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BGonline.org Forums
OT - Trivia Question du Jour
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: OT - Trivia Question du Jour (Mike Clapsadle)
Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2016, at 3:17 p.m.
Clearly, Stick's question is open to various interpretations. Under my interpretation, I would submit "Othello" as an answer. The final score in Othello is based on disc count. At any stage in the game, the "scoreboard" would therefore seem to be the current disc count. But as anyone who has studied Othello knows, it is not only possible, but common, for the player who has the lower disc count to be winning.
A former Othello champion who would sometimes do simultaneous exhibitions as a marketing stunt for Mattel would sometimes slyly mention, in his introductory lecture, that you can lose the game by getting "wiped out" and having no discs at all. This would typically have the psychological effect of encouraging beginners to acquire lots of discs of their color. Of course, this is a disastrous strategy against an expert.
In the book Characteristics of Games, which I've often mentioned before, there is an interesting section about "catch-up." It's generally a bad design feature in a game if one side is hopelessly behind but the rules of the game force the players to continue playing for a long time even though the outcome is a foregone conclusion. One way to address this issue is to introduce "catch-up" features that allow the player who is behind, or seemingly behind, to catch up. Backgammon is the example par excellence of this principle, since a backgame exemplifies catch-up. Of course, to some extent this is an illusion, and thanks to the bots we know that a well-timed backgame is not actually hopelessly low in equity. But as far as fun is concerned, illusion is fine.
Of course, catch-up features have a downside, in that if there is too much opportunity to catch up, then the game may go on forever, or else terminate suddenly for what seems to be an unsatisfying lucky event.
Also, I would not give backgammon as an answer to Stick's question because I don't think that the pipcount can be plausibly construed as the "scoreboard." In Othello, it's at least somewhat plausible to regard the disc count as the scoreboard.
Finally, one other category of answers comes from flawed tournament designs, such as the infamous Olympic badminton scandal, where players are incentivized to lose in an early round in order to achieve a favorable spot in a later round. I'm not sure that this is what Stick intended though.
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