
Some of the most popular games get the least respect from game enthusiasts - mudil
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-virtues-of-simple-tic-tac-toe-1453484862
======
kqr
I think this article blows past several important points – perhaps
unknowingly.

1\. Sure, tic-tac-toe is a fantastic game for someone who needs to learn the
"rewards of thinking ahead and taking the opponent’s strategy into account".
Game enthusiasts (or indeed anyone above the age of 12) are very unlikely to
need this lesson.

1> However, there is an interesting variant of tic-tac-toe[1] so disregarding
the game completely isn't fair either.

2\. People don't dislike Monopoly because it has dice. Risk has dice, and is
incredibly popular. People dislike Monopoly because _it is designed to be a
game that is not fun to play for all but one player_.

2> The game was designed as an anti-capitalist, anti-monopolist lesson.[2]
When the rules are set up just right, only one person will be the winner and
the other people will spiral into a negative feedback loop and quickly run out
of all their money. That's the entire premise of the game: if you have a lot
of money you can easily get more. Of course a game which is designed to
distress 3/4 people playing in a session is not going to be very highly rated.

That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little respect
from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go[3]!

Probably known in these circles as "the game computers can't yet beat top
humans in" it's an abstract strategy game for two players (like chess) – with
incredibly simple rules. You can learn the rules in a few minutes (literally)
but it will take you weeks to even start feeling like you know what you are
doing, and years before you're competent. The strategic and tactical depth is
vast, much deeper than any other game I've tried.

[1]: [http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-
tac-t...](http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-toe/)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Mono...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Monopoly)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_\(game\))

~~~
thraxil
> That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little
> respect from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go

I guess I would have to disagree with your characterization of go as not
respected. I've never heard any of the game enthusiasts I know talk about go
in anything but the same reverent tone you use to explain why you like it. Who
are you hanging out with?

------
purpled_haze
The comment about chess is just astounding to me:

"The queen, which can move horizontally, vertically or diagonally, is nothing
more than a combination of the rook and the bishop, making it an inelegant
redundancy."

Whoever stated that has never played chess to the level they should before
even _attempting_ to comment on the game.

Chess would seem to me to be one of the ultimate games for humans; it's simple
enough to teach a child, but few adults can come close to mastering it.

Even the term "chess master" is a bit of a lie. To be a "chess master", you'd
have to know the perfect solution move for every board configuration- forget
openings, gambits, tactics- that's child's play compared to truly mastering
the game. People called "masters" are just really damn good- not perfect.

In comparison, I am a "tic tac toe" master. I know that I can fail to lose at
the game if I try.

~~~
heydenberk
The rules of chess are, in fact, complicated and inelegant compared to the
rules of Go.

~~~
lazyant
I'll counter that, I read a couple of Go books and I'm still not clear of when
the game ends or how you count points, go is very elegant but let's not
pretend all its rules are simple and clear.

~~~
lmm
The game ends when both players pass. That's very simple and clear.

You score by counting the number of unoccupied points in your territory and
adding the number of your opponent's stones you captured, + the "komi" that
the second player gets to make up for going second (usually 6.5 for a full
size board). (A common technique is to place all the stones you captured on
empty points in your opponent's territory, so that you're subtracting the
number of your captures from their territory). The only possible ambiguity
there is around what constitutes territory; if you like then as a beginner you
can just make the rule "unoccupied points in regions surrounded entirely by
stones of your colour", which will make for a few tedious turns at the end
where you fill in the last few gaps but won't change the scoring at all.

------
cognivore
I think the proof is in the pudding. I've played hundreds of hours of chess in
my life, and I set chess aside as a special case, but as for the rest of the
traditional board games, they become boring once you've played highly rated
games on boardgamegeek.com. Monopoly is a good example. It feels crushingly
dull and random (yes, even with wheeling and dealing) to the point that I
would call it an anti-game - it actually removes fun instead of creates it. A
better title would be "Death March."

I've spent that last thirty years playing and watching board games enter what
seems to be their golden age, and have introduced scores of people to the
games I love, and have had friends do so in kind. Almost universally people
say something along the lines of, "Wow, that was fun. It's nothing like the
games we played as a kid." Often followed up with "Where do we buy this?" They
don't play the games from their childhood anymore because they're boring and
they didn't know there were alternatives. Now they'll play board games as
adults and enjoy themselves. Beats the Hell out of TV.

~~~
agentultra
_The proof of the pudding is in the tasting._

And the rating system on that site is in question of late due to a presently
controversial number 1 game: _Pandemic: Legacy_. The rating system is highly
subjective and many suspect is prone to "flavor of the week," ratings by
people who don't take time to read the scale and objectively rate the games
they play.

Monopoly could be rated so lowly because it is a popular opinion on the site
that it's not a good game.

That being said I don't think the classics are disappearing or that they're
bad games. A game like Mancala is seeing a resurgence as a mechanic in many
popular games today. I think we can learn something from what made these games
endure for so long and are starting to incorporate them into new games.

Don't let the rating system on boardgamegeek dictate what we think is a really
good game until the objectivity problem gets sorted out.

 _update_ : An example of a thread that comes up every now and again:
[https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1512907/new-rating-
system-n...](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1512907/new-rating-system-
needed-bgg)

~~~
cognivore
"The proof of the pudding is in the tasting" is certainly a statement I would
agree with. Controversy around the rating system on boardgamegeek.com doesn't
really invalidate that games that rank higher tend to be better. The same
could be said of rottentomatoes.com, metacritic.com, and just about anything
that rates anything. Use a large enough set of data and even subjective
evaluations are useful.

