01-24-2022, 09:43 AM
(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!