Tag Archives: real-life mechanics

The House Selling Game

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Real life is full of games such as contract bidding, gift exchanging, and national voting — a topic that I’ve previously touched upon in a few different posts about “real-life mechanics”. These real-life games are no less competitive than the board games that we play around tables, and in fact might be much more important. As I wrote in my “Burning Freeways” article on blind bidding, the winning bidder earned $800,000 more than Cal Trans expected and could have made as much as $3.5 million over costs.

In that article I also briefly touched upon how the blind bidding of house sales can be affected by just the teeniest bit of external information from a realtor. At the time I hadn’t sold a house. Now I have, and I’ve learned a lot more about the various parts of house-selling, and as usual they offer up new possibilities for the designs of These Games of Ours. Continue reading →

Gift Giving Mechanics in Games

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1257675768969338833secretlondon_red_present.svg.medLast week I offered up a gift guide for Christmas giving. This week I’m going to continue the seasonal theme by looking at gift-giving as a game mechanic.

Sure, it’s hard to fashion pure gift-giving into a mechanic, because in that pure form it’s theoretically altruistic — offered with no expectation of recompense. But, that isn’t how gift-giving really works, especially not when it gets wound up into societal holidays like Christmas, where gift-giving becomes an expectation.

When you add expectations and recompense in to the idea of gift-giving, then you have something more like a game mechanic. I’m thus going to look at the few games I know of that have used these various elements … Continue reading →

The US Elections as Bad Game Design

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Though this blog often looks at game design through the lens of published games, that’s not the only possible source of great game design ideas. A few years ago I wrote an article about burning freeways here in the East Bay — and the auction that followed — because I thought that it too had some neat ideas that could be applied to gaming.

And that brings me to the current day.

This Tuesday is, of course, the day that the United States will be electing its president. I encourage you to get out and vote as it is (once more) likely to be one of the most important elections of our generation.

However, I also find the presidential election to be an interesting example of game design. Looking at it from the euro point of view, the presidential election is essentially a big majority-control game. There are 51(!!) regions, each of which has a different value. The winner is the player who gains control of the most valuable collection of regions.

More than that, the presidential election is, in my opinion, an example of very bad game design. The game design is so horribly flawed at so many different levels that it’s somewhat surprising that we’ve only had two Constitutional Crises in my lifetime (when the unelected President Ford took office and when the 2000 election ended in an effective tie).

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Burning Freeways and Blind Bids! (Or: Real Life Auctions)

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A week and a half ago a major interchange in the California Bay Area literally melted in a hellish inferno. Following a single-vehicle tanker truck crash, over eight thousand gallons of gasoline lit on fire, resulting in temperatures in excess of 2750° bathing the freeway. The metal frames holding the I-580 overpass together began to warp, and then one segment of the overpass came down in a thundering crash.

As part of the infamous MacArthur Maze (which I pass through every week on a BART train on my way to EndGame and back), the I-580 overpass was a central part of the road system which moved traffic between the East Bay and San Francisco, and suddenly it was gone. Dire predictions were made on the effects on traffic. Thus far, it’s apparently been bad, but not terrible thanks to Bay Area companies’ willingness to allow employees to telecommute and our decent public transit system.

Nonetheless, the I-580 overpass needs to rebuild and quickly. How can you find the company that could do it the quickest and cheapest? The answer was … an auction.

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