Today in the United States we are celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a holiday marking the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. He was, of course, the chief spokesman for nonviolent activism in the Civil Rights Movement, which successfully protested racial discrimination in U.S. federal and state law. Yet though we celebrate the work and words of this civil rights leader, a half century has passed since his death and still race relations are more tense than ever. It a dilemma that seems impossibly difficult to solve.

As frustrating as dilemmas are in real-life, situations with difficult solutions can be entertaining in games. After all, one of the reasons we play games is to overcome hard challenges.  Dilemmas especially occur in situation in which the difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially equally undesirable ones.

Perhaps the first dilemma that you experienced was on your own birthday.  Your parents bring in the birthday cake, and kids being kids, everyone wants their fair share but is afraid the another kid will claim the bigger piece. How do we cut the cake so that everyone thinks they got their fair share?

The cake cutting scenario is an example of a zero-sum game, a situation in which each participant’s gain or is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participants.  If one kid gets a bigger piece, then another kid will necessarily get a smaller piece of the cake.

Let’s simply the situation by saying that there are only two kids, each of whom is suspicious that the other one will take the larger of the two slices when the cake is cut.  Fortunately, Mom comes up with the obvious solution to this dilemma: have one kid cut the cake into two slices, and have the other kid pick a piece first.  Naturally, the kid cutting the cake will try to cut the cake as evenly as possible, knowing that the other kid will try to take the larger piece.

So, what does cake slicing have to do with games?  Well, for every two-person, zero-sum game with a finite number of strategies, there exists a value V and a mixed strategy for each player, such that

• Given player 2’s strategy, the best payoff possible for player 1 is V,
• Given player 1’s strategy, the best payoff possible for player 2 is −V.

Player 1’s strategy guarantees him a payoff of V regardless of Player 2’s strategy, and similarly Player 2 can guarantee himself a payoff of −V. This solution is called “minimax” because each player minimizes the maximum payoff possible for the other—since the game is zero-sum, players also minimizes their own maximum loss. The solutions to these type of zero-sum games are so obvious that these are scenarios game designers need to avoid.

Now, let’s take a look at another dilemma scenario. Two criminals, Mario and Luigi, are arrested and imprisoned. Each criminal is placed in a separate interrogation room with no means of communicating with the other. The police lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair. They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a bargain:

• If Mario and Luigi each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison
• If Mario betrays Luigi but the Luigi remains silent, Mario will be set free and Luigi will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa)
• If Mario and Luigi both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison on a lesser charge

This scenario is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Is it better to betray my partner in crime or stay loyal? Well, because betraying a partner offers a greater reward than cooperating with him, all purely rational self-interested prisoners would betray the other, and so the only possible outcome for two purely rational prisoners is for them to betray each other. Pursuing individual reward logically leads both of the prisoners to betray, when they would get a better reward if they both kept silent.

This scenario presupposes that the two prisoners cannot communicate with each other, but what if they could? In reality, people have a bias towards cooperative behavior in this and similar games, much more so than predicted by simple models of “rational” self-interested action. So games in which players can communicate and negotiate for resolving dilemmas can make for compelling strategic gameplay.

Here’s another scenario with a social dilemma.  A group of farmers share a field on which their cows can graze.  They all agree to each only have two cows graze on the field so that the field won’t be destroyed from too many cows grazing on it.  Of course, cooperation is best for all concerned, but what if one of the farmer decided to break the agreement bring five cows on to the field, to the detriment of everyone else, so that he can profit by having more cows to milk?

Some players will compete against the others even when cooperation is best for everyone, and this risk can bring some exciting tension to a game. For the game designer to set up such a scenario, a game requires individual rewards (in this case, well-fed cows that can be milked) with shared penalties (over-exploiting the field), with the rewards outweighing the penalties.

Dilemmas like these force the player into making risk/reward decisions that can bring about very strong emotional immersion in games.  The dilemma of determining when it is better to cooperate or compete can bring about exciting gameplay.

