Theory: Morten Monrad Pedersen on Emotional AIs

Posted on Posted in Game design theoryTagged Leave a comment

A while ago I talked about stand-in AIs. I mentioned that they need to imitate human players–but I didn’t have much to say about how that could be achieved.

That question was very ably addressed in Mr. Pedersen’s BGG blog post on Monday, which gives some really fascinating suggestions about how deck-building could be used to change an AI giving random responses into an AI that looks like it hates you personally . . . or loves you!

If you haven’t seen it yet, I would urge you to give his post a look. Even if designing solo games isn’t your thing, the ideas have applications elsewhere.

Theory: Don’t Make These Arguments

Posted on Posted in Game design theoryTagged 2 Comments

Every game that’s going to be played on a tournament basis has to figure out whether it’s going to allow things like intentional draws and people conceding for tactical purposes (e.g., to improve a friend’s standings). Magic went through this process years ago; Warmachine is still hashing it out; Netrunner is just starting to. It’s good that people are thinking about these things, since they’ll come up and it’s good to have a policy in place.

As a lawyer there are certain arguments that come up in these discussions that I find deeply frustrating. They’re based on fundamental misunderstandings of what rules are for and how they work. I don’t have a position on whether any given game should permit players to choose to draw or concede: there are reasonable arguments in both directions. I know, however, that in arguing in favor of those things no one should ever say either of the following.

Unsound argument #1: It’s hard to detect players throwing games, so we should just let them draw or concede openly.

Laws don’t exist because they’re easy to enforce; they exist because they are deemed necessary. That necessity isn’t impacted by the fact that sometimes people get away with things. We’re all mere mortals, and as a result some wrongs will go undetected and unpunished. It doesn’t follow from a difficulty in enforcement that we have to throw the doors open, and let people do whatever they want.

It’s well known that some crimes are hard to prove. Investigating sophisticated crimes—certain forms of fraud, for example—can take years, and even at the end of that process there might not be enough evidence to make a conviction certain. Nor are criminal laws the only ones where enforcement can be a struggle; monitoring compliance with environmental regulations can be a tremendous and not-always-successful undertaking.

Yet, we still have these laws, because we’ve decided as a society that they’re worth the trouble. They allow us to direct people toward good behavior, and to punish those who do harm. Furthermore, punishment isn’t always necessary for a law to work. Laws have a messaging function: they signal what we feel members of society should be doing. Legal scholars have shown that just having a law on the books has a powerful impact on behavior.

This argument, then, puts the priorities wrong way ‘round. The first question is not “will enforcement be hard.” It is “do we feel the rule is necessary.” If it is necessary, then it becomes appropriate to think out what an enforcement mechanism that’s commensurate with the scale of the problem and the resources available would look like. Asking first about the difficulties of enforcement puts the people doing bad things in the driver’s seat.

Now, my suspicion is that a rule against intentional draws and tactical concessions wouldn’t be anywhere near as difficult to enforce as laws against sophisticated fraud. Take it from someone who’s worked in public defender offices: most people aren’t as good at being underhanded as they think they are. They’ll get busted.

I’ve seen people worry that intentional drawing and tactical concessions are unprovable–that it’s impossible to know the player’s mind. Remember, however, that even in court proof beyond a reasonable doubt—the highest standard of proof in the American legal system—is not proof beyond any conceivable doubt. Sure, it’s always possible to concoct a scenario where someone wasn’t throwing a game, but rather was suffering from some incredible combination of bad luck, an uncharacteristic bout of incompetence, and perhaps a curse placed upon them by an evil wizard. It’s more likely that they were just breaking the rule, and if we can put people on death row while there’s conceivable doubt we should be able to disqualify them from a tournament.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument, though, that the rule will be very difficult to enforce, and that many of those who break it will not be caught. (Again, these are very big assumptions.) Even in this case, the rule is still doing work. It sets a standard for good play, and inculcates values in new players coming into the game. The rate of intentional draws and tactical concessions will decrease, even without consistent enforcement, simply because most players aren’t comfortable being thought of as cheaters and don’t do things they’ve been told are cheating.

That last claim might sound unprovable, but look at the first defense raised by players who intentionally draw in games where it’s a grey area when others call them on it. They rely on the text of the rules! It’s not easy for people to toss the rules aside, even when it would be advantageous to do so.

