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Organicity in abstract strategy games
| Chess | Chess evolved around its goal of checkmating the king. You can't 'think Chess' without this a priori goal in mind so mechanics evolved around it. |
| Go | Go evolved around the mechanism of capturing stones or groups by depriving them from their liberties and this 'elimination' aspect is still crucial for the game. Go's design started from this 'core behaviour'. |
Cycles and suicide 
The good news was that suicide, making a placement that leaves the placed stone or the group to which it belongs without liberties, obviously came in two forms. One is plain suicide which, at least with a regular goal in mind, seems to go against the spirit of a game. The other is 'suicide including ressurection' in which a stone is placed where it or its group has no liberties but where it gets at least one new liberty as the result of a simultaneous capture. This would seem a fair procedure and a just outcome in a 'game to be'. The bad news is that it can lead to a cycle and thus needs regulation. The change to a territorial goal This wasn't the only early discovery. The progenitors probably agreed that plain suicide would go against a game's spirit. But making it illegal would mean that groups could emerge that were safe from capture! That in turn would be somewhat at odds with compulsory placement. Rather does it suggest that players should get the option to pass.
Inside out, outside in Go evolved 'inside out', that is, starting from its core behaviour of placement and capture by enclosure. Careful consideration of this behaviour led to a territorial goal, and while many implications still required regulation, Go in the process 'became itself'. Chess evolved 'outside in'. It didn't start from core behaviour but from a core concept: capturing the king. Pieces were assembled and mechanics were adapted to best serve the concept. Where they were felt to fall short they were modified to improve the game's behaviour, but choosing pieces and rules always breathes a certain arbitrariness, even if the result is satisfactory. A correlation of sorts Chess evolved outside in and has a low degree of organicity. Go evolved inside out and has a high one. Is there a correlation between organicity and the way a game evolves? Generally speaking, yes. But Reversi, which later became popular as Othello, was invented inside out, starting from core behaviour that emphatically suggests a territorial goal. Havannah on the other hand was invented outside in, starting from a 'connection' goal and finding a working assembly of three types of connection by sheer luck. Yet Reversi behaves as an organism trapped in a poorly fitting exoskeleton, while Havannah displays a fair amount of organicity. So the correlation isn't cast in concrete. Yet it is there, and it begs the question what makes a game display organicity. The Game of Life A striking example of organic behaviour of 'pieces' is John Conway's Game of Life. The very name illustrates that the game is very suggestive of it and that this is generally recognised as such. If we look at how it actually works we see that ...
If these are not actual conditions for organic behaviour, then they obviously have at least some affinity with it. Conway's game is great to watch and its protocol isn't hard to understand. In fact it isn't unlike Go's protocol: the fate of a piece depends on its neighbours. But the Game of Life, although it isn't actually a game, has an immediacy about it that is appealing. Watching a game of Go in fast forward has a similar appeal, but learning Go from the ground up takes a lifetime. There's little immediacy about that. Diversification The core concept of Chess presumably emerged some 1500 years ago in India, in a game called Chaturanga.