Just remember that life is not a game, so when away from the board or video screen, let’s all work a bit harder to get along with each other.

Can you name this game from this description?

“A puzzle game where several different types of colored blocks continuously fall from above and you must arrange them to make horizontal rows of blocks. Completing any row causes those blocks to move downwards. The blocks above gradually fall faster and the game is over when the screen fills up and blocks can no longer fall from the top.”

Well, of course you can. The game is obviously Tetris.  However, this description is quite wordy, and while it is accurate, it doesn’t quite capture the experience of playing the game.

There are quite a number of ways that we can describe a game to someone else, each conveying a substantial aspect of the game in only a few words.

For example, we could describe the game’s core mechanic: rotate shapes to fill rows. Rotating shapes is the action we perform hundreds, if not thousands, of times while playing Tetris, and filling a row is a perpetual short-range goal of the game.

We could also describe the game by its genre: puzzle.  The genre tells us whether the skills required to succeed in the game are more based on dexterity or strategy (puzzle games are focused on strategy), and whether the game objectives are more about exploration or overcoming challenges (and in this puzzle game, the challenge is to fill rows and eliminate them before they fill up the screen).

Another way to describe a game is by its theme, if it has one.  A theme is the setting. story or even just a character that provides a narrative or aesthetic context for the game mechanics.  In the case of Tetris, the theme is Russian — the game has a Russian name and is often implemented with Russian graphics and music.

An important way to describe a game is by what makes it fun to play.  Any game fun (hopefully!), but the type of fun varies from game to game.  Ubisoft Creative Director VandenBerghe devised these “5 Domains of Play” to describe the different ways in which a game can be fun:

• Novelty: Surprises vs. Predictability
• Challenge: Hard vs. Easy
• Stimulation: Exciting vs. Calm
• Harmony: Building vs. Destroying
• Threat: Dangerous vs. Cheerful

A game like Tetris has a high degree of Challenge, Stimulation and Threat, although it doesn’t have a high degree of Novelty (the only surprise is which shape will appear next) or Harmony (the player builds rows, which then immediately get destroyed).

Of course, we must not neglect our players!  For whom we design our game is another way to describe it.  No one game is truly made for everyone (any attempt to do so would only result in a game that no one wants to play), and so we can describe the target players for our game by such demographic factors as age, gender, favorite genre, skill level, preferred game session length, or even income level (not everyone can afford to buy the latest AAA game.)  Tetris does appeal to many type of players, but I would say that it mostly appeals to those who prefer casual types of games: ones that have a smooth learning curve and can be played for short sessions.

With so many games coming out each year, it is also important to describe what makes our game stand out from the competition.  In marketing terms, this description is called the product’s Unique Selling Proposition.  What differentiates Tetris from other puzzle games, other than its Russian theme, is its unusually high degree of addictiveness.

That’s a lot of different ways to describe a game.  However, we can wrap up all those definitions into one nice, neat package called an Elevator Pitch.  This is a short (spoken in about the length of an elevator ride, hence its name) description of a product or service that contains all its essential information.  With a game, the general format might be:

Game Title is a game genre set in theme for target player.  It features core game mechanics that bring play value.  Unlike competition, this game unique differentiation.

Wrapping it all up, we might describe Tetris as “a Russian puzzle game for casual players, who are challenged by rotating falling pieces to fill lines before they fill the screen.  Unlike many other puzzle games, Tetris is extremely addictive.”

We can whittle this down further by removing some unnecessary words and make the remaining ones a little more exciting:

“Race against the clock to match and arrange vertically falling colored blocks before they stack too high and fill the screen!”

Not only is this description shorter, you probably found it more interesting, because rather than precisely describing the gameplay, the second version focuses on the excitement of playing the game.  In fact, the description with the fewer words arguably does a better job of conveying the essence of the game experience, which is often far more important than describing the details of the game.