Wonderland: Games

I had been looking forward to Chapter 5 in Steven Johnson’s Wonderland to read about one of my pastimes: playing games. The chapter starts out with a brief history of Chess. The author uses chess to illustrate the main thrust of his book about playing games. He writes: “[It is] one of the key ways in which the seemingly frivolous world affects the ‘straight’ world of governance, law and social relations. The experimental tinkering of games – a parallel universe where rules and conventions are constantly being reinvented – creates a new supply of metaphors that can be mapped on to more serious matters.” Such metaphors include “raise the stakes” and “wild cards”. Alan Turing, one of the giants of computing and A.I. wondered about whether machines can play chess.

No history of boardgames would be complete without mention of The Landlord’s Game. According to Johnson, the inventor Lizzie Magie “worked at various points as a stenographer, poet and journalist… and was also a devotee of the then-influential economist Henry George, who had argued… for an annual tax on all land held as private property – high enough to obviate the need for other taxes on income and production… Lizzie Magie appears to have decided that radical tax reform might make compelling subject for a boardgame.” Thus the ancestor to Monopoly was born, as can be seen from the 1906 picture of the gameboard. I won’t repeat the story of how Clarence Darrow “invented” and successfully marketed Monopoly; Johnson and many others have covered this.

The most interesting part of the chapter was on Games of Chance. Johnson begins with astrigali, a dice-like game that was the precursor to Backgammon. He then discusses Cardano’s famous The Book of Games of Chance where probabilities of dice rolls are discussed. Today, probability and statistics have widespread use and a firm theoretical basis. Johnson, though, ponders why it took so long to develop the basic theory of dice rolls – after all, folks had been gambling over the centuries on dice-like games. He proposes that “the answer to this riddle appears to lie with the physical object of the die itself.” [Die is singular for dice.] Early dice were not uniformly made, and were idiosyncratically biased. Johnson writes: “Seeing the patterns behind the games of chance required random generators that were predictable in their randomness.

To think that the edifice of probability and statistics was built on regulations placed on dice-makers forbidding the use of “loaded, mark of clipped dice” because there’s always a huckster around the corner trying to swindle you in a dice game. Hucksterism goes through much greater lengths in today’s technological society, but that’s a different story. Johnson writes: “By the time Cardano picked up the game, dice had become standardized in their design. That regularity may have foiled the swindlers in the short term, but it had a much more profound effect that had never occurred to dice-making guilds: it made the patterns of the dice game visible.” I even used these patterns when playtesting Bios Genesis to figure out how catalysts were generated by rolling triples given N dice.

This month I finally cracked open the new version of Bios Genesis and played several games. It had been over a year since I played, but I’ve been thinking about the origins of life this month (subject of my next post) and found myself sufficiently motivated. I did have to re-learn the rules again (they’re complicated) but I can now show you some of the newer graphics and make some comments about the game. To see the older graphics and read more about the game, you can read this session report. The following pictures were taken mid-game and I apologize for the blurriness. (My hands shake when I take photos.)

Here are the event cards (shown above). One is drawn at the beginning of every turn. We are three turns into the Archean Era, and are in a Tropical Waterworld. A Huronian Snowball has just hit leading to new areas where life may be seeded. (These are called refugia in the game.) Cosmic refugia and Terrestial refugia are active as shown by the non-shaded meteorite and mountains icons on the left of the card. The icons on the bottom panel indicate what takes place. Two new refugia are revealed. Then there is release of oxygen. (Organisms without protection against oxygenation of the atmosphere are in trouble.) Finally the snowflake in the blue circle indicates that the temperature is cold.

The two new refugia revealed are a Warm Pond and Eutectic Brine. The cubes represent “manna” that can be used to generate catalysts (in cycles!) and may form the seeds of chromosomal material if micro-organismic life is able to take root. Dice rolls determine how the manna is cycled through the system and if life can be “created”. The cube colors represent different key constituents in life: red for metabolism, blue for genetics, yellow for specificity (membranes), and green for managing entropy (i.e., increasing the efficiency of energy transduction).

The overlaid pictures above show my bacteria that Amyloid Hydrolysis bacterium that arose from the oceans. It has acquired ATP Synthase and Chemiosmosis Respiration allowing it certain special powers as indicated by the circled icons branching off the ‘helices’. I’m the Blue (Genes) player. My organism is being parasitized by a Salmonella virus from the Green (Entropy) player which is also equipped with Nitrogenase. Below is a picture of the Red (Metabolic) player’s macroorganism, Arrow Worms.

Overall I like the new graphics, even though they took some getting used to. It’s also nice to have actual cards on cardstock (rather than pieces of paper). I think a game’s aesthetic increases the enjoyment in playing – if it’s a good game. (If it is a lousy game, beautiful components don’t do anything for me.)

I’ve found that over time, I enjoy games such as Bios Genesis more and more because they are simulations that allow one to trace “what if” scenarios. I suppose it’s a good thing I don’t play video/computer games because those could be much more immersive environments that I might find hard to leave. Towards the end of his chapter on Games, Johnson traces the development of SpaceWar!, perhaps one of the first computer games. It had crappy graphics but being able to live-control those blips on the screen drew folks in. As we think about machine intelligence and forms of A.I., games have been the starting point. They also make the big news: Deep Blue versus Kasparov, Watson versus Ken Jennings, and just two months ago AlphaGo versus Ke Jie. But those algorithms also fuel scientific research delving into the mysteries of conscious life. The boundaries of playing games and more serious matters are increasingly blurred.