Chess has been an international sport for some one and a half century now, while Shogi became big in Japan and XiangQi was big in China. This growth and diversification resulted from Chess being a concept rather than a specific game. It mimicked human warfare with a commander and a range of divisions, so it is no miracle that cultural influences helped shape its actual form at any given place and time. Pieces were interesting to look at and invited to be made with different designs. Rules were arbitrary and thus subject to modifications and adaptions. Because it was so much a representation of human conflict it soon overtook Go in terms of geographical spread. Is it fair to assume Chess stimulated human imagination because of its exuberance? You had kings, generals or commanders, surrounded by knights, chariots, cannons, lances, elephants, rooks, bishops, infantry and the like, engaged in epic battle. And it offered abundant leeway to adapt it to different cultures. The elite and the masses Chess' a priori goal of representing human warfare makes it very different from Go. The emergence of Go as a concept was preceded by its mechanics, not followed by it as in Chess. These mechanics were based on a square grid and plain black and white stones and they showed the way to Go, pun intended. The game to which they led looked nothing like any human battle. Far more an abstract battle than Chess and not at all fit to be adapted to different cultures in a different way. In the higher echelons of ancient China knowledge of the game was considered a requirement and learning it a privilege. But that was a rather elite player base and XiangQi, with its theatrical mimic of human conflict, became the game of the masses. This restriction to the social and intellectual elite may have hampered Go's spread. Its popularity in the West only increased from the mid-twentieth century onwards and comparisons with Chess were inevitable. Go could not be dismissed as less of an intellectual challenge, so it was often presented by its cognoscenti as more of an intellectual challenge. Since both games proved to be too much of an intellectual challenge for me, at least in terms of playing at any commendable level, I can't really comment on the issue. Chess versus Checkers There were similar and ongoing comparisons between Chess on the one hand and Checkers and Draughts on the other. In these comparisons the roles of 'elite versus working class' had been reversed, with Chess being the game of the social and intellectual elite and Checkers as a kind of republican chess, in which hereditary kings had been replaced by common men who had reached a deserved promotion. A simple game for a working class that often couldn't afford a Chess set in the first place. From the very beginning there were some influential voices in support of the qualities of Checkers, like Edgar Allan Poe who wrote a famous paragraph about it in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":
I feel this is not entirely fair to Chess but at the same time the writer draws attention to Checkers' organicity as opposed to Chess' supposed 'frivolity'. Checkers' organicity The organicity of Checkers is lower than that of Go. Checkers has an initial position, lacks growth and isn't quite that uniform due to promotion, all of which is not very organic. It is fairly uniform nonetheless and has movement and capture in its favour. Most importantly, Poe emphasises the unity of Checkers' modus operandi, as a single organism rather than a multifunctional mechanism. But an 'organism' would rather feature growth and lack reduction than vice versa. Another thing an organism would strive for is more freedom. Checkers gave rise to International Draughts which is more free in its capture options and king moves, and capable of magnificent combinations that are reminiscent of a physical sport like judo. It therefore feels more organic than its ancestor. Is Go the only truly organic game? Definitely not, but if we look at the status of abstract strategy games other than Go in terms of organicity, the landscape is bleak. We already mentioned Othello as a questionable outcome of inside out design and Checkers doesn't quite live up to organic behaviour either. Then there's Hex. A delight to some, a desert to others, but in a popular vote the 'deserts' would win by a landslide. You can't even tell if the 'design process' was inside out or outside in or indeed at all, because the goal and the mechanism are so inseparably connected that 'seeing' it operate means you invented the game. Hex is a simple uniform 'growth only' connection game, a pencil and paper game in fact, but its strategy is very complex and rather monomaniacal. It's hard to see anything as a 'local issue' or to distinguish between local and general priorities. The few people that mastered the game to a high degree often play moves that seem incomprehensible to beginners. That's a big difference with Go, where local issues are abundant and where a beginner can more or less understand the general flow of a game between masters. Territory is everywhere, but where is that connection? Somewhere? So Hex is brilliant, but it suffers from its inherent goal. Elimination and conquering territory are part of human behaviour and worth fighting for. So far as 'making connections' is inherently human, it is a more of a social activity and not so much a source of conflict. Great games have always been existential or territorial. It suggests that core behaviour is most promising if it points to either goal or indeed, as I found out recently, to both. Is there any future for highly organic games? Most designers work for a market. Their designs are almost inherently 'outside in' because the games have to look good and they must be fast and tricky. Any object will do, there's