesign…
I’ve even written a program (which you’re welcome to download, adapt, and use) to calulate the
odds of any combination of any variety of non-transitive dice against one another, or even to help you develop your own non-transitive dice sets.
Penney’s game
Heads or tails? Image courtesy David M. Diaz.
Here’s another non-transitive game for you, but this time: I’ve made it into a real, playable game that you can try out right now. In this game, you and I will each, in turn, predict
three consecutive flips of a fair coin – so you might predict “tails, heads, heads”. Then we’ll start flipping a coin, again and again, until one of our sequences comes up. And more
often than not, I’ll win.
If you win 10 times (or you lose 20 times, which is more likely!), then I’ll explain how the game works, so you know how I “cheated”. I’ll remind you: the coin flips are fair, and it’s
nothing to do with a computer – if we played this game face-to-face, with a real coin, I’d still win. Now go play!
I’ve been playing for a little while now, and here’s my thoughts so far:
I love the open world aspects of the game; I’ve never played anything where there’s been quite so much freedom (especially when you’re just starting out). It’s taken a while to
get used to the areas which are only accessible at certain times of day, though, like some of the shops. Also: the quest-givers who seem to give me the most money seem to want me to
complete missions during the same hours that the shops are open, so I have to choose one or the other – what’s with that?
Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck, but I’ve discovered that if you try enough things, eventually something will work. If you go around picking everything up, it’ll probably be
useful at some point (but be careful because the NPC guards will stop you “stealing” things!), and you can sometimes get great results by using combinations of things (for example, I
tried imbibing a potion of drunkenness and then wearing a traffic cone the other day, and I’m pretty sure it gave me an invisibility buff: no matter how much I sang, everybody ignored
me!). Inventory management is a bit of a pain, but picking up a rucksack has really helped.
Not so impressed with the NPCs. I’ve learned that the best approach to getting information and quests is to talk to everybody, but most of the people I talk to don’t want to say
anything, or just repeat the same few phrases over and over (“Go away,” “Stop bothering me,” etc.). I’ve tried offering things for trade, but most of them aren’t interested in my
traffic cone or my crayons or my rucksack: I’m honestly not sure what most of them are for!
Anyway: I know that some of you must have been down this quest track, too – I’ve seen you wandering around wearing your traffic cones and carrying your rucksacks. So I’ll jump
ahead a bit and save from spoiling it… Here’s where I’m stuck: I’m in the padded room in the hospital, and I can’t get past the boss of the doctors. I tried eating the crayons, to see
if they’d give me strength (one of the NPCs here suggested it), but it doesn’t work. The doctors are a seriously creepy monster, by the way – they keep talking about you having
“delusions” or something – but I’m sure there’s a way to get back to the main quest track. Any tips?
Earlier this year, I played Emily Short‘s new game, Counterfeit Monkey, and I’m pleased to say that it’s one of the best pieces of interactive fiction I’ve played in years. I’d highly recommend that you give it a go.
Counterfeit Monkey is one of the best interactive fiction games I’ve played in years. And not just because I love puns.
What makes Counterfeit Monkey so great? Well, as you’d expect from an Emily Short game (think Bee, which I reviewed last year, Galatea, and Glass), it
paints an engaging and compelling world which feels “bigger” than the fragments of it that you’re seeing: a real living environment in which you’re just another part of the story. The
island of Anglophone Atlantis and the characters in it feel very real, and it’s easy to empathise with what’s going on (and the flexibility you have in your actions helps
you to engage with what you’re doing). But that’s not what’s most-special about it.
I’m in a bar, presumably in need of a pint of apple. Apple? That’s not what I mean! Where’s my P-Remover when I need one…
What’s most-special about this remarkable game is the primary puzzle mechanic, and how expertly (not to mention seamlessly and completely) it’s been incorporated into the play
experience. Over the course of the game, you’ll find yourself equipped with a number of remarkable tools that change the nature of game objects by adding, removing, changing,
re-arranging or restoring their letters, or combining their names with the names of other objects: sort of a “Scrabble® set for real life”.
Wise words from the Bureau of Orthography.
You start the game in possession of a full-alphabet letter-remover, which lets you remove a particular letter from any word – so you can, for example, change
a pine into a pin by “e-removing” it, or you can change a caper into a cape by “r-removing” it
(you could go on and “c-remove” it into an ape if only your starting toolset hadn’t been factory-limited to prevent the creation of animate objects).
Poster for Dental Consonants Ltd. Get your consonants here!
This mechanic, coupled with a doubtless monumental amount of effort on Emily’s part, makes Counterfeit Monkey have perhaps the largest collection of potential carryable
objects of any interactive fiction game ever written. Towards the end of the game, when your toolset is larger, there feels like an infinite number of possible linguistic permutations
for your copious inventory… and repeatedly, I found that no matter what I thought of, the author had thought of it first and written a full and complete description of the result (and
yes, I did try running almost everything I’d picked up, and several things I’d created, through the almost-useless “Ümlaut Punch”, once I’d found it).
