When you’re playing games you generally want to spend your time exploring interesting situations, which are typically ones where there are a range of outcomes. If someone is definitely going to win it’s not usually much fun to keep going, and in many gaming cultures when you get to this point it’s polite to resign. The problem is, what do you do when it’s only very likely that someone will win?
In some games, this is still a very interesting area to explore, with lots of interesting choices even for the losing player, but in others (Risk, Go, etc) it would usually be better to stop and play something else. In these cases, bargaining over fractional resignations can work well.
For example, I might think I have an 80% chance of losing, and if further play doesn’t seem fun I could offer my opponent 80% of a resignation. This is something that we would think of as essentially equivalent to them winning four games and me winning one game. If they think they actually have a 90% chance of winning we could bargain and maybe end up at 85%, but usually that isn’t needed.
This does mean that more games end in resignations, but only in cases where that’s what everyone wants. It works especially well if you’re gaming with someone who doesn’t like to resign if there’s a chance, but you’re playing games where finishing them off can be just really tedious.
In games with more than two players, negotiating fractional resignation should still be possible, but I don’t think I’ve ever done it. It’s more common for these games to have dynamics that keep it interesting for everyone, however, so this is often less needed.
(Avoiding the need for this usually looks like keeping the possibility of anyone winning relatively live until the very end, through some combination of randomness, secrecy, and last-shall-be-first dynamics. For example, when I play Modern Art we usually don’t know who will win until we count up the score because people’s amounts of money are too hard to keep track of, in Ticket to Ride you don’t know what sort of progress opponents are making towards their tickets, and in Power Grid the “penalize the apparently leading player” dynamic is a strong equalizer.)
From the title and the first sentence, the article I hallucinated described the possibility of saying: “Okay, you’ve won this actual game, I resign for most scenarios; but if such-and-such event happened, then the game would be interesting; so let’s say that you’ve won 90%, and then battle it out for the remaining 10% with such-and-such alteration to the game state.”
Also sounds fun!
I like the core idea presented—factional resignation. But I also like how it touches on other game mechanics. Worth its own post. (Board) game design seems to be a fun way to approach some topics loosely related to alignment, or at least mechanism design. I don’t have time to write up something like that but at least I can offer these pointers:
10 Elements of Good Game Design
Seven principles of game design
These mention randomness, secrecy, and last-shall-be-first dynamics, among other mechanics and many illustrative examples.
Caring and remmbering win track records is not common in all games. For the mindset that doesn’t track ending the game without annoucing winners or losers is a viable option. For example in game like Civilization “win” only provides a fuzzy metric of being able to say some actions are laudable and other are “bad”. The game events themselfs are reward enough. You can see the behaviour of “resigning” even wins by the winner when this dynamic is strong.
If your reason why you care about track records is that some kind of ladder then having wins of different value makes the complexity of your player rankings shoot up. If “negotiation skill” can offset pure mechanics and strategy that might alter the character of the game. There might also be a thing where certain game states that do not make sense to enter in a purely binary game are entered because they have good “appearance ratio”. Simulcra level goes up. High-risk-high-reward plays might benefit more than more mild approaches (by being only medium-risk-high-reward).
I was trying to guess what the idea is before reading the post, and my first thought was: in a multi-player game, there is a problem where, say, two players are in a losing position, and would like to resign (and go play something else), two other players are in a so-so position and want to possibly resign, and the final player is clearly winning and wants to continure. But there is no incentive to straight-up resign unilaterally, as then you have to sit and wait idly until the game finishes.
So, we introduce “fractional resignations”, we get something like [1, 1, 0.6, 0.6, 0.1], compare it to the pre-agreeded threshold (say, =3) - and end the game if it passes this bar.
I thought it would be about resigning from the responsibilities of your job that you dislike to work fewer hours on only the parts that interest you more.