Science of Board Games - Jess Fostekew, Marcus du Sautoy and Dave Neale

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Speaker 7 BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Speaker 8 Hello, you're about to listen to The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 1 Episodes will be released on Wednesdays wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 8 But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now. on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 9 Hello, I'm Robin Ince.

Speaker 8 And I'm Brian Cox, and this is The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 1 Now, when Brian and I are on tour, as you probably imagine, on the tour bus, more often than not, we play board games.

Speaker 10 But it doesn't go very well.

Speaker 1 Partly because of the nature of Brian, partly because the nature of board games. Cluedo.
Cludeau is one of the ones that I think is most rubbish.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I always knew who did it. Robin in the library.

Speaker 6 That was it,

Speaker 9 I didn't commit any murders.

Speaker 1 I was just in the library. I never got round to doing the murders.
I love libraries. So that was the first.

Speaker 1 Then it was Professor Cox in the observatory with the atomic bomb. So that ruined everything.

Speaker 1 Then he would refuse to allow us to open the envelope to find out who'd done it because he said it would collapse the wave function, so that was an issue.

Speaker 1 And then it totally went down the drain when Brian said we could use DNA evidence.

Speaker 8 Yeah, so we moved on to Monopoly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and that didn't go very well because someone bought the water utility and everyone else died of dysentery.

Speaker 8 Today we are looking at the science of board games. What can we learn about each other's minds from how we play games? Just how much is luck versus skill?

Speaker 8 Is it unwise to play risk against a mathematician?

Speaker 1 Never play snakes and ladders against Steve Baxhall. That goes on for ages.
So today we are joined by a mathematician, a games designer and a professional twerp. Their description not mine.

Speaker 1 And they are.

Speaker 10 I'm Dave Neal. I'm a board game designer and I've also done research in play and psychology.
And my favourite game is incredibly hard to pick because I think games are just so diverse.

Speaker 10 It's a bit like asking for my favourite thing.

Speaker 10 But I will say The Mind, which is a very simple card game, is one of my favorite games at the moment, partly because it's just so simple and yet it activates part of my brain.

Speaker 10 I think I didn't even know I had.

Speaker 7 Follow that. I'm Jess Fostercue.
I'm a comedian and an avid board game player. And my favourite game is Azul

Speaker 7 because it's patterns and strategy and luck, and it's possible to play kindly and it has a definitive end.

Speaker 7 And it was the game I was playing when I proposed and she said yes.

Speaker 11 I'm Marcus DeSotoy. I'm a mathematician and also author of a book called Around the World in 80 Games.

Speaker 11 Again, very difficult to choose one of those 80 is my favorite, but I'm going to choose the last one, which is actually a game we don't know how to play.

Speaker 11 It's called the Glass Bead Game, and it's a game that features in a book by Herman Hess.

Speaker 11 And I read it when I was a student and I fell in love with the idea of playing this game because it seemed to be to play the game well, you had to kind of synthesize knowledge.

Speaker 11 You had to bring music, history, mathematics, science together by telling a story through the game. And I thought, yeah, that's what I want to be when I grow up.
I want to be a glass bead game player.

Speaker 1 And this is our panel.

Speaker 1 First question for you, Dave.

Speaker 12 What is your favorite thing then?

Speaker 10 My favourite thing?

Speaker 10 I would say socks.

Speaker 6 Fair enough.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a very, very strong answer and pragmatic too.

Speaker 6 And I want to find.

Speaker 1 So, Azu,

Speaker 1 is it a solo game?

Speaker 1 Or is it a game you were playing together?

Speaker 7 You need at least two, you can have up to four.

Speaker 1 And were you winning at the time that you proposed?

Speaker 7 I can't remember. I was in such a state of extraordinary stress and anxiety.
I've got no idea who was winning. Yeah, I've got no idea who was winning is the answer.

Speaker 8 Marcus, what is the definition of a game?

Speaker 11 That is a really tricky question to answer. In fact, it's one that Wittgenstein wrestled with.
I mean, he had this idea that defining words is actually really difficult.

Speaker 11 And he had this thing called language games, that you only know what a word means by the way that you play with it and use it.

Speaker 11 And his example of a word that was really hard to pin down was the word game.