Atlantida, nominal ruler of Anglophone Atlantis.
I can’t say too much more without spoiling one of the best pieces of interactive fiction I’ve ever played. If you’ve never played a text-based adventure before, and want a gentler
introduction, you might like to go try something more conventional (but still great) like Photopia (very short, very
gentle: my review) or Blue Lacuna (massive,
reasonably gentle: my review) first. But if you’re ready for the awesome that is Counterfeit
Monkey, then here’s what you need to do:
How to play Counterfeit Monkey
Install a Glulx interpreter.
I recommend Gargoyle, which provides beautiful font rendering and supports loads of formats.
Note that Gargoyle’s UNDO command will not work in Counterfeit Monkey, for technical reasons (but this shouldn’t matter much so long as you SAVE at regular
intervals).
Download for Windows, for Mac, or for other systems.
Download Counterfeit Monkey
Get Counterfeit Monkey‘s “story file” and open it using your
Glulx interpreter (e.g. Gargoyle).
Download it here.
(alternatively, you can use experimental technology to play the game in your
web browser: it’ll take a long time to load, though, and you’ll be missing some of the fun optional features, so I wouldn’t recommend it over the “proper” approach above)
For our fourth day at the Edinburgh Fringe, Ruth, JTA and I decided to take a little break from the
rushing-around-to-comedy-shows game and get out and see the sights. Ruth had somehow acquired a somewhat romantic idea of nearby Leith: that it would be full of quays and boats and
suchlike, and not – as we would come to discover instead – full of rain and a foul-smelling burst sewer pipe.
We started with breakfast from Snax Cafe, under Matt‘s recommendation, which turned out to be a good one, as this tiny greasy spoon/takeaway turns out to serve a fantastic selection of
fried foods ready-to-eat at great prices. I opted for a fried egg sandwich, with which I quickly made a mess of my t-shirt and shorts when I accidentally spilt the yolk all over myself.
Ruth and JTA trudge through the wet suburban streets of Leith.
A combination of the weather quickly turning against us, Leith being significantly further away than it first appeared on a map, and the three of us still being remarkably tired since
the previous day turned this expedition into a far more arduous affair than we had initially expected. By the time we’d reached the pretty little boats and bars of the waterfront, we
were damp (admittedly, we’d all but JTA underdressed for the excursion: his overcoat helped protect him, but it had the side-effect of making him look like a flasher, his bare legs
poking out from under it).
Ruth and Dan playing Scrabble[TM] in a pub in Leith.
We escaped from the weather just as it began to get sunnier again, into a pub called the Teuchter’s Landing, which Ruth had discovered earlier during her research into the area. There, we drank beer and played
some of the boardgames made available by the pub: Scrabble™ (at which I scored abysmally low, for which I partially blame rotten luck on draw after draw: my final hand – representative of
my fortunes – was R-R-R-L-L-U-O; my starting hand contained only one consonant), the Who Wants To Be A Millionare boardgame (which took a significant amount of sorting to put it back into
a working order, and in which we had to work around some missing pieces), and a few hands of Knockout Whist (with the most static-electricity-inducing deck of cards I’ve ever encountered:
almost impossible to deal without giving each player four or five cards at the same time).
(Veggie) haggis stovie (in a mug), a bowl of oatcakes, and a pint of beer. Is there a better lunch? The shiny white thing is my new phone: oh yeah, I have a new phone. the old one
broke. I should probably do a blog post about that rather than just mentioning it in the caption of a picture of an unrelated post, shouldn’t I? I’ll try to remember to do so.
The food was good, though: we lunched upon freshly-made haggis stovies, served in mugs, with chunky chips (in further mugs) and oatcakes. And when we were done, and set out into the
world again to explore the waterfront… that’s when it began raining again, even harder than before. Fucking marvellous.
JTA and I by the waterside in Leith. For some reason, at this point, a whole queue of Three Rings clients decided to phone me (about unrelated things), in a row, so in most of the
photos I seem to be on the telephone.
By the time we’d worked our way around the docks, we were damp and tired, so we found a bus to take us back to Princes’ Street, cut across to a cheesemonger in Grassmarket to stock up
on delicious cheeses, and then returned to the flat for a quick nap, because we were all pretty pooped.
Ruth aims a harpoon. I’m not sure what she’s hoping to hit from here: it’s too rainy for whales. Whales hate the rain, right? Everybody knows that.
Later, we went out for another helping of Peter Buckley Hill and Some Comedians. Being Tuesday – the day before
Buckers’ day off – and close to the end of the Fringe, he was clearly exhausted, and kept digressing from the usual (awesome) shite to random stream-of-consciousness new
shite. Still all funny, and some enjoyable guests.
![Ruth and Dan playing Scrabble[TM] in a pub in Leith.](/_q23u/2012/08/DSCF0454-1-1024x768.jpg "Ruth and Dan playing Scrabble[TM] in a pub in Leith.")
