The Game of Love

I feel so unloved. Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I'll go eat worms. All that. See, I've got this game, I like this game, it's a wonderful game. But noone wants to play with me.

I feel so unloved. It's a great game, it's an amazingly fun, interesting, thought-provoking game. It's one of the only games I've ever played in which it's _likely_ that everyone loses. So if you have your choice of people to play with, you should choose carefully, lest you get a bad apple causing the world to end. Or at least causing Rome to fall. But me, I have no such choice. I can't find enough people to play, much less enough that I can pick and choose the players.

I feel so unloved. Although the more I think about it, the more I realize that if I did have the players for this game, probabilistically I wouldn't manage to win. If there were enough players, I'd spend the entire time playing the game and end up with nothing to show for it other than the bitter taste of defeat remaining any time I saw the box on my bookshelf. And since it's on my bookshelf that I see many, many hours a day, that would be a lot of bitterness. And I don't really want to become that bitter, 'cause then I'd be unable to find anyone to play other games with me either. I do get to play other games, so it can't be me, it must be that people realize that this game would be time consuming and just cause me to be bitter in the end.

I feel so loved. People prefer me just the way I am. They'd rather not spend a wonderfully enjoyable day playing one of the most fun games I own, they'd be willing to sacrifice all that, just so I maintain my mostly-bitter-free lifestyle. People are willing to not beat me, just so I don't have to live with the defeat. Gosh darn it, people like me!

I feel so loved! But I still want to play my game.

Darth Vader's [Drunken] Galactic Renaissance, Year 2

Darth was very sad at his troop's showing the year before. While the audience oooh-ed and awww-ed at the synchronized drunken flight patterns, the amount of vinyl collected was pitiful. The next year was certainly going to have better results. The programmers had another year of schooling. And anyway, it couldn't be any worse.

One would hope.

The first year, it had been set in space, ships collecting vinyl. The second year, it was on a planet. Mechs duking it out, beating on each other until one of the two collapsed from the simulated injuries. Or until time ran out. Not that time should ever run out, but just in case, there was a time limit imposed.

Sadly, in this fighting game, there was an optimal strategy. A very simple strategy. A one-line program. "Punch". If all the mech did was stand there and punch, it couldn't lose. If all it did was blindly punch, the enemy could never get near, never deal any damage itself. So it was stupid to move into attacking range, but worthwhile to assume that the opponent might be dump. So combat looked very much like...

*punch* *punch*
*punch* *punch*
*punch* *punch*
*punch* *punch*
*punch* *punch*

Unless, of course, you were working for Darth. See, there was another attack you could do. Another attack that would do more damage to anyone moving within range. Another attack that was much more appropriate for the Renaissance. Well, Darth's Renaissance, anyway. You know, the drunken one. This attack was the "Body Slam", better known as "repeatedly fall flat on your face". So a second year in a row, Darth Vader's Galactic Renaissance gained the self-stated title of "Most likely to be drunken" as combat with Darth's team appeared to be....

*punch* *fall*
*punch* *stand*
*punch* *fall*
*punch* *stand*
*punch* *fall*
*punch* *stand*

Year two was not a moral victory. Year two was, however, a tie for first place.

King Arthur Goes to Disneyland!

There's the amusement park that has the ride that has the cars that go through the house that is filled with the ghosts that are shot by the guns that are on the cars that go through the haunted house. It's a great idea for an amusement park ride--a ride where you don't just sit back, but rather have to do something. And try to remember where things jump out at you so whomever you're on the ride with doesn't laugh at you too horribly. But it's a wonderful conglomeration of two enjoyable parts of an amusement park: the rides and the games.

Each rider is given a gun that is used to shoot the ghosts. Each ghost you shoot gives you points, and the car keeps track of who has how many points (my best was around 700 points, the best of the group I was in was closer to 2500). It adds an element of competition to the ride, either against others in your group or simply against yourself. Or you can ignore the shooting part and just ride through the haunted house. Which is really silly to do, as it's pretty lame for a haunted house.