hardly any hierarchy. Games also must be 'assembled' to create market demand because uniformity is felt to be boring. It's hard to assemble uniformity so things must be added. I'm not going to comment on any recent abstracts but I do understand their designers. You can decide to make a game for the market, especially if backed by a manufacturer. It's a rational process based on market research and you make sure that the outcome has visual appeal. You can not decide to find promising core behaviour, and if you do there's always a chance that it will unfold into a game that behaves beautifully, but looks dull. Like if you can play it on a chess board with checkers. Some choice. The first wave As a kid I had Draughts players among my heroes, can you imagine? Around thirty my interest in abstract games became more general, not to mention more obsessive. Then, in the eighties, I invented a lot of games without bothering about inside out or outside in. Two of them are worth mentioning, Grand Chess and Emergo. With Grand Chess I completed Chess and I did a good job, freeing the rooks and modifying promotion in the process. Grand Chess, I'm sure, will ultimately prove to be a better sport weapon than Chess. But 'organicity' had no part in it. That cannot be said of Emergo because Emergo is all organicity. But I didn't think in those terms yet, I simply extracted the 'core behaviour' of column checkers from a game in which it seemed trapped, and followed it through to its inherent conclusion. And that turned out to be an organism that is spiralling upwards in an inticate dance, with fewer and fewer pieces growing higher and higher till inevitably one color is on top of all pieces. It is poetry in motion and turned out to be an unparalelled source of truly deep combinations that require powers of visualisation similar to the ones that good Draughts players must have. The curious thing is that this beautifully simple and utterly decisive behaviour isn't at all recognised by the abstract game community at large. Here is the only 'checkers' game that features growth, but no reduction. The only existential game that is totally organic. Almost the only one that behaves omni-directional, in a pit rather than on a track. Almost the only totally uniform one. And certainly the only column checkers game that didn't emerge as the 'columnification' of an existing checkers variant. But you can't sell it, metaphorically speaking, to the BGG abstract games community. An intermediate game Then came the year 2000 and with it Dameo. Dameo is 'checkers' so it looks dull. You can't sell it because everyone already has it. And not being able to buy it is seen as a major handicap at BGG. Thus it took my esteemed fellow designer Nick Bentley one and a half decade to discover the game. If I may quote him from a mail regarding this very article: And that's how most people feel about checkers variants. Nick has an antenna for organic behaviour so he eventually discovered that Dameo has a high degree of it ... for a draughts game. But it doesn't pervade the game like it does Emergo. The second wave Circumstances made that it wasn't till 2008 that I became involved again by translating the rules of games at iGGC to dutch. It was hard not to think about games. It brought me back to the games world and thus the second wave started. In Moving Forward Looking Back I mention five games that matter to me and that I feel should matter to the abstract games community at large. Two of them are Symple and Sygo. Both use a move protocol that is organic in itself. The difference is that Symple is a territory/connection hybrid and Sygo is a Go variant. They look very much alike and both look very much like Go and are played on a Go board. Some irony. But all three behave very differently. These games weren't invented with any a priori intention regarding their behaviour. I found the move protocol in the magical moments again, in the dark, looking for behaviour. It is a generic protocol with an affinity for placement games and it turned out to harbour a high resolution balancing mechanism that is totally fair. It seamlessly adapted to the slightly different demands of both games. Where Symple requires compulsory placement, Sygo is a Go variant and requires the option to pass wholly or partly. Both have natural behaviour with a very high organicity, but neither has the progressive refinement of tactics that Go has. On the bright side, their tactics are more than adequate to serve strategy and strategy itself may be no less difficult than Go strategy. Not seeing the game for the rules I'm fascinated by organic behaviour and by the games it may render. The main characteristic of starting from 'core behaviour' is that you'll have to find it in the first place, but after that the process is largely self-explanatory. There may be inherent issues in want of regulation, such as cycles in Go for instance, but these are usually easy to solve. Play testing such a game is seldom needed to evaluate the rules, because they follow an inherent logic. But its behaviour needs to be evaluated as it may reveal some surprises, because core behaviour provides only a few clues about actual behaviour. There's also a drawback in communicating such a game. I can visualise behaviour before even thinking about rules. I've been made aware of the fact that only a few people can do the reverse, to 'see through the rules' all the way to the organism that gave rise them. Most people can't and this constitutes an almost inherent hurdle. Organic behaviour is fascinating once you understand it, and if the rules don't immediately speak to someone, that is unlikely to happen. To be or not to be I never did all that much to promote my games. I invented. More in particular, I never did much to introduce Grand Chess to the Chess world