The Fundamentals
[Warning: Rant Forthcoming] The extra credit assignment I posted last week was a mysteriously unqualified failure. Not a single student submitted a ruleset. When discussing this with Brenda, we were both scratching our heads to try and understand why no one bothered even to submit a half-assed idea. All I asked for was two typed pages of rules; I can punch out a ruleset that long in fifteen minutes. It was hardly a taxing assignment, nor was it ill-publicized. So why the total apathy?
One theory Brenda hazarded was that students were unfamiliar with the rules of Chess. This concept astonished me. Number one: if anyone doesn’t know the basic rules of Chess (and there are… let me see… twelve. Twelve rules total.) five minutes on Wikipedia would solve your problem. And Number two: what aspiring game designer worth his or her salt doesn’t know how to play Chess?
There are a handful of board and card games termed ‘classic,’ meaning they’ve been around in an established, immutable form for at least a century. These games are not merely games, and they’re not important simply because they are old. They are important because they are forces of history. Chess, Go, Shogi… these are world-changing games. Go has been played in China and Japan in its present-day manifestation for millennia. Emporers and warlords studied it. Treaties have been signed or broken over games of Go. In 1972, American Chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer defeated Russian-French grandmaster Boris Spassky in chess match dubbed “The Match of the Century.” The duel with and subsequent defeat of the Soviet titan was important enough to alter the course of the Cold War. A chess match changed the course of history! When’s the last time you heard of a video game altering world events? Even Pong, progenitor of the video game itself, was nothing but an American fad. It was the computer it ran on that became powerful, not the game.
These games are canon. They are The Fundamentals, the ancient legacy of games as tangible forces of human interaction. No one calling themselves a game designer, aspiring game designer, or game design student can rightly do so without knowing these games. Knowing of them is not the same thing. Games are their rules; they are knowable only through play. “Know your roots” does not mean know the NES. These are your roots. These are the pillars of game design, the ancestral foundation upon which all our modern efforts at game design are built.
Amen.
I would be as surprised as you are that the class didn’t seem to know the rules of chess. But any time someone of a certain age complains that a younger generation is unfamiliar with some expected body of knowledge, this should be a clue that they need to become more familiar with that younger generation.
So, now I’m curious - what was the actual reason why the class didn’t do the assignment? Keep us posted!
It’s not that they don’t know the rules, or don’t think chess is important to game design. It might be possible - I’m not sure, I’m not even a little bit familiar with your students - that they felt reluctant to make a probably-poor game derived from chess. Perhaps they felt that the requirement that it needed to be different from chess was too broad - making something completely original and polishing it in your spare time, in just a week, especially at this time of year when there are finals about, well, that’s a fairly daunting task for something optional. Then again, maybe that relative lack of structure is appropriate for an extra credit assignment.
For the record, I (just a humble reader) was planning to submit something, but, alas, life got in the way. I had something going, but it wasn’t cohering - how much like chess is too much? If I decide to make a whole different fundamental mechanic, rather than just describing newer, more complicated means of sliding them around on the board, how am I to decide it’s fair? Eventually these questions stopped looking more interesting than the other things I was working on.
They’re hardly a younger generation. On average, those students are only three years younger than I am
Re: Mark
I hope and assume that was the case. Brenda’s suggestion that is was possible they would not know chess is what threw me. For all I know, they are all well familiar with the game.
I’m not sure what challenges they perceived in the project — I was hoping to inspire modest innovation by forcing them into mechanical constraints: the pieces and board. For you design, I’d say you can be as inventive as you like! I hope you do find time to finish it, though. I’d be excited to see even one submission.