But I certainly wouldn't let a rating system dictate what I think is a good
game.

~~~
agentultra
The rating system is under fire because it encourages fashion over merit. It's
scale is based on what I want to play and think is good _right now_ [0]. I
mentioned _Pandemic: Legacy_ because technically you cannot play it a second
time (and personally I don't think I'll want to). It's a good game but I'm
going to rate it highly today and probably lower once I finish it.

It seems to me that the rating system on BGG is skewed towards what the
community thinks is presently a good game. I think Monopoly would rate much
higher if we were rating based on merit instead of opinion.

I think most game enthusiasts and critics can see the importance and position
Monopoly has had in gaming history. But in terms of what we like right now I
don't find it very surprising that Monopoly or Checkers rank low in BGG's
system. It's a system that favors novelty (over a longer term than "The
Hotness" but still... flash in the pan games like P:L have been rising high,
quickly, and with greater frequency)

[0]
[https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Ratings#](https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Ratings#)

------
toothbrush
Simply commenting on the title, but it struck me that you can probably say
“Some of the most popular $X get the least respect from $X enthusiasts” —
examples of _X_ that come to mind are music, food, wine, ….

~~~
joezydeco
...Adam Sandler movies...

------
muzani
Monopoly is such an underrated game. It's about negotiation and alliances. I
think their biggest mistake is calling it Monopoly, implying it was one person
killing off everyone else. It might be more interesting if it was called
Balance of Power.

It has to be played with around 4+ people. They need to trade favors along
with their land. With enough players, the favors owed last long enough to make
a difference.

The randomness simply makes negotiation power the main focus of the game. E.g.
if you land on a rival's hotel and go broke, a rich ally can pay you premium
on your land. You'll realize early on that everyone is either going to be
doomed or super-rich, so it's worth being diplomatic really early on.

When someone starts to snowball into a monopoly, they have to start laying
low, while the others have to encourage the others to pile pressure. The
players have to notice this trend early, at the point where it makes sense to
'blacklist' certain players.

It's a game with about as much depth as Settlers of Catan, without having to
worry about too much complexity.

~~~
colejohnson66
Monopoly was originally created to show the dangers of letting a business
become a "monopoly". That is until the Parker Brothers started making it and
marketing it as a game.

From Wikipedia[0]:

> _The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][4] when American
> anti-monopolist Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips, created a game through
> which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George.
> It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of
> concentrating land in private monopolies._

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_\(game\)#Early_history)

------
Zikes
Someone recently posited a theory that really stood out to me: when a better
version of a board game comes along, the old one simply becomes obsolete. The
game that they were referring to in particular was Secret Hitler, which they
felt obsoleted Werewolf and The Resistance.

When I have an opportunity to play board games with people I will always want
to play something that I think is fun, exciting, or new. Monopoly is none of
those things to me. For some people it probably endures primarily out of
nostalgia, or a lack of interest in other options, but there are so many
better options for new board game players.

~~~
jclos
That's one of the things these articles don't really take into account: games,
much like movies, tv shows, music, etc. evolve and crossbreed. Some good games
could become virtually unplayed because they were so great that the following
generation of game designers took the mechanics they liked in them and used
them to create new games.

------
vacri
Weird article. "Why do games enthusiasts dislike these games? You know, the
games that are great for teaching _children_ some supposed lesson or other?".

I expect other articles from the author to include "Why don't wine enthusiasts
like $3 bottles of rotgut? I mean, it's really popular with winos" and "why do
people like listening to musical bands? Toy xylophones are popular with kids,
and teaches them hand-eye co-ordination, rhythm, and so forth."

I mean, the author lionises tic-tac-toe as providing some deep life lesson,
when in actuality, even the author's target demographic gets bored of it in
very short order.

------
chipsy
Art is at its best when it presents questions. If our games declare random
winners, or can be played perfectly to a predictable conclusion, they have
stated a definite answer about strategy, and lack room for further
investigation, which is distasteful to enthusiasts.

That said, games also say something about the societies that play them.
Monopoly's popularity in spite of its unfairness speaks to that. Playing it,
and winning, reinforces a certain fantasy about becoming a property owner. The
casual player believes: "This is how life works."

------
facepalm
I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy. We want to learn for
real life from games, and real life is full of chance. And there are
strategies for dealing with chance, like hedging your bets.

