The Many Types of Games

There are an infinite number of ways that someone could decide to divide up the very broad category of 'games'. One excellent book I read was entitled "Finite and Infinite Games". But for the purposes of this blog, I'd like to talk about games in the same way that authors talk about types of conflict. Assume that I'm politically correct and swapping gender pronouns appropriately even though I'm too lazy to actually do so.

• Man vs. Himself
• Man vs. Other Man
• Man vs. Society
• Man vs. Nature
• Man vs. Artificial Construct/Alien Life Form
• Man vs. Fate/Gods

Games that fall into Man vs. Nature include things like marathons; Man vs. Himself include things like How Long Can I Stand On One Foot, and Man vs. Society include things like Look Ma, I'm On Fox News. Man vs. Fate/Gods, I'll leave to the religious folk. (I suppose you could say that Let's Flip A Coin counts, if you really need an example.)

Most games that I'm willing to spend long times talking about fall into the categories of Man vs. Other Man (like Chess), Man vs. Artificial Construct (like Super Mario Bros.), or have aspects of both (like Elements The Game). Essentially, in gamerspeak, PvP and PvE games.

I am of the unshakeable opinion that, unless you have a weighted neural-net AI capable of learning on the fly from it's own mistakes, PvE (Man vs. Artificial Construct) games are essentially enormously complicated puzzles that are solvable. Given enough time and resources, it is always possible to construct a 'best' solution for any given PvE game. In fact, it's almost always possible to then create a flowchart to describe to a total n00b how to play that 'best' solution well enough to win a satisfying number of games.

Because of that, most of my interest comes when people talk PvP. Any game that has a PvP aspect should balance every element of the game around PvP, because PvP is interesting in a way that PvE cannot be once you've mastered the basics of the puzzle.

Next time, we'll delve into how best to make PvP an exciting and addictive process that keeps gamers coming back for more.