It’s important to note that this is different from the situation where everyone is ignoring a rule. We’ve all heard funny stories about laws that are hundreds of years out-of-date, but are still on the books. An entire community shrugging off a rule and not even bothering to check for violations suggests that it’s become unnecessary; that’s very different from a rule that is still held out as important.

Some rules are difficult to enforce. In practice it’s generally not that difficult, because even smart people often aren’t good at covering their tracks. Either way, though, rules can still be valuable. They shapes the environment, and in doing so promote their intended end even when they cannot guarantee 100% compliance.

Unsound argument #2: “No one can legislate morality.”

I’ve always found this position—which tends to be stated as a single sentence like the one above—a bit hard to parse. So far as I can tell, there are two ideas at play here:

1. Rules of behavior are different from moral rules. Standards of sportsmanship are moral rules, and therefore are not a suitable subject for rules of behavior.
2. People are going to do what they think is right. Trying to stop them is futile.

Both of those arguments are completely unsupportable.

First, rules of behavior and moral rules constantly intersect. Every law that has ever existed has been a rule of behavior, and they all have some kind of moral judgment behind them. We have environmental regulations because we’ve decided that preventing certain kinds of pollution is more important than economic efficiency. We don’t have other environmental regulations because in those areas legislatures concluded that the social gains of efficiency should win out. Laws against assault and murder exist in the first instance, not because of some economic argument about lost productivity, but because human society determined that those things were wrong and bad. There is no law which does not have some kind of moral judgment behind it.

Given that, there’s no reason why a rule against “unsporting” acts is per se invalid. It may be undesirable; a game might benefit from intentional draws and tactical concessions, and that’s fine. This is simply to point out that it’s necessary to have the conversation.

The second version of the argument requires very little discussion. Laws and rules prevent people from doing things they would feel justified in doing every single day. Sometimes people damn the torpedoes, of course, but that only returns us to the previous unsound argument about uncertain enforcement.

Decide on a proper basis

I don’t mind allowing intentional draws and tactical concessions. However, I would never use either of the above arguments to explain why. If you find yourself taking that position in a debate, I would urge you not to use them, either, and if someone uses them against you, don’t be swayed.

Something Completely Different: Star Trek Games Done Right

Posted on Posted in Game design theoryTagged , , , , 7 Comments

Grousing about the old Star Trek CCGs got me thinking about Trek games. Years ago I saw a forum post on Boardgamegeek that superbly captured the issue most of them suffer from. I can’t find the post now, but paraphrased it went something like:

“Star Trek is focused on moral issues. No Trek game ever has been.”

To my mind that’s exactly the problem. All of the Star Trek games I’ve played—and I’ve played quite a lot of them—focus either on completing scientific tasks or on combat. Both of those things feature in Trek, of course, but (at least in the good episodes) they’re window-dressing for some other, more universal dilemma.

There’s been one brief exception, and it’s all the more powerful because it demonstrates how remarkable a Trek game that feels like Trek could be. Back in the SNES days there was a game called Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Starship Bridge Simulator. (That’s a mouthful! Let’s call it ST:SA.) ST:SA was, for the most part, about combat. It played like Wing Commander, X-Wing, or the Freespace games: a flight sim set amongst the stars, where the goal is to shoot down opposing vessels.

However, there was one mission that was absolutely brilliant. I can no longer recall the details, but the player had to deal with a Gorn vessel. The Gorn are not the friendliest of species, and after going through a conversation tree I was dropped into the usual fight. Destroying the Gorn vessel earned me a passing grade on the mission (this was the Starfleet Academy game, the missions were graded)—but not full points.

That was striking. Overwhelmingly the game rewarded fighting prowess. Most gameplay time was spent in battles. What had gone wrong?

I had. I had settled into a routine of “Star Trek-themed space sim,” but the designers still had in mind what Star Trek was all about. With this mission they set out to see whether you were playing according to Trek’s ideals.

After several replays, I realized that it was possible to avoid the fight entirely—but to do so, the player had to communicate with the Gorn in a way that a Gorn would respect. Offering help and being polite made them feel talked down to. Be bombastic, on the other hand, and the Gorn knew they were being taken seriously. If the player took the time to read up on the Gorn and then leveraged that knowledge to find a productive way to communicate, they would go peacefully on their way and the player got a 100% for the mission.

