![]() ![]() Single-player FPSes, relatively 'closed world' RPGs, that sort of thing. Then there are the 'games' that really shade into choose-your-own-adventure books with pictures, or movies with reflex tests: I enjoy these myself, and they are a perfectly valid form of entertainment but they are about as dissimilar from classic 'games' as something called a 'game' can be. Specific 'games' in the sense of 'Program X sold under name Y' tend to come and go but the overall dynamic is similar to regional variations, changes in equipment, occasional rule tweaks, and the like in traditional sports, except that traditional sports tend to treat variants as all being flavors of A Sport, while the trademark and SKU-focused game market tends to treat each variant as a separate game. There is strategy and teamwork along with individual expertise in implementation, so most of the 'churn' in these games is either abandonment of older engines in favor of nicer ones, or iterative tweaking of weapons and balance. Something like Counter-Strike is replayable much like soccer or football are (ignoring the fact that operating systems and Glide/OpenGL/DirectX tend to break backward compatibility more often than 'grass' does, so a single, specific, implementation may not remain playable in the long term without porting, though games with robust port support are in decent shape). Then there are computer games that are really, in terms of playability and intricacy, basically team sports, rather than anything analogous to deterministic games of perfect information like chess, checkers, go, etc. These usually have some improvised implementation that doesn't need a computer (multiple chess/checkers boards with rules for pieces moving between them in the extra dimension, that sort of thing) but computers make them easier and less knock-over-and-abandon-in-frustration prone. Mostly 2d games adapted to 3 or more dimensions(or 3d puzzles, like Rubik's cubes adapted to 4 or more dimensions). The slightly less trivial analog is extensions of classic games that would be impossible or impractical to fabricate as board games. Some games are so simple that children can solve them by hand (tic-tac-toe, most notably, since people do actually play it but it's simple enough that most players eventually solve it and lose interest) but solving checkers, or the partial solutions for chess and go, are exercises that require ingenuity and cunning but a lot of brute force. Being the trivial case, this is mostly a wiseass cop-out but it's worth mentioning because computer implementations have made a substantial difference in what games are considered 'solved' and how strongly. ![]() ![]() The trivial analog to simple games is (of course) those games implemented on a computer. In terms of replay value and intricacy, 'computer games' are arguably several largely different things that all just happen to be amenable to running on computers and being sold in software boxes: ![]()
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