Competition would make any amusement park ride better, though. Finding the proper way to compete on these is the difficult part. Obviously, taken to a more extreme variation, roller-coasters could be improved by the same method. But they'd require more skill as they move more quickly, and to make things even more interesting the targets could also be moving. Ghosts are apparently rather sedentary. Parrots eat nuts and fruit. Then, of course, it'd be even better if there were multiple roller-coaster cars going at the same time, and you had to shoot the passengers in the other car. You know, extra competition. Sure, there was a laser-tag course there too, but you don't get the roller-coaster with that!

But, really, any ride could be made better with competition. Since you don't /have/ to compete to ride the ride, it doesn't even detract from those that prefer not to compete. So you got a low score? So what, you got to /enjoy/ the view!

Sadly, laser-tag-type competition doesn't work well for every ride. Take the ski-lift ride, you know, those really slow-moving things? Guns wouldn't improve that much. But it seems a great way to practice your jousting.

Old Jedi Never Die

It was a moral victory. Sure, by the numbers we were in a race for last place, but morally we were winning. We'd spent all weekend writing the AI for a programming contest, stayed up late, woke up early, and still hadn't managed to get the physics of the system working. See, it was a 2D torroidal universe with a really sweet physics system--our starships /kept/ /moving/ in the direction they were going. Wonderful theory, but it was harder than we expected to get the math. So we didn't really have much time to work on our AI.

Our goal was to design the AI for a fleet of four spaceships, to retrieve the most useful asteroids from an asteroid field. And to not die in the process. But when it got down to the last couple hours of the competition and we were still having problems refraining from appearing to have drunken starship pilots, I decided it was time to try something else. For the system of course also came with trash-talking capabilities.

So being set in space, we based our ships on the Star Wars universe. Palpatine, Vader, we had a fleet of four (very nimble) SSDs (Star Destroyers). Apparently all of the captains had been drinking the night before, but at least it was /synchronized/ drunken flying.

And then there was Thrawn. Generally a quiet guy, get him drunk and he's very talkative. Or at least he'd like to be talkative, if he could think of anything to say. Instead, the trash-talk part of the simulation just read:

Message from Thrawn:
Message from Thrawn:
Message from Thrawn:

Repeated about a bazillion times, anyway. But the audience loved us. One of our ships would accidentally pick up an asteroid and get bumped into the base, and we'd get a room full of cheers. And then, of course, there was Thrawn. His ship was down to the last of its health (drunkenly bumping into too many asteroids), and he saw his doom approaching.

Message from Thrawn: Old Jedi never die.. they just fade away.

And then his ship was no more. No more messages from Thrawn, but the crowd wouldn't have heard them anyway. It was a moral victory.

Full-Contact Chess

You got your tricks
Good for you
But there's no gambit I don't see through
Oh I'm the Arbiter I know the score

From square one he'll be watching all 64
Chess (The Musical)

Chess is great. (The game, I've not actually seen the musical. But the music is a lot of fun too--seldom does one hear songs from musicals on popular radio stations.) I've never been much good at it though. I've yet to figure out how to think about it such that it doesn't take tons of planning, looking many moves ahead. Doing that takes more memory than I seem to have. Instead, I try to figure out an overall plan, try to move into a better position. Alas, against people that actually play the game, it doesn't do very well.

Thankfully (or perhaps not), most of my chess-playing experience is against the inexperienced. Kids at the camps that I've worked decide that I look like a good opponent, but I manage to hold my own. I never won them all, but I did fairly well. Of course, it could be my playstyle that won out. Generally I'd make fast semi-random moves, and they'd think that I knew more than I really did. I psyched them out, and they made bad moves, allowing me to gain the upper hand.

Of course, playing the game isn't my favorite thing to do with chess. Rather, it makes an amusing answer. When playing the "meeting-people" games at camp, one of the standard questions is "What's your favorite sport?"

Noone managed to forget that my favorite sport is chess.

The Legend of the Sleeping Cat

The imagination is a wonderful thing, a great way to use up a rainy day, or to make a ten-hour drive fly by. Or is a great way to put off a twenty-page paper. Coming up with reasons why a paper might not be due in four hours can occupy more than the four hours remaining. And if there are more people to help come up with ideas, the game could be played for /years/ before the paper gets started.

Given a group of intelligent people and the bare bones of a plot line, some pretty fun things can happen. A pretty amazing story or theory or plan to take over the world can result, just by hours of brainstorming. Many fascinating ideas have come from such sessions and hours to spare.