For Monopoly, mathematicians have worked out winning strategies. I think it
has to do with a high chance of people landing in jail and the odds of landing
on fields when starting from jail.

~~~
sago
> I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy.

Because it often makes it unfun. Not always, of course, many of the highest
rated games on the Geek also have random elements. But in the case of, say,
Chutes and Ladders, the entire outcome is random. Might as well flip a coin
and call it. Why spend the time going up and down the board?

For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend
an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance.

These are not 'unworthy', they are just boring in comparison to many other
games. I think people avoid the 'other' games not because they have some deep
subtle appreciation for the merits of the 'bad' games, but because they
haven't come across better options. It is rare to find someone who likes
Monopoly who can describe another game with the same theme (not counting Star
Wars Monopoly!).

~~~
facepalm
I guess it is true that the time it takes to lose is the real issue. Still, I
played a lot of Monopoly as a kid. Nowadays it wouldn't be my first choice for
a game evening, but I have brought it out occasionally for my preschool kid. I
make him calculate change money, which he doesn't always like. Even Chutes and
Ladders can be great fun for kids, and they can practice counting.

I think the boardgame geek top list is a bit biased, because it was made by
gaming geeks who might tend to prefer complicated game mechanics.

~~~
sago
I don't think so, a game like Werewolf, say is very simple, and has a lot of
love on the Geek. A game like Ticket to Ride, or the Resistance, or Forbidden
Island is much less complex than Monopoly, but are routinely in top lists of
game fans.

Okay, you have to be into heavier games to be into Brass, but heavy Euros are
hardly the be-all of board gaming.

[edit: Yeah, I take back the 'I don't think so' \- on reflection - there is a
bias towards heavy games at the top, but I don't think that's why Monopoly,
Parcheesi et al are low]

------
VLM
An interesting aspect of Monopoly hate not discussed so far is the analogy
with computer graphics / VR "uncanny valley".

Much like a CGI face can approximate a human closely enough to be just far
enough off to be repellent, an individual board game can approximate the ideal
of a really good game yet end up so far off the mark that it lands in the
uncanny valley of dislike.

Most of the general public doesn't like political activism, and the game being
invented as a piece of propaganda, more or less, it not going to appeal to
most people because its propaganda, and even worse, some of why the game sucks
might have been required for propaganda purposes. And that circularizes the
argument for the general public, see why political propaganda is bad, it made
the Monopoly game suck by dumping to the bottom of the uncanny valley
therefore propaganda is bad.

In summary I'd theorize that game appeal follows an uncanny valley curve and
unfortunately right at the bottom of the trench is where you'll find Monopoly.

------
kriro
BGG rankings are essentially based on the idea of "how likely/eager would I be
to agree to a game of X". By that measure tic tac toe deserves to be ranked
very lowly. Same goes for Monopoly for me it's mostly a boring long grind with
very few interesting decisions. Once you've understood that some squares are
reached more often than others it's also closed to solved imo...at least
there's a very good standard strategy.

Granted that's not how most people would rank games especially if they get
played only once a year or on the occasional family meeting. I would also rank
"A few Acres of Snow" very lowly but it's still reasonably high on BGG despite
being solved/broken.

There's also many people on BGG who have a "mission" of getting people to play
less boring games. I'll gladly rank Monopoly lower than its true value because
in relative terms I want it to lose as much ground as possible. It's also
noteworthy that they have different categories (overall ranking, strategy
games, family games, war games etc.). The family games ranking is very useful
when buying games for the occasional game night (Monopoly replacement).

There's also the (sometimes artificial) divide between thematic games
(commonly referred to as Ameritrash) and strategy focused games (commonly
referred to as Eurogames). Both archetypes are great fun for me but some
people prefer a rich story and immersion (say Imperial Assault where you play
a bunch of Rebels facing off against the Empire) and some want their games to
be more pure optimization exercises. Like I said I love both types but this
shows how hard it is to produce a unified ranking that makes everyone happy.

And of course their algorithm is far from great (imo). Some games stick around
for sentimental reasons or because they are hard to get, it's odd that they
don't unify versions of games etc. Same guess for the UI which is quite
horrible (once again imo).

------
VLM
"Complexity can be the result of elegant design" LOL its always the opposite.
More detail below:

The second to last paragraph is a direct analogy with programming where
outsiders think the best programmer is the one generating infinitely complex
code, but for people actually in the field the criteria is the reverse and the
best programmer solves the problem with the least complex code. Of course this
is somewhat political and some lisp-ish functional-ish languages are more
aerospace "simplicate and add lightness" than other more grindy languages
(java, cobol, whats the difference...)

A gaming insider's view of the last paragraph is the lead story in the latest
"C3I Magazine" is by the COIN series designer explaining the virtue,
measurement, and minimization of complexity as a series of games develop. On a
slightly tangential topic, C3I Magazine has an interesting although probably
unscalable solution to the magazine industry crisis.

------
jld89
It is pretty obvious to me that this is a natural trend in a lot of areas of
entertainment.

Game design techniques are refined with time it is only normal that
"classical" games get to the back rack as games develop to be more subtle,
simple and refined.

------
cwyers
> Monopoly is neither simple nor random

Well, it's not simple.