Speaker 11 And so he said, you know, every time you try and define what a game is, you include things which you didn't intend to include and you exclude other things.

Speaker 11 But I think there have been some attempts, and the definition I like is: playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

Speaker 11 No, but actually, I think it captures a lot because a game actually is an expression of free will. You go enter into the game because you want to play the game.
So it's very important.

Speaker 11 And the game should be not useful for anything. That's really important.
As soon as it's teaching you something or you're earning money, it becomes work.

Speaker 11 So I think it's really important that the quality of a game is it should be just for the fun of it. The other important thing, and this is something Wittgenstein agreed on, a game involves rules.

Speaker 11 Everybody who's tried to define a game has included rules as an important part of that.

Speaker 11 And that's why I think actually a mathematical insight into the way games work is a really powerful one because mathematics is really good at understanding the implications of rules.

Speaker 11 And so in this book, Around the World in 80 Games, I take a lot of the games that I love playing and actually I give away away all my tips for how to use mathematics to win at these games.

Speaker 11 Because basically, people stop playing games with me because they say, oh, DeSoto, you all know some clever trick to win at risk or monopoly, for example.

Speaker 11 So, in a way, this is to try and get people to play with me again is to give away all my tricks.

Speaker 1 Does that mean when someone does beat you in a game, they feel like the surge of ego at that point?

Speaker 11 I crushed DeSoto.

Speaker 6 Yeah, especially when it's something like

Speaker 11 yeah, he can't play snakes and ladders, he couldn't use this, and then they realize, well, there isn't any strategy to that game.

Speaker 8 Dave, I should ask you

Speaker 8 the same question. How would you define a game? Do you agree or disagree with Wittgenstein?

Speaker 10 Yeah, I liked that definition that Marcus just gave. I mean, a game is like a discrete system that we can engage with, and that essentially doesn't really have any impact on the outside world.

Speaker 10 And this is the thing about play as well: is that play in general is about this space that is separated off from having consequences for like the real world and our daily lives.

Speaker 10 It's a space we can enter, we can have fun, we can try out different things, and there isn't going to be impact on our daily lives. It's just for exploration and creativity and that kind of thing.

Speaker 10 I guess I would say play is willingly doing that, it's entering this other space where we can just try out things creatively and mess around.

Speaker 10 And then a game becomes kind of doing that with rules attached, where you actually formalize it to some extent and you play within certain bounds and expectations.

Speaker 11 But there's an interesting thing that quite often a game has to have a separate space and a separate time it's almost like a parallel universe that you create and you live inside that world and then you come back to the real world i quite like that element of a game that that kind of escape is the key the key thing that you both said seems to be this voluntary aspect to it that you're focusing in on it's something that you you should never force a rule i mean i really think a forced game and that happens every christmas for nearly a year

Speaker 10 but that's life isn't it life is a forced game yeah i guess we have enough of that from just what we're forced to do in life and then the game is a nice voluntary escape into something else.

Speaker 10 It gives you a sense of agency, and that's one of the things people love about it.

Speaker 11 Agency, I think, is a really important word here, because I think the best games are ones where you can express yourself.

Speaker 11 So something like Snakes and Ladders is a really failed game because you have no agency. You're just at the mercy of the roll of the dice.

Speaker 7 I love how much you hate that game.

Speaker 11 But the weird thing is, that game has very ancient origins from India that is actually a game about teaching good and bad karma. The ladders are good actions, and the snakes are bad actions.

Speaker 11 And it would be a teaching tool in sort of Jain philosophy and Hindu philosophy to teach the impact of these good actions. And the winning square was Nirvana or Moksha, paradise.

Speaker 11 And the weird thing in the Indian version is that if you missed it, you were reborn. You had to keep on going round and round until you eventually got there.
Yeah, it can take some time to get it.

Speaker 8 Isn't there a kind of an unforced error in it, or whatever you call it, where isn't getting drunk or or inebriated a useful thing?

Speaker 6 That's really weird.

Speaker 11 So, there's a lovely piece of mathematics, not to play the game, but to make the game.

Speaker 11 So, what do you want, and Dave, you'll know this, about making a game which is that perfect point where it doesn't go on too long, but doesn't finish too quickly.

Speaker 11 So, in snakes and ladders, it's a decision about how many snakes versus ladders.