Of course, for things to work well, everyone has to be interested in the same goal. The produce something worth producing. Sadly, it doesn't always work this way, sadly people often aren't willing to sacrifice their wild ideas for some sense of coherence. Or everyone at least has to understand the point.

There's a card game, "Once Upon a Time," in which each player gets 7 cards. Each has an word or phrase on it (Spell, Night, Time Passes, etc.), which are used to produce a story. The "goal" of the game is to play all your cards, bringing the story to an end. But the "point" of the game is to tell an interesting story. Alas, as a camp counselor, when my kids wanted to play my card game, they understood the goal, but not the point. Somehow, I never won.

But neither did they.

Once upon a time, a ring found on an island that was at sea went and transformed someone's parent into a sleeping cat. It died. The end.

Good Ol' Rock

Some people, to make easy decisions and settle arguments, will play a swift game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. I, however, tend to prefer the game Rock, Rock, Rock.

Very few people actually play Rock, Rock, Rock well. But one of the best characteristics of this game is it's possible for both people to win. In fact, both people almost always do. One of them just may not realize it.

There are two ways to win at a game of Rock, Rock, Rock. First, and most obvious, is to be the person that can pick rock more times than the other person. The one that is more persistent, that can outlast. If you're the last person to pick rock, you win. The decision goes in your favor. You don't have to order the pizza tonight, even if you still have to pay for your share of it.

The other way of winning is by being the person that quits playing. If you're willing to admit that the other person is more annoyingly persistent for no good reason than you are, then while you may not have won the game, you have the moral victory. Which is often the better choice. Wouldn't the real loser by the couple that spends eighteen hours, both refusing to quit? So the true winner would be choosing nothing, letting the other person "win".

Which just shows that it's true. Nothing beats rock.

Ba Bum Bum Bum Ba-*BOOOOOM*

During my years of high school, I ended up meeting several people. One of them gladly was an incredible GM, and started up a game of (no-Jedi allowed) Star Wars RPG. Fun mechanic for picking your starting race, where it was either random chance..or human. My random chance happened to be a huge lizard that naturally did fairly well fighting (best blaster skill in the bunch). Someone else ended up being a large sentient plant--thankfully the lizard wasn't a herbivore.

So there we are, a group of rebel spies running around a starbase looking for information on some Imperial general or such. I don't recall for sure. It may have actually been Papa Smurf, but with this GM, I tend to doubt it. So store after store we poke our heads in, buy a few trinkets, and try to weasel some information out of the owners. By the end of the row, not only do the Imperials know that they're being looked for (and consequently send a squad of stormtroopers to find us) but we've got a _ton_ of junk onhand. Backpacks are marvelous things.

Talk to the last shopkeeper, and what happens but the squadron of stormtroopers marches into the other end of the way, all of the patrons discreetly making their way into the nearest establishment to buy..something. Anything. The 'troopers know we're rebels, we know they're not, everyone should've seen enough Star Wars to know the logical next step is a firefight.

Several rounds go by without anyone hitting anyone else, or even come close. Not much time game-time I suppose, but with all the die rolling and talking and planning and everything, it's been a while in real life, and I get tired of it. Not only that, but the blaster charges are starting to run low. I hand my gun to the plant and start pulling this junk out of my backpack...

Me: I throw the little black box down the corridor.
GM: Ok...
*rolls die*
*rolls another die*
*rolls another die*
*rolls yet another die*
*repeat*
GM: The black box hits the ground in the middle of the stormtroopers and rolls over onto one of its faces. You hear.. click--ba bum bum bum bum bu-bu-bu-bum, ba bum bum bum ba-*BOOOOOM* All of the stormtroopers get blown against the wall and crumble to the ground.
Me: What /was/ that thing?
GM: Let's just say...it was a defective jack-in-the-box

Now, he didn't /mean/ for it to be defective. He meant for it to just be a regular boring ol' jack-in-the-box. But I got _really_ lucky with his die rolling. When one situation seems completely hopeless, don't just keep shooting at the stormtroopers. Start throwing jack-in-the-boxes. You never know, one of them may just be defective.