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+--- Thread: The problem of "bad" games (/showthread.php?tid=762)
The problem of "bad" games - Michael - 12-06-2021
I decided to check out the game of the day, for once, now that the web player makes it even easier. That made me wonder about the value of the ludemic approach to historical/traditional games. The game was Bajr, and playing it game against AI, it feels completely broken. It is clear that some information is lacking in the description of the game. This could be information like whether it's a children's game, or whether Bajr-players all have some unspoken agreement about certain things one simply do not do when playing (like blocking the opponent's goal area).
In short, if you strip away the context in which this game is played – if you abstract out the mathematical entity from the cultural phenomenon – what you're left with is garbage. And the question is: For what kind of end is this garbage a valuable piece of data? If this was a rare effect of such an abstraction, there would obviously not be a problem, but my impression (which might be, and hopefully is, wrong) is that this is often what happens if you regard traditional games as mathematical entities apart from the complex way it is embedded in a history and a culture.
I'm not saying this to cast doubt on the value of this project, but to ask for a broader picture. The idea of racing to fill a portion of a board is definitely a real ludeme – it's a repeatable and replicating unit of "tabletop gaming" – so of course it's interesting to record it's occurrence in space and time and map its relation to other ludemes. So the (real, and more nuanced) question is: When Ludii eventually is going to reconstruct old games based on partial descriptions, how will it know if it has found a plausible reconstruction of a silly game that only works because it is played by drunk and blind-folded players, or an implausible reconstruction of a highly regarded game played in serious competition? It seems that kind of context is important in order to get the reconstruction "right".
RE: The problem of "bad" games - Walter.Crist - 12-10-2021
Hi Michael,
Yes, this is something we have encountered in several games, and unfortunately is something that is unavoidable. We are bound by what was written by the people who observed or recorded these games, and very often these kinds of details are not reported. What we have in the database is what is is in the accounts, and for many of the games we have recorded the data about who played it (age, gender, social class, etc, and even the kinds of spaces it was played). The fact that it is not always available presents many challenges, but it is still useful. We can only deal with the data that are available.
Of course, AI does not play like humans. Games are a social act; much of the way that people play is bound by the sociability of their actions rather than the actual rules of the game. That is to say, an AI can play to avoid losing at the expense of ever making a valid attempt at winning—always using legal moves for thousands of moves—, whereas a human would be expected to play to win, or at least to progress toward an end of the game without playing indefinitely with no progress. The AI would stall for all eternity to not lose. While the AI values winning, most human play values the social aspect of play, and there are social pressures against stalling or playing in an antisocial way. Social rules are of course culturally contingent, and are indeed situational, and may vary between games. The question of etiquette is difficult to model with AI, and this is very very rarely, if ever, recorded by ethnographers, who would need to spend a lot of time studying game players in particular, whereas usually the games are just a side note to the work they are doing. Such is the nature of games research. So, rather than "drunk and blind-folded players," what we are dealing here is the more intangible style of play that may not be reported as rules, that kind that we expect in the modern world where games are designed to produce a clear winner. Even chess imposed kinds of etiquette as rules (turn limits without capture, etc) by organizations to produce winners in tournaments, where the social aspect of play is devalued and winning is the only objective. These were not part of the traditional game, and even today are not always observed or even known by casual players, because winning isn't the only objective of play.
We have methods of manipulating the AI agents when we do our playout experiments to compel them to play in ways that value certain kinds of actions, such as changing the thinking time, changing the search depth, adding heuristics, etc. Our analyses will contain hundreds of playouts per game, so we will be able to see if such possibilities are indeed something that are common in games—i.e., if these rules always lead to a kind of broken-looking game. We can then see if there are many games that have a bare set of strict rules which rely on etiquette for completion. We can consider this when making reconstructions, by comparing the games we are reconstructing, and their known ludemes, to those that are more complete. We expect similar games to play similarly, and expect that they will play as well as other games which are from nearby cultures (both chronologically and geographically)—although, maybe we will find that games within a certain culture vary widely in the ways they are played. These are all things we can investigate. If relevant games often have this kind of situation where they seem to be more driven by etiquette than hard rules, we can take this into consideration for what kind of metrics we expect a game to generate. We also take into consideration the social aspects of the games, where available, based on the kinds of games also played by those demographic groups/in those spaces.