or Dameo to the Draughts world. But they persisted and will continue to do so because they are better than Chess and Draughts. I'm not sure about Emergo but I can't imagine players will let the most organic elimination game ever, the most dramatic one and one of the the richest ones in terms of combinations, slip into oblivion. I'm also certain that they will have less reservations to do exactly that with Symple and Sygo. These games weren't meant to top Go and they indeed don't. They primarily resulted from finding the Symple move protocol and discovering its properties. To bid them farewell I'll summarise their properties one last time. Symple merges a territorial goal and a connection goal in a most intricate and simple way. A group is worth the number of its stones minus a 'group penalty' that every separate group carries as an original sin. Thus connecting two groups gets rid of one penalty. The penalty is variable and must be agreed on before a game. The higher the penalty, the more the emphasis leans towards connection in the territory/connection balance. The game displays a great elasticity in this respect that cannot be found in any other game. Symple has compulsory placement and no capture, and in a balanced game the final stages may pan out very dramatically. A slight misperception or miscalculation may deprive a player of growing options and force him to an involontary invasion, gaining a point or maybe two or three, but losing the number of points of the penalty. Sygo is a Go variant based on 'othelloanian capture'. The redeeming quality of this way of capture, also known as 'flip capture', is that it is cycle free. Not so redeeming is the fact that it is very difficult to create eyes and get life. Several inventors, tempted by the prospect of being rid of cycles, made that very discovery. Most of them felt that the problem only could be solved by an additional safety criterion. Thus they got things to 'work' but at the price of somewhat betraying the very mechanics that gave rise to Go. Sygo does not need any additional safety criterion. The simultaneous growth of groups makes creating eyes and getting life possible. It's not always easy, and you can't always save every group, but it's effective enough to shape the very behaviour of the game. A player may pass, wholly or in part, without losing the right to move in a subsequent turn and suicide is illegal. Sounds familiar doesn't it? Sygo is a cycle free Go variant that needs no Komi. It is a flip capture variant that needs no artificial additives. These hard to get qualities were much sought after by the abstract games community, and still are for that matter, because inventing games is as human as playing them. I didn't seek them, but I found them anyway. The last loose end In December 2016 I invented Io, the organic version of Othello, and announced once again it would be my last game. But in July 2017 Starweb appeared out of the blue, an accidental invention because the drive to invent had gone. That is, almost. There was one nagging concept that had emerged about half way, and it wouldn't let go. It was a hex grid with separate territories consisting of cells, that would grow cell by cell, until growing by a particular cell would mean a merger with one or more adjacent territories. Since separate territories would never merge, that was the basic idea, a cell of 'the Wall' would appear on the offending cell. The process eventually would result in territories that were tightly squeezed together and separated by a web-like Wall. A very organic 'core behaviour' taken from Mu. In Mu's case all complexity derives from the explosion mechanism, not from the manner the Wall arises, so I was focusing on the latter. If this manner could be fuelled, I thought, by a simple single step move-and-grow mechanism it might lead to an intriguing game. The invention process When finally decided to give in, the process turned out to be rather obvious. I saw the board covered with hex tiles, as in Mu, and a tile would either disappear or be flipped over to become a cell of the Wall, the first time any piece would vacate it. So there I had the basis: the organic emergence of the Wall as a result of both players' actions. But 'pieces' were obviously inherent, so what about them? Again I reverted to Mu's organicity. Pieces in Mu are uniform and able to form columns that move according to their height, in a straight line in any of the six main directions. They capture by simple replacement, regardless of their size. It means that columns always consist of one player's men and that they may split or merge. Nice and simple, but how to get them in the first place? For me it immediately implied 'growth'. You don't start an organic game with an initial position, not if you can avoid it. So I needed a start, for instance an entering protocol, and a growing mechanism. Only couples can breed Growing a new man every time a tile would be vacated would fill the territories as well as the Wall indiscriminately and unconditionally. That seemed dull, boring and overdone. Then came the magical thought: "only couples can breed". I call it 'magical' because it was one of those thoughts that will come out of the blue without any logical connection, although this one had a definite connection with humans and some of the other organic life forms on Earth. It of course translated to 'only doubles can breed' or, more specifically, as mentioned in the rules: The first thing I noticed about it, admittedly, was arbitrariness: why not singles or triples? But then the Medusa grid appeared:
Emerging game behaviour Two distinct examples of core behaviour had merged into one and the goal was inherently territorial, so let me summarise what I saw as logical and self explanatory, and how much leeway I saw in its implementation.