That single mission was the most Star Trek thing in any Star Trek game I’ve ever played. It was about diplomacy. It was about empathy. It was about building a bridge between the player and someone who seemed to be nothing like the player.

Unfortunately, it’s a moment that’s never really been repeated. Even ST:SA went back to dogfighting.

I want to play a Star Trek game that maintains the spirit and sensibility of that mission throughout. A game where creating earns better rewards than breaking, where both competition and cooperation are valued.

That game doesn’t yet exist. I guess I’d better get to work.

The Case Study: Following Up on Feedback

Posted on Posted in The case studyTagged Leave a comment

Changing a game’s theme is risky. Parts of the design were shaped around the previous theme; they might not fit the new one. Through the Jungle has proven to suffer from this issue, and I’ve been putting thought into how to fix it.

At its inception Through the Jungle was a game about traversing a no-man’s-land between World War I trenches, trying to sneak across in the darkness while avoiding searchlights. In that context it was perfectly sensible for the searchlights to move quickly, steadily, and in more-or-less predictable patterns.

When I refitted the game with the current evade-hunting-animals theme, I retained the movement system designed for searchlights. That seemed reasonable from a gameplay perspective—it was tried and tested. Board gamers often hear that games are re-themed by their publishers after the rules are set in stone; I figured that since I was going to be wearing the publisher hat, I could do as they did.

Unfortunately, the results weren’t quite what I was hoping for. Jay has accurately pointed out that the current way movement is handled doesn’t feel right for animals. They’re sweeping about at a constant pace (don’t the animals ever slow down to investigate something more carefully, or speed up to give chase?), over all forms of terrain (picking a path through overgrown jungle doesn’t slow them down? Climbing a steep cliff doesn’t either?). I’d fallen into the dreaded trap that makes board gamers sigh when they hear about publishers altering a game’s theme at the end of the process: the new theme was merely pasted on.

There was another problem as well. It was perfectly logical for searchlights to be able to catch multiple people; if one illuminates them all, they’re all busted. Jay noted that it makes a lot less sense for an animal to be able to do that. Presumably it only has one set of jaws with which to drag prey back to its lair.

In response to this feedback I’ve tried two modifications to the game:

1. Animals only “see”—i.e., can capture—in front of them, and “pounce on”—move into the space of—the first adventurer they spot. This was immediately unsatisfactory; most of the time the animals were still moving like searchlights.

2. As above, but with everything taking place at a smaller scale: the board is 10 x 10 rather than 20 x 20, animals move three spaces (with the chance at an extra “pounce” move), adventurers move two spaces. This sort of worked; having the animals move more slowly gave more of a feel of stalking prey, and sharply limiting the adventurers’ movement demonstrated that getting through the jungle was not easy.

However, this approach still had the animals moving in a very mechanical, arbitrary fashion. Furthermore, it’s not yet clear how rescuing should work: ought hearing ranges be reduced, just as the animals’ line of sight has been? It’s exceptionally difficult to arrange a safe rescue when adventurers only move two spaces; is that a valuable source of challenge, or is the game now just unwinnable?

Neither of those is likely to end up being the way Through the Jungle ultimately goes. Having things up in the air isn’t a bad thing, however. The game needed fresh eyes on it to progress, and now it’s getting them! Breaking Through the Jungle down is a vital step in building it back up better than it was.

Try the game out if you haven’t, and let me know what you think. For my part, I’ll be at the library. I need to do some reading on the hunting behavior of great cats . . . .

Theory: Environment-Influencing Games

Posted on Posted in Game design theoryTagged , 1 Comment

When we previously talked about games with an environmental element, the discussion focused on how the great outdoors could affect play. The game would change based on the weather or the season, with the components taking account of the ambient temperature. However, feedback doesn’t need to be one-way, with the state of the world driving the game. It’s possible for the influence to run in both directions, with the world altering the game—and the game encouraging players to influence the world.

Imagine as an example a civilization-building game. New technologies in this hypothetical game would be based on the actual progress of human knowledge. Traveling to other worlds might be a victory condition, just like it is in the Civilization series—but the technology to accomplish that wouldn’t be available just by spending a certain number of turns researching jet propulsion. It would need to be achieved by actual scientists.

