Why Are Stories Important For Logic Games?

This time I will not talk about Game Mechanics, but how Game Mechanics Induce Behaviors, i.e. I will not talk about how to play The Strange Forgeries Of Mr.S.C.Rheber but how players played The Strange Forgeries Of Mr.S.C.Rheber during the playtests I conducted and why they helped me to conclude that:

Even a logic game needs a story.

In particular I won’t talk about the obvious fact that theme helps to teach a game, but I will talk about a more personal experience: the genesis of the first expansion of The Strange Forgeries Of Mr.S.C.Rheber: The League Of The Extraordinary Collectors and how a particular player inspired me to expand the logic game I had designed into a system of Emergent Storytelling, with this bizarre booklet:

During one of several playtests of the base game there was a player who played Hermann Homer, the Gallerist, i.e. the one who had to invent the secret rule of the game. The player (whom I will identify as Moriarty from now on) choses to be inspired by one of Bongard’s problems (n 45) and invented his own variation of that rule “the drawing must contain a white figure partly covering a black figure”.

During the game, Moriarty would present his collector clients with 6 separate paintings (according to the rules of the game, these are his only clues to the players) and describe their contents without sparing any details so that the sequence of clues, once completed, would become a small vignette story about man and wizards gazing the cosmos.

Normally, at the end of each playtest session, we comment on the strategic choices and Moriarty‘s idea was to emphasize the presence of something that was there (such as the star gazing people in his story) so as to imply the absence for anything that was there but was not emphasized (the features of the concealed rule). To keep the astronomical theme, he intentionally joke on the famous Confucius sentence:

When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.

It is an interesting idea: mentioning a thing makes the mentioned thing more true, but, by inversion, the things which are not mentioned exist less.

Moriarty will play three more games using the same tactic: starting from the first game with unsuccessful results (with negative scores), he will manage to obtain a positive score in the third game following an upward learning trend.

Moriarty‘s strategy is a rhetorical strategy that has a specific name: Red Herring. That is, Moriarty showed an apparently flawless logical connection between each of his pictures (a vignette story about star gazing) in order to distract the viewer from noticing the real and more random nature of those drawings (the white and black shapes), which had to be hidden.

The game Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective makes extensive use of the same rhetorical technique of our Moriarty player (note: this last sentence is a Red Herring itself): if the victim of the case is found shot in the head while wearing a gold watch, then the newspaper of the day (the main source of the clues provided to the players) is populated, in a statistically absurd manner, with articles about corpses found in the Thames with wounds in various places of the head or advertisements for gold or watch dealers.

Often, each of these features has nothing to do with the solution of the case, but, constituting 90 per cent of the information, it has the power to create the most complex and intricate criminal speculations in the players’ imagination. A case in Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is mainly solved by the Occam’s Razor principle: only 4-6 paragraphs out of about 70-ish contain the information needed to solve the case (and any of the latter points at any of the formers!), while the others contain only Red Herrings. Red Herrings which, given their frequency and apparent interconnectedness, will always be interpolated in solutions that are more complex than the truth.

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is a thoroughly narrative and linguistic game where the game-language association seems more natural than for The Strange Forgeries Of Mr. S. C. Rheber which is a pure abstract logic game. And yet a language goes beyond the exclusive use of words and playtester Moriarty was inventing the setting of a little investigation game out of thin air and would have done something amazing if the rules of the game I had invented had allowed him to do so. Composing more than 6 drawings and on larger media than the 5x5cm (2x2inch) sheets I had provided could have been a good idea… but I will explain later what I think is even better to foster this kind of Game Induced Behaviors.

Let’s start by defining what is a “language”, then why games are form of languages and, lastly, how we make a game like The Strange Forgeries Of Mr. S.C.Rheber a better language.

A language is not solely letters-and-sounds, but comprises

• a very rigid system of rules (as grammar is for languages)

• within which all sorts of flexibility is allowed, such as all sorts of logical fallacies (such as nonsense or Red Herrings) are possible despite of common sense if they respect those rules:

As Jeremy Campbell notes in Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life, “A modest number of rules applied again and again to a limited collection of objects leads to variety, novelty, and surprise. One can describe all the rules, but not necessarily all the products of the rules not the set of all whole numbers, not every sentence in a language.” Representation in games emerges from the relationship between a rigid, underlying rule structure and the free play of meaning that occurs as players inhabit the system.

– K. Salen,E. Zimmerman, 2003, Rules Of Play: Game Design Fundamentals

In other words the playtester Moriarty was creating what the authors of the cited piece call an Emergent Narrative by mechanically following a strategic approach that became, playtest after playtest, more and more refined. An Emergent Narrative is a story that emerges spontaneously from the players, without the designer having contributed its content, but only a white canvas in which to mechanically elaborate possible strategies.

