Hardcasual

On the weekends, HardCasual hands over their keys to friends. We encourage them to share their rants, raves, or groans about whatever they feel fit–the podium’s theirs. We only ask they stay on topic, don’t incite revolution, and vacuum the living room.

This week marks the swift return of local NYC playwright and musician, Chris Littler. He loves Nintendo products, but like my relationship with SEGA, he can’t help but crack them open and figure out what’s going on inside. This is Chris Littler on “Mario Party and the Trouble with Chance.” 

——————————————

Critical (It’s Critical!)

I don’t like Mario Party. This is something that I can only admit in print. To be fair, I’ve only played games 1 through 5, but I think it’s unlikely that the latter three would have swayed me. It is the only game I can think of where I have actually thrown my controller in anger, and definitely the only game I’ve ever let see me cry (post Everquest)

These games genuinely drive me crazy. Not Hulk crazy, but I certainly get angrier than a man should get at anything that involves magical mushrooms. Thankfully, those who I play the game with are gracious enough to listen while I explain how the very concept of a “Mario Party” is broken. Then I eat their food and leave.

Yeah. I’m that guy.

It wasn’t until recently that I came to understand the real problem. In fact, it isn’t so much the game’s problem as it is my own.

I simply have a profound lack of patience for what I consider ‘games of chance.’

Each time I played, I asked myself if what I was feeling was any different than the disappointment a gambler feels when the dice don’t roll his way. Or when a tourist is conned at a shell-game. I decided that they were all one and the same, except that what I was feeling was far less painful.

The feeling is helplessness. I felt that the outcome of the game was completely out of my hands, that I was more observer than active participant.

Then I asked myself, “If I had the chance to play this game again, would I change the way I played?” Probably not. And could I have won? It’s possible.

So what the hell was so fun about a game that could basically play itself?

Risk, Dungeons Masters, and that one McDonald’s Monopoly piece you can never find–all after the jump…

It’s worth noting that – at least among the people I know – very few people play Mario Party on a regular basis. It’s a ‘party’ game. It’s meant for parties. You can pop it in the console and avoid having actual human interaction at a get-together. It’s brilliant. And it’s probably why it remains such a successful series. It fills that niche.

But that doesn’t explain why this game drives me up a wall, while crappier games leave relatively fulfilled.

So I asked myself this question: Are all board games – after all, that’s what Mario Party is, right? - simply ‘games of chance’?

It’s a difficult question. A good game – a game worth playing – is the balancing act of chance versus strategy. The variable versus the constant. Situation versus the mind.

A game like Monopoly seems frustrating to me because there is a hell of a lot more chance involved than there is strategy. The participants are practically enslaved to the dice for the first few rounds and then forced to work within the confines of their piss-poor land empires. A strategy can be used, but waiting until your friends are apathetic enough to hand over their land for dirt cheap isn’t anywhere in the rulebook. In other words, you’re stuck.

A game like RISK is called a ‘strategy game’ because it seemingly has few variables in play. But there’s a lot: random countries at the start, random risk cards, and random army deaths. So Risk is definitely a far cry from chess, a game that leaves very little up to chance, and what I would call the ultimate “strategy game”. Man, that game is intense.

But to answer the question of board games, I had to boil the games down to their general key parts: a board, a couple playable pieces, and the world’s first random number generator, dice.

Any game that hinges on the outcome of dice rolls is inherently a game of chance. To me, this is inarguable. There is no strategy to rolling dice, so don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’re actually playing any part in the outcome. You’re merely a spectator at this point. It’s up to “God” or “physics”, whatever fictional creation you like.

With dice, “Chance” is what’s really playing for you. And to some people, that’s just fine. They don’t care. They like to spectate. I can appreciate that - now that I understand it. But what I wanted to know is where my brain draws the line. And how does that line jive with the games I enjoy? Really: how much do I want my games to be Chess and how much do I want them to be Monopoly?

I prefer Monopoly. Surprisingly. But it took Dungeons and Dragons for me to figure that out.

It is usually through Dungeons and Dragons that I come to understand everything, so figuring this one out because of it came as no surprise. Thanks again, Gary!

Dungeons and Dragons is a game that I find practically flawless because it appears to be 99% based on what the players bring to the table. It seems that the two sides – the Dungeon Master and the players – are seemingly unbound to any rules that they do not wish to abide by.

But this isn’t true. What is required of them is to listen to the dice. Like Two-Face, no decision is made without communing with the spirit of chance, and even then, sometimes chance is tossed out the window in favor of a ‘good story’.

To me, Dungeons and Dragons always seemed like the perfect mix of chance and strategy. It appears that way because of the sheer number of possibilities surrounding the outcome of the dice rolls outweigh any restrictions they might cause. To be succinct, it isn’t a slot machine, it isn’t a Monopoly board, and it isn’t Mario Party. The conceit of the game is that it is completely up to you.

Trickery!

You see, the games that I enjoy – and probably you, reader as well – are extremely complicated games of chance. But they are games of chance that are presented in such a way that the players are fooled into thinking there are limitless possibilities.

I thought about this as I played Team Fortress 2. There are a lot of servers where ‘critical hits’ have been removed. At first, this made me angry. What is it about critical hits that pisses people off so much? As long as every player has the opportunity, all is fair, no?

I think people dislike it because they feel powerless to it, just as I feel powerless to Monopoly. After all, both games are highly influenced by the outcomes of random number generators.

Players on the other, regular servers don’t seem to mind critical hits. I certainly don’t. I don’t see it as ‘anti-strategy’, but necessary to provide a variable in how the game can be played. After all, a game like Team Fortress can quickly become as nuanced as a game of chess to the most extreme players, which only alienates those who are not as interested or experienced. I know it would certainly alienate me.

What I realized is that I enjoy Team Fortress 2 and not Mario Party because the former is a game with a much better Dungeon Master. The divider is up, instilling in me a sense of mystery. I can’t see the gears working. It is a game that makes all its rolls in private, keeps hidden the most important secret of all: how many dice are behind the screen.

-ctl

edit & image: ct

Are you a chess person or a monopoly person? Why do you play games: thrills, exploration, completion, something entirely different? As always, we love comments.