The incentives that would create are, I think, really neat. It’s a game where success involves both good play and finding ways to contribute to NASA’s Journey to Mars program. Winning the game requires getting involved in an amazing real-world feat.

Now, I’m not a rocket scientist and I’m not sure how much of a contribution I could really make to space exploration. However, a game like this needn’t be quite so lofty. In the spirit of thinking globally and acting locally, it could be designed to look for things the player could more readily impact.

Envision something like Batman: Arkham City, except based on the player’s home town. (Or perhaps some other town—a pre-set map of New York City or Paris, or some such.) The overall conditions in the video game version of the city are based on conditions in that city. If the real-world city doesn’t have enough homeless shelters, the video game city doesn’t have enough either, and player won’t be able to cure poverty; a poor EMT dispatching system will limit the help the player can receive in-game. Building a virtual utopia demands building the necessary infrastructure in one’s own community.

Maybe that’s still too big, too hard to see the impact. What about a space-trading game where the amount of space debris is based on the condition of a local park? Less litter in the park means fewer pieces of debris. Getting good at dodging through space is valuable, but to really make money and move up the leaderboards you have to keep your park clean so that you can have lots of ships flying safely on autopilot. Or spread to a new system by taking on a new park. The rarest minerals and most exotic trade goods are in the hardest-to-reach places, so you’ll want to choose one with a lot of litter to be cleaned . . . .

Going down this path involves lots of design problems. From a technical point of view, how would that last game know how much litter is in a park? Coming at it from a design perspective, what fun in-game activity is the player engaged in, so that the whole exercise isn’t just a transparent effort to get people to clean up a public space? (Not that transparent efforts to get people to clean public spaces are bad, but we’re trying to make a game here.)

Nevertheless, I’m really excited to explore this avenue of design. Games are so often viewed as a centripetal force, pulling players into fictional spaces and drawing them away from the greater realm of human accomplishment. I have to think that there’s potential in games that could serve in the opposite role, flinging players out into the world with the goal of making it better.

The Case Study: New Version

Posted on Posted in The case studyTagged Leave a comment

I’ve just updated Through the Jungle’s page with new versions! They include changes inspired by Jay’s feedback: the full game rules can now be accessed from the main menu or during play (press Detailed Rules in the upper right corner of the How to Play screen), and the water that served as a border for the map has been replaced by mountains on the three sides where it’s not possible to escape.

Jay also made the excellent suggestion that the animals should behave more like animals. For example, their movement should feel more like stalking and pouncing, and less like a sweeping dragnet. I really like that, and am going to put some design work in to figure out exactly how that would work and what other changes, if any, would be necessary to balance the very different gameplay experience that would result.

This is one example of why feedback is so valuable. I was too close to the existing movement system to see even the possibility of a different one, much less its advantages over what I’ve been doing. Get playtesters involved as early and as often as possible!

As always, let me know what you think, and if you run into any issues!

The Case Study: Debugging . . . the Rules Screen

Posted on Posted in The case studyTagged Leave a comment

In what I can only interpret as a warning against hubris, my efforts to put a “detailed rules” screen into Through the Jungle at first failed so catastrophically that any attempt to view them crashed Unity. Some crashes were been so bad that they changed the layout of the IDE windows! Remind me never to think “I know how to do this, it’ll be easy.”

The crashes are now resolved. Unfortunately, figuring out what was causing them* took so long that the more conventional work of getting the screen scrolling properly, getting everything hooked up internally, etc. is still underway. Owing to the talk I won’t have time to work on it tomorrow, but I’ll have a go at it again on Friday.

* I spent a long time looking at the code, but as it turned out the problem was a misclicked setting in the IDE relating to one of the GUI elements that handles scrolling text. I’m not at all certain why that caused crashes as opposed to just a weird-looking interface.

Theory: Essential Wargames for Designers

Posted on Posted in Game design theoryTagged , , , , , 2 Comments

Following up on last Wednesday’s post, here are five wargames that have something interesting to teach designers. Playing any one of these represents time and money well-spent.

Wargames As Exemplars of Board Game Design: Twilight Struggle

Defying the notion that board games and wargames are separate entities, Twilight Struggle is, as of this writing, both the #1 rated board game and the #1 rated wargame on Boardgamegeek. It features a superb marriage of mechanics and theme; complex but intuitive rules that fade into the background during play; rich strategy that continues to be interesting over many plays; and quality components (especially in later printings, when the game’s success allowed for a nicer board). In other words, Twilight Struggle has the things one wants any good board game to have.

