So my drive for revenge was mostly emotional instead of rational.
You mean the other way around, right?
my two friends had been eliminated from the game relatively early… it was already very late and we called it a night at that point.
This illustrates a basic design flaw shared by almost all board games involving war: one or more players are eliminated early and then have nothing to do until the next game starts. This flaw has been identified by the new wave of “German” game designers, whose games rarely involve war.
Another design flaw many earlier (ie primitive) games exhibit is what I would call “unwinnability”: if one player takes a lead, the other players simply team up to take him down. Then a new leader emerges, who is targeted by the others, and this cycle can be interminable. The new games almost always involve a mechanism to ensure that a game will end with a clear winner in a reasonable amount of time.
if one player takes a lead, the other players simply team up to take him down. Then a new leader emerges, who is targeted by the others, and this cycle can be interminable.
That’s usually a deliberate feature, not a bug. I call it “handicapping”.
Richard Garfield wrote an essay on the useful of game design terminology (can’t find it via google for a link but I found a game review where someone else apparently remembers the same article) where he borrowed the term “kingmaking” from politics. In Garfield’s re-coining, the term describes situations where one or more players with no chance at winning are empowered by game mechanics to determine who wins in the end.
When my family plays Settlers of Catan, the winner is normally determined by kingmaking and a lot of the endgame fun comes from friendly metagame political wrangling (vengeful playacting, backrub offers, and such). If someone wins without any visible kingmaking on their behalf, we consider it a categorically superior sort of victory.
I remember reading an article by Garfield (this would have been in roughly 1998?) where he proposed the term as the kind of word that game designers need more of, and my memory of that reading (possibly simplified) was that he coined the term there. Now my guess is that he simply imported the term from political history to games, but I worked that out by tracking down references and discovering usage going back to literal king making in British history.
Checking just now, google scholar contains essentially no references to game theoretic kingmaking during the 1990′s. The terms “king” and “making” occur together, but it all appears to be political usage, a distinct re-use for websites whose links are especially critical in creating nearness relations, or accidental, as when talking about things made by Martin Luther King.
You mean the other way around, right?
This illustrates a basic design flaw shared by almost all board games involving war: one or more players are eliminated early and then have nothing to do until the next game starts. This flaw has been identified by the new wave of “German” game designers, whose games rarely involve war.
Another design flaw many earlier (ie primitive) games exhibit is what I would call “unwinnability”: if one player takes a lead, the other players simply team up to take him down. Then a new leader emerges, who is targeted by the others, and this cycle can be interminable. The new games almost always involve a mechanism to ensure that a game will end with a clear winner in a reasonable amount of time.
That’s usually a deliberate feature, not a bug. I call it “handicapping”.
Richard Garfield wrote an essay on the useful of game design terminology (can’t find it via google for a link but I found a game review where someone else apparently remembers the same article) where he borrowed the term “kingmaking” from politics. In Garfield’s re-coining, the term describes situations where one or more players with no chance at winning are empowered by game mechanics to determine who wins in the end.
When my family plays Settlers of Catan, the winner is normally determined by kingmaking and a lot of the endgame fun comes from friendly metagame political wrangling (vengeful playacting, backrub offers, and such). If someone wins without any visible kingmaking on their behalf, we consider it a categorically superior sort of victory.
Is that usage really due to Garfield? I was under the impression it was much older than that.
I remember reading an article by Garfield (this would have been in roughly 1998?) where he proposed the term as the kind of word that game designers need more of, and my memory of that reading (possibly simplified) was that he coined the term there. Now my guess is that he simply imported the term from political history to games, but I worked that out by tracking down references and discovering usage going back to literal king making in British history.
Checking just now, google scholar contains essentially no references to game theoretic kingmaking during the 1990′s. The terms “king” and “making” occur together, but it all appears to be political usage, a distinct re-use for websites whose links are especially critical in creating nearness relations, or accidental, as when talking about things made by Martin Luther King.