W. Eric Martin: Games as Art and Science

As someone who studied mathematics in college, I’ve long been fascinated by the concept of limits. When dealing with theory and artificial constructs, you can use the idea of infinite structures to build limits into your calculations. Calculus is all about limits, of course, as you divide space into ever-smaller sections, and the difference between open and closed sets can be experienced only on a theoretical level.

When you move from the abstract world into the real one, the infinite drops out of your measurements, yet you still find limits all around you: speed limits, property lines, due dates, account balances, goal lines, and so forth. An article by Wendell Berry called “Faustian Economics” in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s focused on the issue of environmental limits – oil reserves, fish stock, landfill space, etc. – but the paragraphs that most captured my attention were the following:

It is true that insofar as scientific experiments must be conducted within carefully observed limits, scientists also are artists. But in science one experiment, whether it succeeds or fails, is logically followed by another in a theoretically infinite progression. According to the underlying myth of modern science, this progression is always replacing the smaller knowledge of the past with the larger knowledge of the present, which will be replaced by the yet larger knowledge of the future.

In the arts, by contrast, no limitless sequence of works is ever implied or looked for. No work of art is necessarily followed by a second work that is necessarily better. Given the methodologies of science, the law of gravity and the genome were bound to be discovered by somebody; the identity of the discoverer is incidental to the fact. But it appears that in the arts there are no second chances. We must assume that we had one chance each for The Divine Comedy and King Lear. If Dante and Shakespeare had died before they wrote those poems, nobody ever would have written them.

The difference between art and science isn’t as clear cut as Berry pretends as one can identify instances of evolution in fields like the graphic arts, with futurism leading into cubism, which is followed by dada. I agree that no one can view Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase as a necessary consequence of the work of Picasso and Braque, but an evidentiary line can be traced between the former artists and the latter mind-bender. Similarly, a peek at the work of Augusten Burroughs will bring David Sedaris’ ouevre to mind, and it’s hard to picture the former becoming a success without the latter showing that a market for such writing existed.

The larger difference between art and science, one recognized by Berry’s description of the fields but not explicitly stated, is that scientists are typically revealing external truths – that is, discovering facts about the world as it already exists – while artists are adding new features to the world, features that run perpedicular to the notion of truth because they’re formed from opinion and whimsy. As Berry suggests, gravity and genes – along with the structure of matter, the composition of light, etc. – already exist, whether we are aware of their nature or not; the scientist “merely” identifies the details of these structures. The catalog of potential poems, on the other hand, returns us to the infinite and theoretical limits of mathematics. Before one human brought King Lear into being, it existed only in the unreal land of a million typewriting monkeys or Borges’ fantastic Library of Babel.

So where do games fit in this art/science dichotomy? My natural assumption is to view games as works of art. As with poetry, the universe of potential games is infinitely diverse, with the preponderance of words at our disposal being reformed in any number of ways to create new rulesets that define the entirety of a game. All of those games exist as possibilities in some Platonic sense, shadows on the wall that become concrete only when nailed down by a creator. Variants of No Thanks exist in this unreal world in which eight or ten or fourteen cards are removed from the game; more generally No Thanks could be seen as a particular instance of a game in which players start with X chips and remove Y cards from a deck that ranges from Z to Ω – possibly including duplicates of some cards – and try to obtain the smallest number of points during play. The game could include “take that"-style cards that require players to bid not to take them or wild cards that require players to bid chips in order to claim them. The form in which Thorsten Gimmler chose to present the game is only one of many possibilities, yet intuition, knowledge and playtesting experience led him and his publishers to believe it would be the best one. He was the force that formed an abstraction into reality. More realistically, I can imagine that cloud of conceptual games only thanks to the reality of one of them.

Stepping away from the notion of games as art, however, you can view the scientific approach to this mental library of games in the works of Klaus Teuber, Dirk Henn and Michael Schacht, designers who leaf through the possibilities found in their creations in order to discover related variants. The landbound Settlers of Catan led to ocean-going explorations in Seafarers and the more conflict-oriented Cities & Knights. Anno 1701, Starfarers, Candamir, the Deutschland edition of Catan – all of them spring from the original item with varying degrees of evolution. Schacht has been working his way through the animal kingdom and zoo management systems with all the add-ons for Zooloretto that have been released since the game’s 2007 Spiel des Jahres victory. And Henn’s Alhambra can apparently be altered in a unlimited number of ways if the five expansions released to date – each containing four variants – are any example.

Klaus-Jürgen Wrede’s Carcassonne is another game that has been folded, spindled and mutilated in multiple ways from its original form – a form that itself has been altered thanks to the varying rules for how to score farmers. And aside from minor variations that take the game to prehistoric times or add multipliers to the value of cities and roads, Wrede has done the equivalent of splicing art onto science by introducing an unexpected dexterity element to his previously staid and methodical tile-laying game. Surprisingly, Carcassonne: Das Katapult has been met with widespread disdain, well before people have even been able to play the expansion, as if introducing a catapult to a strategy game violates some natural taxonomy of games, as if gamers don’t cry out for novel creations with one breath while denouncing such works with the next.

At the same time that Wrede is exploring the Carcassonne family tree, other designers have spliced its genetic code into new bodies by turning out Carcassonne-like games such as the Spiel 08 releases Cities by Martyn F and Lungarno by Michele Mura. No matter whether these games are directly inspired by Carcassonne, it’s hard to imagine their existence without that earlier tile-laying game.

More broadly, anyone who views a recently released design as a rehash of existing titles is pegging the designer as a scientific manipulator of data, as a person who can do research and read charts but not create a sonnet to bring such material to life. Being a scientist isn’t bad, mind you – we wouldn’t average lifespans of 70+ years without them – yet they’re hardly the heroic figures that artists are made out to be.

Co-creators Daya Fernandez and Inge Theron; pic by Evan Agostini at AP

From a description of the game, Hollywood Domino sounds like little more than a Mexican Train variant airbrushed with a Hollywood theme. More power to Theron and Fernandez for getting such fabulous coverage – now let’s see Orlando Bloom, James Franco and Jake Gyllenhaal plugging Android on David Letterman…

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