We will never know if any of our reconstructions are correct. We can only deal with the data given to us. And indeed, individual games are played with many variations in different places, sometimes even down to the household, so there is no way to be able to say that a reconstruction is the only possible one. We can only say that a reconstruction fits the profile of what we know about a particular game, those similar to it, those we know from that region or time, or by people belonging to similar social groups. Furthermore, the reconstructions are not an end point; they are the beginning of a conversation about what to expect from games from various cultures and how to reconstruct them, and what methods to use. So much is unknown about games, and there are many assumptions out there about how games are played, what makes a good game, etc, and we aim to measure and challenge some of these assumptions in our work.
RE: The problem of "bad" games - Michael - 12-15-2021
Thank you for the thorough response! That's very enlightening.
RE: The problem of "bad" games - RogerCooper - 01-24-2022
The quality of play in traditional games may well be low. There are many traditional games in the "draughts" family that lacked compulsory capture. It is hard to see how a game could be won against a sober opponent. And yet people payed them.
It would probably worthwhile to include compulsory capture as an option in such games, even if not historically recorded.
RE: The problem of "bad" games - Walter.Crist - 01-24-2022
(01-24-2022, 02:53 AM)RogerCooper Wrote: The quality of play in traditional games may well be low. There are many traditional games in the "draughts" family that lacked compulsory capture. It is hard to see how a game could be won against a sober opponent. And yet people payed them.
It would probably worthwhile to include compulsory capture as an option in such games, even if not historically recorded.
Of course, any measure that we have about the "quality" of play is based on our own expectations of what a game should play like. These are very culturally bound, and are also tied up to things like the experience of time—which is much different in other societies that have different expectations of how long things should take! In fact, the point of the game can be to pass time, people have filmed mancala players in certain places get up and leave a game in the middle, and someone else takes over their spot; playing to the end and crowning the winner isn't the important part, it's the experience of the game.
Regardless of this, culturally specific rules of etiquette and social pressure apply in gameplay. Post-Industrial Euroamerican attitudes toward play say that there should be a winner, and all scenarios in the rules should be accounted for, otherwise players will take advantage of loopholes that will allow them, for example, to avoid defeat forever. This speeds up games and forces them to come to a conclusion, making them fit a certain paradigm of how games should be played. That's one way to avoid antisocial play behavior, but other groups have taken other informal strategies to counter this, and in some cases that is merely the social pressure to play in a certain way to bring the game to a conclusion—because the way you play reveals something to your opponents about who you are, and you still have to interact with them outside the game!
The purpose of our project is to document what is known about the games, and analyze them for various metrics to see if something might be reasonably missing. We can evaluate the length of games in a particular region or time, to see if, for example, a draughts game for that place plays much longer than other games for that region, and we could reasonably make an argument that there was something in place to speed it up. On the other hand, maybe we would expect a place to have games that are played in a range of times: some fast, some long. This is all research we can do and identify likely strategies based on other games that are nearby. The idea of adding compulsory capture to a draughts game involves a series of decisions: do we apply the huff rule? Is the maximum capture compulsory? Does capturing a king count more than capturing a regular piece? Each of these choices takes us further away from what the original source tells us about the game. Our primary goal, ultimately, is not to make traditional games more palatable to modern expectations of what a game should be, it is to preserve the knowledge of the games of the past and to offer reasonably playable versions based on the expectations we should have for gameplay in that time and place.
Users are free to add their own versions of these games that they like better!
RE: The problem of "bad" games - rainrat - 04-17-2023
After looking at the translated description of Bajr, I believe the answer
is, the pieces can't move backwards (they only have the 3 moves that
advance toward the goal). Running the description
https://ludii.games/data.php?gameId=879 through Google translate:
"The pawns move one step at a time on the neighboring squares,
diagonally, vertically or horizontally **but not backwards**."
So each stone has at most 3 possible moves, and even if a player tries
to have one stone camp out in their home, eventually the other stones
will hit the goal corner and be unable to move further, and the player
will have to free up a spot in their home.
----
I then looked at Tuktuk. The implementation allowed the pawns to move
one space back, forward, or sideways. It also seemed like it could
only be a draw, but again looking at the translation:
"Each pawn can move **forward or backward at will, and as many squares
as it pleases**, but cannot jump over the partner's pawn."
I tried the revised rules in Fairy Stockfish, and the game made a lot
more sense.
RE: The problem of "bad" games - Walter.Crist - 04-18-2023
Good catch! We've fixed the rules on the website, and they'll be implemented shortly.