Everything is Secretly Rock Paper Scissors
Games are a bigger part of our lives than most people would care to admit. Playing Monopoly at the family dinner, idly swiping through Candy Crush on the bus, using Beer Pong as an excuse to get drunker than you told yourself you'd be... When you're little, you play hide and seek or tic-tac-toe. You grow older, and you start playing cards, chess, and some board games. We resolve disputes with rock paper scissors. We handle economic decisions with a concept called Game Theory. Games are inescapable, and an inseparable part of the human experience.
So it was shocking to discover how many of them are just "rock paper scissors" hidden under 20 layers of complexity.
I have been interested in game design since I was a little kid; I loved playing video games, so I wanted to know what went into making one of my favorite pastimes. Since then I've tried to play as many games as I could to open myself up to new experiences, watched Game Developers Conference talks whenever I had some time to kill, and now that my uni year's been delayed indefinitely - started reading some books about game design.
The one I am currently reading through is Characteristics of Games, written by George Skaff Elias, K. Robert Gutschera, and Richard Garfield. The book is less about telling you how to design a game and more about analyzing elements of gameplay present in games, like player count, the effect of luck on skill and vice-versa, and other things that many of us are passively aware of without never really sitting down to think about them. It's fairly shallow, in the sense that it doesn't really deeply explore any individual mechanic, but it's surprising how complex these little elements you never really stop to think about really are.
For example, the book asks what even is a "game", definition-wise? The smartasses in the crowd probably just rushed to google, and are about to come back saying "it's obvious! A game is a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck." This is a correct definition, but it's also a wholly pointless answer - you just moved the issue from defining what a "game" is, to defining what "play" is.
Really, think about it: how can you define a "game" in a way that both includes all things commonly accepted as games, yet doesn't include all things commonly not accepted as games? It can't necessarily require skill or intricate levels of player involvement, because we consider the slots a form of game, and yet all you do is pull down a level and watch the pretty colors. It can't be an element of luck, because chess is one of the most well known games and it's pure logic. It can't require multiple players because of Solitaire, and it can't require a win condition because of Temple Run or Subway Surfers. It can't even require "having different solutions or end points", because tic-tac-toe is considered a game, and everyone who's played it when older than 13 knows that tic-tac-toe must always end in a tie.
Another observation that surprised me is how many games have a core gameplay loop that is just a different, simpler game, hidden underneath a mountain of extra rules. This issue is more present in what they call "constructed games"1, but it's still interesting to think about:
Most games with multiple players in open competition, such as Monopoly or 3+ player Super Smash Bros, end up devolving into a basic game called "The Chip-Taking Game": All players start with X chips. Each turn, clockwise, each player gets to remove one chip from a different player, and the last one who remains with any chips wins. This isn't a particularly fun game, and yet you've probably played it already: when you're playing a game and suddenly someone has a significant lead, many will stop what they were doing and exclaim "they're in the lead! GET 'EM!" which is... the chip taking game. We've stopped caring about game mechanics and interplay, and are just looking to remove the chips from the person who has the most chips. Unless active action is taken to prevent this, every game with more than two factions competing to win will devolve into the chip-taking game.
Or, as the title stated - Rock Paper Scissors. Rock Paper Scissors is a very convenient way to keep your game from ever reaching an "ultimate strategy", since no strategy is necessarily stronger than the other. As such, many games will incorporate some variant of it (explicitly or implicitly) to avoid a situation where one strategy is dominant. Pokemon's types are an explicit version of rock paper scissors, despite having more than 3 choices, because you still are just checking "who is weak to who". In fighting games there's an intricate dance of blocking, attacking, and grabbing, which, implicitly, is still just rock paper scissors (you block the attack, you grab a block, you punch someone trying to grab).
Or thirdly - sometimes the game is just a puzzle that we haven't solved yet. Tic-tac-toe is the game everyone solves on their own, but chess is still fundamentally solvable. We just don't know what the solution is yet, and playing chess is really just competing to see who has the better solution. You can see elements of this fact in competitive chess with concepts like "mate in X moves" or the various memorized openings. Mate in X is "I can force a checkmate in X moves," and how big X is entirely depends on how well you can see into the future. Possibly, in the future, X will be the entire length of the game, and we'll know if the game ends in a draw every time or if one of the players has an inherent advantage. Often, in order to avoid turning into a puzzle, games will incorporate elements either of random luck (forcing you to rethink how you play), or a Rock Paper Scissors dynamic.
All in all, this book is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it even if you're not as into game development as I am. Seeing all of these things I generally knew to be true be given names, explanations, and a more thorough view into how they affect a game, was really something else. And if you're not into game development, I still recommend you look into the basics of your craft, regardless of how skilled you are. Often you forget to work on your fundamentals.
Games developed in the modern era by a specific group of creators, as opposed to games like Chess or Poker which were passed down from person to person, growing and changing with the passage of time.↩