Perhaps the great lesson of Twilight Struggle is that the fundamental rules of board game design are more powerful even than we thought. One might reasonably question whether principles often stated in terms of deck-builders and worker-placement games are applicable outside the subgenres that are currently prominent in the market. Twilight Struggle demonstrates that some rules of design really are applicable to the full range of board games, and that adhering to them (or at least, breaking them only consciously and for a specific purpose) consistently leads to good results.

Incomplete Control: Memoir ‘44

Most board games assume away problems of communication and coordination. Cave-people in Stone Age always go where players tell them to go and do what they tell them to do. Pandemic’s medic never has to worry about whether his support staff will fly to the wrong city, or quit their jobs rather than entering a country where a dread disease has taken hold.

What if a designer seeks to capture realistic human behavior, where misunderstandings, mistakes, and outright refusals are part of the experience? It’s time for that designer to look toward wargames. They have been finding ways to introduce uncertainty and the fog of war into the open-information environment of a board game for years.

Memoir ’44 presents one such solution: rather than moving any piece she wishes the player uses randomly-drawn cards to activate units. If no card in hand can move a unit, that unit is conceptually out of control: maybe its radio has been destroyed and messages aren’t getting through, or the soldiers are panicking and won’t come out of their foxholes. It’s an easy-to-learn, elegant system that shows how modeling the human element adds to a design.

Solo Gaming: D-Day at Omaha Beach

Requests for a “solitaire mode” and questions about whether a game works with only a single player are seen in many board games’ forums. That’s not surprising; we’ve all had games we loved that our playgroups weren’t keen on, or been hankering for a round of something long after all opposition has gone to bed. Sometimes it’s nice just to be able to give in to analysis paralysis, really thinking through the complexities of a difficult decision without feeling guilty about making others wait. Being able to play without other people is a valuable feature.

Wargames have long been a hotbed of solo gaming innovation. The tradition can easily be traced back to 1973 with The Fall of Rome; miniatures games were doing it even earlier, and doubtless these are only the tip of an iceberg hidden by the mists of time. For designers who want to tap into this deep vein of knowledge, D-Day at Omaha Beach is considered a shining star, a brilliant game constructed from the ground up as a solo experience.

Learning by Doing: Squad Leader

Squad Leader has a tutorial so good that it’s a worthy game unto itself. Anyone who’s designing a game complex enough to warrant an introductory mode or scenario should play it, just to see what a really good one can do. You can find more discussion about why SL’s tutorial is amazing here.

Asymmetric Multiplayer: Fire in the Lake

Historically many wars have involved nations (players) with widely disparate economic and military capabilities (starting positions), available technologies (powers), and objectives (victory conditions). Wargames have had to model those asymmetric situations, and in the process wargame designers have put a lot of thought into how to do it well. The results go far beyond a certain species being better at propulsion technology, or a character having a really good fireball.

Fire in the Lake is a stand-in here for the entirety of GMT’s COIN series of games—Fire in the Lake, A Distant Plain, Cuba Libre, and Andean Abyss. Each of them is a game about four different factions. The factions all have their own abilities and goals—but every faction is on a team with another, whose interests only partially align. Far from treating asymmetric powers as simply a way to introduce some diversity and keep the game fresh, the COIN series thus uses asymmetries to create vital gameplay dynamics: the tension between the international coalition and Afghanistan’s government in A Distant Plain, or the I-need-you-but-you’re-bad-for-me relationship between the dictatorship and the crime lords in Cuba Libre. Playing these games is an eye-opening experience that shows what asymmetry can really do.

Getting the Goods

I’ve tried, in composing this list, to stick to reasonably available games. Wargames often have short print runs, and their prices can ascend toward the level of collector’s items very quickly. Even when in print they can cost close to $100; low volume means each unit has to carry a high margin, after all.

Nevertheless, I would urge designers to seek these games out. They all offer valuable lessons. What’s more, they’re all good games that deserve a spot on your shelf. You might find them engaging, or frustrating, or informative, or difficult, or any of many other things. You won’t find them to be wastes of your time or money.

