The ideas here computationally written to a game board are not new?

Any version of Snakes and Ladders can be represented exactly as a Markov chain, since from any square the odds of moving to any other square are fixed and independent of any previous game history.

In the book Winning Ways the authors show how to treat Snakes and Ladders as a (loopy) impartial game in combinatorial game theory even though it is very far from a natural fit to this category. To this end they make a few “minor” rule changes such as allowing any player to move any counter any number of spaces, and declaring the winner to be the one who gets the last counter home. It is hard to deny that this version, which they call Adders-and-Ladders, involves more skill than does the original game.

But, yes, why not video games as a storytelling medium? I *have* played a fair number of videogames. There are a few videogames with fairly compelling stories. For instance, Knights of the Old Republic was a better prequel to Star Wars than any of the episodes I-III. Now, granted, it took you some 30-40 hours of play to get through the story, which took (me, at least) months to go from beginning to end. But if you took out a lot of that pesky “gameplay,” the story would have been a movie or two (depending on how many of the individual characters’ stories you wanted to really explore). Was the story something that wouldn’t have worked nearly as well in a movie as it did in a videogame where you’re pulled into the roll of the main character? I dunno. I can see an argument both ways, but I’m a physicist, not a video game academic.

Many video games have very perfunctory stories, needed to get you from one fun action sequence to the next. Nothing deep there, really, so far as literature is concerned. Of course, there’s no story to Tetris, but it’s one of those videogams that has been fun for decades, and has outlasted the best-loved megaproductions of any era. So clearly story isn’t all.

Some games give you the option of playing as different forms of player … like playing France, Germay, Britian or something in a war game … where you might get different types of troops and equipment.

Which, when you consider massive online play, inevitable leads to issues of how to make the game ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’. So many companies then go through this iterative process of analysing the behavior in the game community and ‘balancing’ the game. This process is not as simple nor as permanent as it would seem as the relative strengths change as the online community develops new strategies.

There are also often extensive tutorials and online communities of people who accumulate knowledge and collect recordings of games for analysis and improvement of strategies. People even collect statistics on the behavior of the game world and create data sets to support the development of strategies by their colleagues.

There is a lot of intelligence both on the player side and the designer side of the equation.

There is a level professionalism and dedication that approaches chess players.

I don’t dare look at the link. I might get sucked in!

-cvj

Lol, it might interest you to know that video games have advanced quite a lot since then…
This is a nice example :

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=14828&type=mov&pl=game

-cvj

-cvj

I guess I could rephrase: it requires a lot of intelligence to make a video game and its a legitimate contributor to the US economy and the pleasures of childhood; and even has real applications in the real world.