Why bother Part 2- Electric Boogaloo

There’s a unique sort of interaction when you play a game like D&D. There are laws to how the game is played that aren’t down in the book, but phenomena that continually crop up in almost every game ever played. The shenanigans that players start out of the blue are always confusing and forcing the DM to totally improvise the situation. When proposed with an obstacle, players are more likely to just break it down than figure out the proper solution to it. Particularly the later is different from how someone might play a video game. In a video game, the player easily accepts the boundaries of its reality, but in a tabletop game, the player is much more likely to disbelieve that it’s the only way through. There are countless other ways to approach the situation, regardless of logical progression. John Harasyni compares such behavior to general psychology:


“To be sure, in spite of this important strain of goal-directedness and rationality in human behavior, human beings often fall quite short of the perfect rationality postulated by normative theories of rational behavior. There are at least two major reasons for this. One lies in the (often unconscious) emotional factors pointed out by various psychologists from Freud to Festinger...” [1]


This can be shown in all sorts of board games, regardless of the roleplay situation. The player is emotionally motivated to believe that there is something else to the situation, and is less likely to approach it from a sheer logical position. This is particularly seen in interactions with NPCs, Non-Player Characters, more so than puzzles. Since the game is based on playing a role, the emotional origins of the character comes into play far more often than the logical conclusion(s) of what would be ideal, for the most part. There is game theory on “belief operators” that will determine, or guess, at how a player will react to a situation, based off of previous experience and how they perceive the situation. Asheim Geir mentions several specific situations:



“-If two events are believed, then the conjuction is also believed
-an event that is always true is always believed
-an event that is never true is never believed,
-if an even tis believed, then the even that the event is believed is also believed
-if an event is not believed, then the event that the event is not believed is believed.” [2]

Although the whole process sounds convoluted, it breaks down how a player, is willing to accept something. Perhaps they are approached by an NPC with a red scarf, but the last red scarf wearing NPC they encountered tried to kill them. The player is immediately unlikely to believe that they are trustworthy whatsoever, and may very well never trust that NPC, regardless of what may be presented to them. This reckless self-preservation is even seen as a darwinistic instinct;
A way the player will adapt and try new solutions in order to find an ideal behavior.

“We have seen that classical game theory is formulated in terms of payoff functions for each of the players. There is a connection between the payoff functions of game theory and fitness function for individual players that links Darwin’s ideas to game theory.” [3]
- Evolutionary Game Theory, Natural Selection, and Darwinian Dynamics

This process of change is often one that any good game is designed to keep up with as well. The player and game both adapt to each other: As the player believes certain things to be true, it’s up to the dice and the DM to make sure that those beliefs are either shaken, or further confirmed, in order to encourage the player to continue or discontinue such behavior.

“Since beliefs in a sequential equilibrium are consistent with the strategy profile, beliefs are consistently updated as the game is played. Given these updated beliefs and the strategy profile, the behavior strategies used by a player maximizes her expected payoff at each of her information sets. Thus, as the game is played, a player has no incentive to deviate from her strategy at any of her information sets.” [4]
- Games and Decision Making

This can also be seen in how players interact with each other at the table. As they learn the relative patterns of each others characters, they formulate group strategies, sometimes to poor effect or surprising efficiency. The game encourages a type of military strategy, as if the whole table is a group of generals forced together in order to survive a war. Richard Duke talks about the significant of war-room strategy in board games:


“War or situation rooms are another useful example of a gestalt communication mode. These usually contain a cartographic map and/or physical model of the region of concern, but that are additional supporting systems which provide other information. Usually the physical representation (map and/or model) is kept current, and this updating makes it a dynamic process… These rooms are a careful abstraction of the most significant real-world characteristics... Gaming/simulation goes one step further than the war room example. In addition to the materials, gaming/simulation. will have a series of scenarios depicting possible courses of action.” [5]
- Richard Duke’s, “Gaming: The Future’s Language”


The tabletop roleplay format particularly encourages this, as the game isn’t entirely reliant on numbers. Instead, there are the two random factors: The game master who watches over the players and designs the events within the game to react to how they’ve reacted previously. Meanwhile, the dice throw in another random factor, to deter even the most logical of solutions. Game theory presses heavily on randomness for all of these reasons. Players are given wave upon wave of incentives to try and experiment with their environment, particularly one as volatile and adaptive as a roleplaying one. These motivations comes not only from the game, but from the players themselves, a self-replicating cycle.


It’s widely acknowledged that this is often what makes tabletop roleplay survive as a game style. Board games can always be replaced by computer functions that can randomize and make all of the numerical functions, but the computer cannot quantify the human factor. Instead, a human must take the helm of the game design, apply game theory, and plain personal reaction, in real time. The game master herself is, technically, a player, and experiences all of these same reactions, but in reverse effect. It’s a constant cycle of action and reaction that recycles itself as soon as it needs to. The whole free-form of it takes mathematical ideas and applies them to emotional and abstract concepts, keeping theory and practice entwined into a functioning game format that simply cannot be replicated.





[1] Harasyni, John. Rational behavior and bargaining equilibrium in games and social situations. London: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
[2] Gier, Asheim. The Consistent Preferences Approach to Deductive reasoning in games. Norway: Springer, 2006.
[3] Thomas, Vincent, and Brown Joel. Evolutionary Game Theory, Natural Selection, and Darwinian Dynamics. London: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
[4] Charalambos, Aliprantis, and Chakrabarti Subir. Games and Decision Making. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
[5] Duke, Richard. Gaming: The Future's Language. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1974.