Something Completely Different: Weather-Influenced Board Games

Posted on Posted in Game design theoryTagged , 2 Comments

Organic food advocates point out that being able to eat any fruit or vegetable at any time of year is a new phenomenon. For most of history, foods rotated in and out of season, available only when they were ripe. What if games tried a similar dynamic?

Sports, of course, already do this. Baseball is great during the spring, summer, and fall, but is nigh-unplayable in winter. (American) Football is tremendous fun in wet, mucky weather, but all that equipment gets uncomfortable when it’s hot. Hockey, when played outdoors, demands temperatures below freezing.

Yet, there’s no reason why the change of seasons can only influence physical games. A board game, for example, could use temperature-sensitive ink for its board; imagine a survival game whose board only appears when it’s very cold. Having to bundle up to play the game might really help set the mood!

Or perhaps the pieces themselves are temperature-sensitive, so that the game is different depending on when it’s played. A wargame about ancient Greece, for example, might model the changing roles of the era’s soldier-farmers using that technique; when it’s warm the pieces are ready for combat, but as the temperature cools they lose interest in combat and have to return to the home front. There’s a market for grand-scale games like World in Flames; how much more epic would a game about the Peloponnesian War be, if it actually played out over the course of a year?

These games might not even be playable in some places, owing to the local climate, whereas they would often be playable in others. Is that frustrating, or is it awesome? I can see a lot of valid concerns, but I can also imagine great stories coming out of people going to the Grand Canyon or the Great Pyramids in order to get the right environment to play a game.

Certainly, these would be niche products. It’s hard to imagine a game store shutting off the heat so that the players can get down to the sub-zero temperatures that activate Ice Floe Survival’s board, or parents letting their kids mess with the thermostat in order to speed up their game of Real-Time Ancient Greek Conflict. Still, I feel like there are interesting results to be found pushing out the boundaries of “what can influence a game” in this way. Is anybody already doing something like this?

Theory: Every Designer Should Play a Wargame

Posted on Posted in Game design theoryTagged , , , 2 Comments

Once every so often I see a list of “board games every designer should play.” They’re often very good, with lots of quality games that can teach valuable lessons. However, I’ve noticed that they rarely include wargames—and that’s an important oversight. Love them or hate them, wargames have a long history and have had significant influence outside their genre. New designers should play at least one.

Fundamentally, wargames are board games. Hex-and-counter affairs played on a map are obviously so—a physical board to play on comes in the box! Miniatures games are as well; their tables serve as the board, the minis as the meeples. There’s no definitional reason to treat wargames as their own separate thing.

Given that they’re part of board games, we might ask: are they important enough that every person interested in board game design should have to spend time with one? They can be long, after all, and demanding to learn. One could get through most of the games in this very good list in the time it would take to play D-Day.

The answer is a resounding “yes, it’s worth it.” For both historical and mechanical reasons, a designer needs to understand at least the broad strokes of how wargames operate.

Historically, for a long time wargames were a huge part of “grown-up” board gaming. If you were a tween or older, in the United States, and were interested in board games, your options were pretty much chess, trivia/party games, and wargames. Any designer who wants to be a student of the art, to understand where we’ve been so as to better see where we can go, would benefit from exploring such an important force in board gaming’s history.

That exploration is particularly important because wargames have had a tremendous influence on other genres. Dungeons & Dragons, for example, was directly inspired by squad-level wargames, and through D&D wargames continue to have influence on the RPG industry. One sees their guiding hand particularly clearly in the many RPGs that have much more extensive rules for combat than for social interaction, even though at least one experienced industry figure argues that simulating the real- (or fictional-) world behavior of different weapons shouldn’t matter when role-playing. Without knowing wargames, a designer can’t recognize the places where other types of games imitate them.

Mechanically, ideas from wargames are at the core of lots of board games. Area control, perhaps the quintessential wargame goal, is now a routine and broadly employed design tool. Up Front was building tableaux with cards in the early 1980s. There’s some wargame in lots of board games’ DNA.

Of course,wargames exert some of their influence by teaching how not to do things. Rolling a single die, with the flat probability distribution that implies. Tiny, hard-to-manage pieces. Unattractive counters. Heavy, motivation-sapping rulebooks.

Still, a game—or a genre—need not be perfect to be foundational. Wargames have been, and continue to be, important to designers. Lists of vital games for them to try would benefit from including one.