Richard

I do remember the first time I played a MUD (probably 1993) and thinking that it was a live Turing test.

Also, it might be worth thinking about those games in which the aim is to determine whether your fellow player is indeed a fellow player or not. I’m specifically thinking of the “game” played in the Turing Test here.

Richard

Excellent paper. Very thought provoking and useful criticism of current research. Coincidentally I had just been introduced to the term zero-player games just a day prior to finding out about this article while I was looking up some details on Progress Quest. I mention this because Progress Quest was mentioned once in the paper. I felt it should have been mentioned earlier and almost appears to have been mentioned by mistake even though it is a great example and would have worked well. Even though the game is mentioned it is not cited under the Games section at the end of the paper.

Thanks for your excellent work as usual.

– Devin

@Ava That’s an interesting example of a hypothetical game. Also reminds me of http://longnow.org/

@Richard Ah, the problem of “the great unplayed”. I guess it is also common for game designers not to finish games for the simple reason that you think you have “grokked” it (I think this is Raph Koster’s point somewhere).

I hadn’t thought about the question of countries playing – it’s a bit like an anthill or some such. But then you can think of, say, France as having intentionality. I think we often do.

Surfit sounds a lot like Codewars, so it is probably a kind of precursor.

From a designer’s point of view, pretty well all games are zero-player. Most designers I know have stacks of games they’ve bought, read the rules/manuals of, but never played. They’ve never played them because they can see the space into which individual instances will cystalise, so they’ve no need actually to “run” the game as a system to find which particular path it follows this particular time. It’s like seeing a die and feeling you have to roll it to see what it comes up with – you can see what it can come up with, so what does rolling it tell you that you didn’t already known?

Your reference to human players as opposed to AI players is fair enough, but it might be worth mentioning that there are other non-AI but non-human players too. Bears play games. Countries play games. Corporations play games. The intentionality is there, but it may not come with self-awareness and it may also be emergent from the interactions of people who don’t necessarily see what they’re doing as a game.

By the way, the old but celebrated book “Computer Lib” contains a description of a game called “Surfit” (“Survival of the Fittest”) that was played by coders in the 1960s. Two players wrote code that lived in the same segment of memory. They had access to the whole of this memory, so could overwrite each other’s (and their own!) code and data. The programs were loaded, then run. The program that “owned” the most memory after a certain number (many thousands) of iterations won. This would seem to be an early version of a set-up game that you hadn’t come across, so I thought I’d mention it.

Anyway, just to say I like what you did here (and not only because my own definition of what a game is stacks up pretty well against it!).

Richard

http://labyrinth.nstweb.net/ASLAP/

It asks the question when a game has become so slow as to be whisked away from human frame of reference and meaningful interaction.

Interesting. Not sure I agree with your hypothesis about “zero-player” games tho. Seems to me I might equally think of AI players as a form of mediated human player – after all, someone has to code the AI, which means thoroughly exploring the decision tree of the game (or a logical representation of it) in advance, and turning it into a “solved game” of a sort , although perhaps on a fairly abstract level. Likewise with Conway: this can be thought of as another sort of mediated human play. Your conclusion hints at this it seems to me, but is also contradicted by the title of “zero-player games”. To go deeper into this one would have to have a full personal and historical context for something like the Game of Life, rather than just taking it in the abstract as is usual. In this the piece seems to sidestep some of the ontological bases of Huizinga; eg. what is being “inside” vs. “outside” the game system, in the sense alluded to above? If the boundaries of the “magic circle” are drawn in consciousness, how can one then exclude consciousness in one’s analysis of what is “internal” or “external” to the game system?