One thing I think is the essence of strategy is emergence. A huge amount of complexity arises out of a small set of rules. The thing with chess is that it can get hugely complex, and yet it always remains manageable throughout that complexity. The rules are clearly defined and reasonably simple. The concepts in it are clearly defined with no ambiguity or uncertainty. When you play it, all your decisions are important and bring you closer to the goal of winning. You dont get stuck into the miniature of decisions about exactly where to put something, or how much of that you need. The subtleties and idosyncrasies of the real world which are irrelevant are removed.

Personally I think many of these so called strategy games lack almost any strategy at all, apart from perhaps attack or not attack.

Quote:Original post by Puck
What is the essence of strategy, at least as it relates to games?

I've given quite a bit of thought to that already, actually.

I starting writing a document a while back and recently put it on Google Docs. It talks about exactly that:

The Strategy Game Designer's Constitution aims to boil out the relevant strategic principles and elements of strategy games. You might be able to pick out something you like.

I'd be very happy if people could look it over and either critique or make suggestions to add to it. I will be watching this thread for nuggets of wisdom.

[Edited by - leiavoia on February 11, 2008 10:39:58 PM]

I don't like the 'strategy' tag as then you get into debates over the difference between strategy and tactics. But I'll assume we're talking about the more abstract notion. I mostly concur with the deception and emergence lines, though coming at it from a different angle. The player has to be presented with choices in how to proceed, and it must generally be possible to estimate how good those choices are, but impossible to know how good they are. It is the complexity afforded by so-called emergence, and the deception in being unable to look far enough ahead, or into the mind of the opponent, which makes it impossible to know for sure how good a move is. The skill is in estimating that.

You'd probably be interested in Game Theory.

From Wikipedia:

Quote:
Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics which is used in the social sciences (most notably economics), biology, computer science and philosophy. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, where an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others. While initially developed to analyze competitions where one individual does better at another's expense (zero sum games), it has been expanded to treat a wide class of interactions, which are classified according to several criteria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory

Game Theory is an entire discipline dedicated to defining the "essence of strategy."

Quote:Original post by Marmin
Not only limitation. Realism.
And, interaction with other players. Internet has brought us this.

You seem have some very strange ideas. You say realism, but clearly you are not using the English definition of realism. One of the greatest strategy games of all time, which you mention later in your post, has very little to do with reality, excpt for the unit names. Chess is also a counterexample on your second point: People having been playing TBS games for several centuries before the advent of the Internet.

I've probably misunderstood you.

Anyway, I agree that emergence is key. Emergence makes it easy to learn all the rules, but the implications of the rules take years to figure out. I believe that This is what makes for good strategy. Whoever has a better grasp of the implications of what's going on wins. This will, of course vary from game to game. Really good strategy requires you to psychoanalyze your opponent to figure out what he's going to do. This is evident when two very good chess players are playing. They rely on knowledge of the opponent to improve thier guesses about what's going on in the game.

(NOTE: I make no distinction between tactic and strategy.)

Diversity is key. There should be many, many different ways to win.
When Game designers talk about "Balance", they are usually referring to preventing a single tactic from becoming dominant. This is good. If a single tactic becomes dominant, The person who has the best execution wins. This is called skill. It may not be bad(FPS games: primary tactic: shoot the enemy, move erratically) but it is not strategy. Good strategy design is setting up a system where there are a large number of viable strategies. Even better if those strategies are a continuum, rather than a set of discrete tactics.

Is it a useful dichotomy to set up skill opposed to strategy? Skill is how effectively you carry out a strategy. Chess has no skill(it's not hard to position pieces on a board) Quake 4 is almost all skill.

I really want to know what you think. Is that a false Dichotomy or a good one?

Quote:After a few rounds, the essential property
that sustains a strategy game is in its ability to sustain
deception.

I like Wai's take on this. However..

Quote:I don't consider tick-tac-toe a strategy game because
only calculation is necessary to play the game.

Only calculation is necessary to play chess, so following your logic, chess is not a strategy game. Yet many would consider it to be a definitive strategy game. And I would say it's a strategy game for us, because despite it being calculable, much of the game tree is effectively hidden from our tiny brains. And even less effective calculators would find tic-tac-toe to be a strategy game.

Quote:Original post by Argus2

Quote:I don't consider tick-tac-toe a strategy game because
only calculation is necessary to play the game.

Only calculation is necessary to play chess, so following your logic, chess is not a strategy game. Yet many would consider it to be a definitive strategy game. And I would say it's a strategy game for us, because despite it being calculable, much of the game tree is effectively hidden from our tiny brains. And even less effective calculators would find tic-tac-toe to be a strategy game.

I too like how this discussion is going, however, I'd disagree with both of you on this point. I don't think that tik-tac-toe is solely calculation, as there is still an element of trying to decifer the opponent's strategy involved. However, since the opponent has so few moves available, and all of his moves are visible immediately, this element is very close to negligible.

With chess, on the other hand, while playing by simply min-maxing the available moves is possible, most people get the best results by recognising emerging strategies of the opponent (patterns) and trying to react/counter to those. Chess would become calculation only if players all worked on min-maxing (choosing moves based on maximizing the return to self and minimizing the risk to self). As human players don't work like this, it's often better to try and analyse their overall strategy.

That's my take on it, anyway.

Id disagree magic is a random game as well

not only can you make decks that remove most randomness,

you can tell a good deck from a bad one, because a bad one
needs that random luck to win/survive.

I think any game that lets players compete, offers the opportunities
to be played forever, in comp games, technology does get to far ahead
if it ever hit a point, of this is as far as it goes the end,
a absolutely no idea what could possibly be evolution of games is brought out
I bet you would still be able to find a group that runs a MUD.

chess really can't improve, its at a fixed point
(thought the 4 player chess that I played in high school was interesting)

So im bored of starcraft, im also bored of chess, haven't played for bout 10 years
while some people are still playing chess, some are still playing starcraft