I said earlier that the player Moriarty would have done better if the rule system I had imposed had been different, so I began to wonder what I could do to come to grips with players like Moriarty.

The Strange Forgeries Of Mr. S. C. Rheber tends to work when the pattern described in the Secret Rule is an easily recognized abstract geometric entity. In fact, when Secret Rules contains patterns that tend to be naturalistic (like “the design must represent a piece of jewelry”) it can be difficult for the Gallerist to win. Therefore, in the basic version of the game, a pack of cards is included where examples of rules based on geometric properties are provided.

This implementation is nothing more than providing context for the players in order to avoid early mistakes. The first question players asked me during playtests was frequently “what kind of rules should I expect?”: and the ‘at a glance’ classification of the images printed on those cards was unambiguous for all of them: they are elementary solids! And a quick peek at that deck was answering their question.

On the contrary the Red Herring of Moriarty was pointing at naturalistic elements like stars and people, hence the Collectors, which were framed to look for geometric patterns, took very little time to realize the logical fallacy that they had been lured into. This implementation did not favor Moriarty but on the other side geometric entities, unlike real-world objects, are universally understood: there is no ambiguity in what is a triangle (and ambiguous rules heavily punish the Gallerist in Mr. S.C.Rheber), while one could have problem in classifying a plastic bracelet as a toy instead of a piece of jewelry… So it seems that Moriarty‘s Red Herrings will always be about abstract patterns and never about real-world objects…

The rigorous character that Euclidean geometry exudes lean away from the “wishy-washy” character of that black-box which is natural language and real-world-objects classification.

And when you play a logic game you don’t like “wishy-washy” . 

Yes, because elementary solids are assumed to be cognitive a priori of universal understanding. So they seem to be the trusted candidates to form better-performing rules in The Strange Forgeries Of Mr. S.C.Rheber if you are the Gallerist… Isn’t it?

Actually not: there is no better context for a game of logic than another.

A piece of jewelry can be a stronger classifier than a triangle…

if we frame the right context.

Alexander Luria conducted interesting experiments in 1931-33 on women from remote regions of Central Asia (and collected later his findings in 1976, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations). Those women were not educated in the Western way, but had an alternative system of wisdom to ours. Luria asked some of them to group elementary solids according to whatever criteria they found most appropriate. Below are the images presented to those women (source: Henry Foundalis, 2006, Phaeco: A Cognitive Architecture based on Bongard Problems):

and the responses of a 19-year-old Ichkari woman:

and another 24-year-old woman from a different culture than the first:

the women had answered the psychiatrist’s riddle with a different context regarding the space of solutions: I may say that “she peeked at a different deck of cards”. In particular, they were familiar with instruments such as the Uzbek water clock (which is an extremely elegant design as old as 16th century BC. As a comparison: Western world started to talk about geometry as we know it around 200BC)

and agreed that the triangular shape of the tumar was a well-placed entity in their psyche and that they would never reduce it to a more generic classifier such as a triangle (similarly open circles are rather bracelets or earrings than circles):

The solution to the problem of creating a better rule system for the player Moriarty is simply to provide alternative contexts:

The “X” in Tic-Tac-Toe, for example, means something quite different than an “X” in the game of Scrabble. (…)(Or) Imagine a playful love letter that uses a Tic-Tac-Toe board to spell out “XXX.”

– K. Salen,E. Zimmerman, 2003, Rules Of Play: Game Design Fundamentals

 Since different contexts applied to the same rules create different meanings and experiences, players needed a common reference text with characters, stories, situations and even belief systems (much like the deck of cards of the base game, but… more bizarre). The goal was to force the mind to reorganize geometric figures beyond the patterns imparted by our western education: a new encryption in which triangles are no more a special case of closed lines but, for instance, mountains and 3 triangles are a mountain chain so that 3 smoke puffs will be a chain smoker and so on towards the construction (play after play) of an alphabet of Hanzi-like letters (I can’t recommend less to check out how Hanzi are formed if you are really into puzzles).

The Collectors players would have needed to think about new symbols in the same way as the Ichkari women had managed to separate tumars from Uzbek clocks without using the concept of Euclidean triangle. The “rule system” had to enforce the Collectors into thinking that any solution invented by the Gallerist would only and only have to do with the things described in that bizarre common reference text. This “rule system” is not published as a variant in the official rulebook, but I will talk about it in future updates.

And I talked to a friend of mine who wrote the most deliriously brilliant stories I had ever read. I told him about writing something about some drawings I had made for a logic game. And so The Legend Of The Extraordinary Collectors was born: which will be the first expansion of The Strange Forgeries Of Mr. S. C. Rheber and a little homage to the player Moriarty and all those players who want to try a bizarre system for Emergent Narrative in the unusual context of a logic game.