Imagine a world that does not exist. An utopia. No a board game. Let's gamify life and make you able to build either a dystopia or an utopia.
People work to prove things like they are the best and get a reward according to rules, and the competition is fair through market/rules, hence the best issues happens to the society.
Market can be regulated (socialism) or regulated (liberalism). (no typo here, a market requires perfect symmetry of information for the buyers whatever the market, hence a regulation either by normalization (liberalism: IEEE, IETF, ISO, CE) or by institutions (socialism: FDA, SEC, FCC)) and often both. Social liberalism is the norm almost everywhere nowadays. So we have a kind of regulation based model, hence we can gamify it.
A real market works better if people learn to learn from feedbacks. Which at my experience happens after you fail your first business. Natural first time winner in business get blinded easily. Failing is very important to learn. Like heroin amazing first shot seems to be the curse of every former heroin addict : the kiss of death. The problem with life, is you have only one. So a game could be cool if it taught you about the effect of your actions without having to actually do it. Just like a flight simulator but for life.
Failing costs money. You need to invest either in education, or culture, or experimentation, resources, or luck to be even authorized to fail. You need money to live, and there is no unlimited credits. (kof kof, except if you borrow money that doesn't exist from the future and enslave your kids to pay your debts, (kof, kof))
If we were to model what makes a successful business man, we would have to randomly pickup a factor for the remuneration of success apart from the intrinsic quality to ship an ideal product which is fucking luck. Something randomly picked but deterministic. The inner talent. The random capacity at being good at something. And also a random context that deterministicly biases the expression of the talent. The conjunction of talent and opportunity modeled by 2 main equally random variables that are not coupled initially.
You see, here in Montréal in café concert, the music is awesome from garage band. In France shitty music makes it to the top. I mean, they work there instruments. They are more often in bars to play music than to brag about playing music.
Why aren't "better" musicians not making it to the top? Because they don't have access to the market the same way... I would say randomly. Why are the french musician so shitty? Maybe because they lack of competition based on objective skills but on random property (being born there).
How would you explain that market can reach local dysfunctional optimum with objective measure of better.
You thus have to make a model based on partly predictable success based on skills and a random part based on all the dimensions we cannot control. Basically success in business is determined by action influencing the outcome of a random dice. Just like a stupid dice roll at D&D. Basically I claim real life can be modeled as a MMORPG based on random characteristics.
So let's try to play this game with dices and a board.
Every player on the market would be given sets of random properties : age, culture, sex, geography, family history, INT, STR.... and a proficiency skill (a generator of production) that would express the intrinsic objective genius of the person. And its contextual luck bias. Talent could be expressed as the speed at which it can generate capital per "fixed turn". Like a gifted musician can produce a good song ten times faster than another one, and in dysfunctional culture (so it has to be updated according to the context) one hundred times faster. And a good musician may be a good sound engineer, and probably better than a randomly deaf person.
The context is the place, the time, the age of the players, and the biases. It changes all the values of genius deterministicly by influencing your probability of sucess per dice trhows. But intrinsic genius growth would tend to be kind of chaotic according to the initial conditions. It is your capacity to generate HP.
Then, there would have to be Hit Points or ... Capital. At 0, you don't play anymore and you are condemned to watch the game until the end, helplessly unless the other players decide otherwise, by transferring HP. Every transfers has at least a fixed cost.
The game would begin by choosing an hidden card taken randomly called "life goals" taken from a pile randomly specifically tailored dream according to your context. The most common being I want to live a life that favours me. It is called competition. Others would be, I wake up being mere theresa ... Cooperation. And Others would be I just want to play because I am there, and it could be fun. Or I don't care about the game, just leave me alone, games are BORING. In fact it would be not a card. But the reality.
You could with enough point in the game actually buy the card to leave the board game you had been forced into.
The problem in this game, is that people cannot chose and they are forced into it because of the 0 limit also called poverty. They can be sided. And it is not a game, it is a social experiment on the submission to the authority of the rule. Like Milgram and the SF prison experiments, but on our submission to our own culture.
Actually nothing prevents the hostage of flipping the board and say fuck you. Nothing prevents the over player to stop the pain of the game and go take a pizza.
But, if I was to make this game I would make it painfully realtime slow. Like you need 7min to cover any year after the starting point. And it requires hours before you can roll the dices triggered by decisions taken years before.
I would also enable people favoured by luck to be able to rig the game to make it funnier. You could even invest in tweaking luck in your favour.
Like education could grow your revealed genius (which expresses the efficiency of your genius according to a context). You could buy extra turns like going in schools with influential future business man to higher the probability of rolling dices in the section finding an investor. You would level up faster by buying DLC bonus.
You see, this kind of late game advantage based on amplification of small increase of stats is exactly like leagues of legend. Ask any players, it is part of the game to choose wisely and to use this to reinforce your natural skills. And cumulative effects are awesome. Even if there are based on random events (like you being better at farming then your opponent, or your kill ratio).
You could also influence on global variables on the side of the board that would be random stuff. Like sex discrimination, fashion, the positive or negative impact of culture on the access to market according to your context. Like a clever LoL player.
Now, imagine you have a second sets of guinea pig spawning randomly in the middle of the party to relieve the players. We will call them kids.
They can share with less friction in HP. They cab transfer HP with members of their family. By either solidarity or theft. People could decide to throw dice for either transfering or stealing money.
Family is anything the random game would find the most probable according to your context. Even a carpenter could be the father of a son that is not his. Still actions are always taken by random dices on predetermined success table varying with your initial random throw. But now you can influence it within game negotiations.
But, the wealthiest characters at some point of the game have more probability to change the game thanks to the accumulation of advantage according to time.
