OK so today’s date is an almost pseudo-palindromic date (in fact is if you write it year/day/month. Which no one would do) so today is the day I start an attempt to write something every day.
OK, the more accurate reason is I saw the fabulous Richard Herring’s provocative Hitler Moustache tour yesterday at the York City Screen and have been inspired by his ‘Warming Up’ blog (almost a blog post a day for now a good number of years) to finally do something about my frustrated desire to do some writing. The argument goes; if you write something – anything – every day then your creative writing virtual muscles will be exercised (virtually) and eventually, if you’re lucky, some of your literary turd will smell sufficiently of roses to be remotely palatable to others.
I have often been accused of thinking too much about stuff, in the sense that I over-analyse otherwise sub-trivial situations as if I were writing a fucking Phd in how people respond to text messages (I do have a working hypothesis about the time distribution of replies to SMS messages. Maybe I’ll expand on it tomorrow). To try to bleed this socially bad blood out of my system (for some reason friends don’t often appreciate an analytical approach to emotional issues. Can’t imagine why), I shall attempt to use this outlet as a digital leach, sucking out my overly rationalist and pragmatic thoughts, and having it’s distended body tossed onto the giant waste bin of the internet daily.
Some of what I write may be the start of more developed and cogent articles, when extracted from this stream of consiousness and cleaned up (some might say in the manner of Gilbert’s Darwinian man[1]), it might not. Who can tell.
Today I want to talk about what I want to call meta-games, but which Wikipedia (source of all lazy research) tells me is a term already in use for a different phenomenon, so which I will grudgingly name second-order games[2].
By my definition, a first-order game is just a simple game, what we normally understand to be a game. There are rules governing what is allowed and what isn’t, and a procedure for working through the rules to a conclusion where (normally) one person or team has come out on top. Snakes and ladders is a first-order game – each player rolls the die in a round robin sequence and must move their counter exactly the number of squares indicated by the roll. If the counter ends up on the start of a snake or a ladder then said long thin article is followed to its conclusion. The first player to reach the final square wins. So far nothing controversial or, indeed, interesting.
A second order game contains a first order game inside it, normally a very simple, boring and possibly deterministic one (a deterministic game is one whose outcome is not affected by any action of the player, either through skill – choosing the right card to play – or luck – rolling the right number. The outcome is unchangable from the opening state), but a ‘game-on-top-of-the-game’, or ‘meta-game’ (damn Wikipedia!) on top of it.
Take poker (all versions). The first order game involves dealing out some cards to each player (or the table) in a certain pattern, possibly allowing the player a choice in whether to accept the given cards or change some of them (draw poker), and then determining which player has the strongest hand, defined by the total ordering of possible poker hands. This is a very boring game.
Take Texas hold-em; each player is given two cards, and five community cards are dealt face up on the table. The winner is the person with the best hand. There is no scope for player skill (you can’t swap cards strategically) or luck (other than the luck of the shuffle – but that is determined before the game starts). Without the betting element of the game, each hand would proceed determinstically and without much interest – either you win or you lose, and you have no control over that.
What makes poker an interesting and compelling game is the betting. But the betting has nothing to do with how the basic, first-order game plays out. The betting is a second order game – you have some chips, and at each stage of the game you make a strategic decision on how many of your chips to bet that you have the best evenutal hand. You can bluff people into believing you have a better hand than you actually do, you can limp along acting as if you have an OK hand when you actually have an amazing hand, or you can bet inadvisably and end up with no chips.
Deal or no deal is another example of a second-order game. The first-order game in this case is, in effect, selecting one box from 22 at random to start with, then choosing an ordering of the remaining 21 boxes to open, and then finally ignoring all that and taking the money in the box you chose to begin with anyway. Ignoring any bollocks about ‘feeling’ where the £250,000 box is, this is a game even preschool kids would quickly find boring. No matter what order you open the boxes the sum you end up with will always be effectively random.
The interesting aspect (if like me you do believe the show has some interest) is the second-order game with the banker. The banker is in a way wagering on the outcome of the first-order game at the prescribed offer-making occasions. From the contestant’s point of view, the second-order game is deciding when the optimal time to accept the offer is, or whether to hold-out until the end and take your fate with their box. This involves a more or less mathematical assesment of the likely return from the remaining boxes in relation to the amount offered, as well as personal considerations of the very real amount of money being offered. One might calculate the expectation on the remaining boxes, or assess the risk of taking out all the remaining strong boxes in the next round of elimination, or realise that £20,000 is serious money in most everybody’s books and shuld not be ignored. Or appeal to hand-wavy, ridiculous ‘feelings’ about where the money is, or false probablistic reasoning that a large amount is somehow ‘due’.
Whatever method you use to determine when to accept a deal and when to reject it (‘I’m ready for the question, Noel’), it’s this process that provides the interesting game.
I don’t at present see how this classification achieves anything other than to prick my intellectual curiosity. But maybe you found it interesting. Who can tell.
Well, you can I suppose, but you may not, at this stage, exist.
Till tomorrow, I hope.
Mark