In short, I saw core behaviour mold itself into a game, and I was following the behaviour's requirements and its intended direction so far as I could see it, using any leeway that might be available. I'm good at that, but core behaviour isn't quite as explicit as actual behaviour, so visualising it all, beginning to end, is usually not possible. And it proved particularly impossible in Storisende. I could see the game would be finite but I couldn't quite see how an endgame might pan out. So I walked for weeks in the game's empty rooms and corridors and hallways, seeing that it all fitted nicely and that it all made sense, but I was still unable to visualise how it would end. On the bright side, this blindness helped me to formulate the explicit goal because what I did see was that the endgame would be a battle of attrition that would take a heavy toll on material. It made me doubt if in an endgame there would be enough men left to claim all territories. So claiming a territory should be possible with a minimum of men. Thus the explicit way to claim a territory became 'to be the only colour present within it' and one man is enough for that. There was another inherent issue to solve. At the end of a game there might still be tiles present on the board. The least problematic solution was to remove them before counting, leaving any men on them behind, and count them as territory. It implies that a player may choose not to vacate a tile during play because it would cost him territory that he could have at the end. What are we fighting for? All great games are either existential, like Chess and Draughts, or territorial like Go. You can fight over anything, but not everything is worth fighting over. Goals for abstract strategy games are plentiful. You can have fight over who will get the last move or indeed the reverse, who will be the first to be unable to move, or be the first to get five men in a row, or be the first to get to an arbitrary number of points, or a combination of those, or to connect side A to side B, or to get to the other side, or whatever. These games may not lack 'depth' but they lack the deep-rooted connection to the primordial depths of human consciousness, that great games indeed have. Quarrelling over small issues is a popular modern pastime, and for casual players those fights shouldn't take too long either, because yet other fights over similar issues require attention. And they should come in a box. I posted Storisende's concept under the provisional name Stiles at the BGG abstract games forum the very day it came to me. It got the interest of a few posters who were aware of the difference between 'inside out' and 'outside in' inventing. They eventually were helpful in improving the wording of the rules and I thank them for that. But the unity of behaviour that the game displays and that is characteristic for 'inside out' inventing, was lost on the majority of the community - they couldn't see the game for the rules. And it didn't come in a box. So I inserted this little paragraph to warn casual players who feel that 'anything goes' in terms of goals as long as the game is 'fast and tricky', that Storisende is long and tricky. Come to think of it, I should have put that at the top of the article. The game of everything It was unusually difficult for me to visualise an endgame in Storisende. I inherently imagine balanced positions because unbalanced positions don't talk. One way is to imagine a draw. Draws are possible in Storisende, it wasn't very difficult to see that, but what would it take? First and foremost, an equilibrium in the territories: same number of cells in the ones that players own, stalemate in the ones they share. But whether such a division is final would depend on the situation on the Wall. If it is empty, then the situation in the territories is final, but what if it is not? A situation with many men in the territories and on the Wall, however evenly divided, doesn't look very 'final' in any way. Men on the Wall can go anywhere and they provide options for territory men to invade adjacent territories. So to get anything 'final' that would include an equilibrium on the Wall, the number of men on it would have to be low. That means that an endgame that is proceeding in a continuous state of balance will eventually become a battle of attrition and if any men remain on the Wall, maybe still providing options to invade, then the manoeuvring will eventually become slow and tricky rather than fast and tricky. Storisende is a territory game but it is as much 'territorial' as it is 'existential'. In actual play these goals compete. If you want to be strong on the Wall you will have to grow men there early on, so you go for small territories and quickly try to erect wall cells between them. In that strategy you don't care too much about territories because you can claim them later - if it works out. However, if the opponent follows similar considerations, it may not quite work out and the battle will first and foremost be existential. As I write, I am still uncertain how a balanced battle of attrition would eventually pan out because in the games I played against Stephen Tavener's excellent AiAi game engine, it never came close enough. Regardless of who won, games were always decided before that. For me the most surprising thing about Storisende is first and foremost how it manages to merge the two most important goals of abstract gaming in a uniform organism with unified behaviour. I'm not sure if any abstract game does the same in such an intricate way. It shows once more that in an 'inside out' process you never quite know what you will be arriving at. And it's not only that. Several goals that are well known as main goals in abstract games, such as connection, breakthrough, race and blockade, pervade different stages of the game as sub-goals. 'Connection' is already provided by the Wall itself: it arises where separate territories threathen to connect. Pieces may conditionally jump over the Wall, which provides options for breakthrough and invasion. The opening is a race for growth, the middle game is pervaded by blockades and slaughter on the Wall, the endgame may feature careful manoeuvring and long term planning of the kind that a 'fast and tricky' player might call tedious. It's a game of everything and it unfolds in an increasing resolution and variety of tactics. Enschede, the Netherlands, May 31, 2018, christian freeling This essay appeared previously in Nick Bentley Games |