So you see, I have played enough monopoly and diplomacy game to know what this game would do without even DLC.
It would make every one throw at each others throats very fast.
Okay what are the irritating effects in this gameplay?
There obviously a social pressure for playing games. And some people sure have a lot of fun.
But with less capital in game initially, you know you will play less in real life. IT IS BORING.
The reason to be bored? Random luck at initial dice throw to chose your characteristics determine your ability to play. And the newest players are guaranteed to have less luck than the first generation. People enter the games with substantially less luck to eventually play the games but are forced to stay at a table event as painfully boring as a family dinner where everybody else have fun but you without having the right to open your mouth.
And at the beginning of the game it is fun. You can make a self taught kids from a shanty town wins the game against a king. The fun in games is about going against the destiny. It is funnier to win when you came in unfavorable position. And that what are all entrepreneurship story telling about. Winning against the odd. Proving by good choices you can influence the outcome in your favour. It is a positive self boosting ego game of competition. And competition is sure fun.
But, this game will cumulatively force more bored players to be inactive at the side of the tables while the rules get increasingly in their clear disadvantage. The more the game will evolve, the less the capacity of incoming late players will be driven by nothing else than luck, thanks to the mechanism of frictionless propagation of the HP between families.
One of the winning strategy is of course when you are still playing and in capacity of influencing luck (genius with poor initial characteritic or the opposite) to make gaming alliance based on extending the notions of family and trading your genius for luck, or luck for having a genius.
Hence creating factions based on common characteristics : gender, age, nation of birth, of location, religion, random background point... And you create a coupling with luck and genius. Late player game will have their initial luck being overly amplified and your genius factor will be useless. The only thing that will matter will be the diplomacy game you are forced out because of lack of HP.
And at one point, like in diplomacy you do know that to make the new family emerge, you have to prepare privacy and the possibility to make alliances that might include theft of your own "initial" family to inherit characteristic from a new blended family. Yeah, betrayal is being more and more incentived and exacerbated over time. They are game incentives to betray more in frequency and amplitude over time.
You could imagine a whole generation of post war conflicting families (the liberal and socialist) deciding to base the payment of retirement at the detriment of their own kids. And then their kids by weired propagation of consequences having to betray them later (in a its you or its me fashion).
You could imagine a lot things. Those who played diplomacy knows how this kind of games destroys friendship ans solidarity in real life.
So the more the games will evolve, the less fun there will be for a vast majority. But for the one still in competition the game would become more intense and fun. And betrayal will become more common. And some people will grind their teeth preparing to betray in order to play a little. Higher betrayal for smaller gains.
There will be players forced to stay hours without even given the opportunity to play a turn. Just because of a random initial choice. And attentive observers will notice that the game will be changing the players rationality in real life.
So you see, sometimes, the problem is not about the players, nor about the game itself.
It is about getting lost in the game and not thinking about the effect not on the personae incarnated but on the human forced to play this game.
The more this competitive game evolve, the funnier it is and more intense... for less and less players.
I think time is the accident of the accident. And that some people have less time in their life because they are prevented to play the game of life. Because they are at the side of the table seeing people having fun and being prevented to run at the outside whatever kind of other games they may wish to play. It is not the game that is bad. It is forcing in pretending to love this game. Life is the result of our meaningful actions. By not letting people play the game of life, people are denied life. Randomly.
And I think an actual games based on our actual world would prove any hardcore players that it is not gaming that sux, it is the rules we make and how we are loosing the fun of a tad of competition.
It is not how we play nicely a shitty game that can bend this game, it is is in thinking we are forced to play this game in the first place. The game can be either influenced from the inside and it can be fun, but also, you should also be given the right to not play a game. And we should remember we get modified either positively (3D orientation) or negatively (???) by games. They can effect us.
However we could avoid the systematical cumulative boringness of the game by removing the amplification of randomness over time. Pure lottery is not a fun game to play when you have no tickets a glass of water and are forced to see people having super prices, wines and meal while you are forced to stay hearing boring discussions about how the game is fun by tweaking on small diminishing part of talent.
Basically, private property and inheritance should be capped at an acceptable level of randomness. Because a too deterministic game would be boring too.
I think we could teach a lot by making a board game for all kids in the world that would help them understand a good model of their life to come. GURPS and the creator of diplomacy are my two objective choices with Gary Gigax for this task. Just to be sure to have unicorns and troll eventually and some dragons.
Not only to depress them a tad, but also to give them hope in understanding how that they can rig the rules to increase the maximum fun for every players in and out of the games. I think that teaching kids a game that result in improving the game, teaching them how randomness and potential can influence future could be a good idea. Teaching them about the boredom of arbitrary world based on purely deterministic rules does not make funny games nor the equally boring world of pure randomness. There has to be a balance in the rules. But a constant for all kids' heart : it is funnier sharing the fun. It is a kind of a way modeling in physics, we just imagine something and validate it could work by reproducing in experiments and checking with the real world. Game should help in testing life's choice.
I say to everyone that people should accept the intrinsic unfairness of the randomness of the world as a given. We should value it. We should just maybe think of controlling it a way that makes it funnier for every players. We should accept for the sake of fun a part of symbolic limited randomness in socially randomly fixed competition where everyone could shine based on their random "talents". Like a nice free kermess for kids or a mario party where you could always choose not to play.
We could make a better society if we remembered the fun we had playing games as kids, and what it means having fun together.
Without regard for genius or randomness. A game where even the unluckiest would have fun.
But nowadays, the game board is increasingly boring for most of the players except a few one chosen by luck reducing the numbers of players more every turn.
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