Speaker 11 And so, I took this game that's in the Pitts Rivers Museum, which came from India, and I analyzed how long it took to finish the game, and it was about 59 rolls of the dice.

Speaker 11 And then I thought, well, that's quite long. So, So I took a snake out, which should mean that it would be easier to win the game.

Speaker 11 And this snake, exactly as you said, Brian, was the snake attached to drunkenness. So I thought, okay, let's take that out, and you should be able to get to paradise quicker.

Speaker 11 But it turns out that this snake helps you.

Speaker 11 Because when I did the Amass, it turned out it takes 75 rolls of the dice without drunkenness.

Speaker 6 I was like, that's really

Speaker 6 weird.

Speaker 11 So the interesting thing is, this snake allows you to have a second go at a really long ladder. So if you miss the ladder first time, the snake takes you back down again.
You get a second chance.

Speaker 11 So I'm sure the Jain philosophers didn't mean this, but the message of this game is drunkenness helps you to reach nirvana.

Speaker 1 You have really reached the sweet spot of academic research now, haven't you?

Speaker 1 Another £20,000 for more booze and dice.

Speaker 1 Jess, I suppose the important thing to ask you is, how much has Wittgenstein influenced your game plan?

Speaker 7 Thanks, Robin.

Speaker 1 And one of the things that we were talking talking about before we came on was that you said that you have become, and now this is interesting as well because of your first answer today, you've become more ruthless as a game player.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 1 Where does that come from, do you think?

Speaker 7 And I think it also ties in that I found it really interesting that part of these definitions of games were that they were, you don't learn anything from them, and that there's no

Speaker 7 that to me implies that there's no moralistic element. But I would say I was brought up with quite a silly, naughty family,

Speaker 7 but we played kindly, I think. I mean, I had one granddad who was just an out-and-out cheat,

Speaker 7 but you just sort of knew he was going to do that, and that was part of the fun.

Speaker 1 Can I also say, What was his cheating be? Like, what kind of games?

Speaker 7 It's just because he actually taught me a card game called cheat. Oh, yeah, it's great.
Yeah, where the whole point of it is to cheat.

Speaker 7 And also, so, for example, it was actually, I had a grandparent on each side.

Speaker 7 I had my mum's mum was a brilliant mathematician, and she was incredible at Rummy Cub, which was close to being my favourite. But she'd just invent and change the rules every time we played.

Speaker 7 Sometimes you were allowed to play a smiley face from the beginning, sometimes you weren't. Sometimes you could break up a line that had a smiley face, and sometimes you couldn't.

Speaker 7 Anyway, gone very niche.

Speaker 7 I used to get really upset if people played ruthlessly. People played like sharks.
Especially if I was playing like a world-building

Speaker 7 game like Risk. A game like that, where actually, you know, you've got to deceive, you've got to team up, collude.

Speaker 7 I would get genuinely, really upset if people broke what I thought was an allegiance with me. And I genuinely did think it was a reflection on what they were like as a person.

Speaker 6 I think that's really important.

Speaker 7 I still kind of do.

Speaker 7 And I think perhaps I've become less earnest as a person and more able as I've grown up to go, well, it is a game that does end in the confines of the game.

Speaker 7 And you'd find out something about this person's personality as a gamer, but not necessarily about how they're functioning in the world. And you don't get to judge them the whole life.

Speaker 6 Not entirely.

Speaker 10 Can I also just say something on the the learning thing? Yeah. It's not that learning doesn't happen, it's that the point isn't to learn.

Speaker 10 Because obviously you can learn a lot of things through playing a game, you can learn a lot of things through play.

Speaker 10 But the difference is if you go into it with the aim of doing that, then it's no longer a game.

Speaker 10 But if you go into it with the aim of just enjoying it and playing it, you will learn that stuff, but it's when it becomes the aim that's the different thing.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that's brilliant.

Speaker 7 The same theory that the reason that we love playing games so much is that it coincided with the emergence of consciousness and that it was a way to explore the mind of the other because you need a theory of mind to play a game you have to realize that what your opponent will do is something completely different from what you do and the call and response that happens there well i think it's also really interesting that if you're playing with strangers you have almost a more open field to play ruthlessly and play the game to the best that you can play the game which is say you've got two options and one of them you'll both gain you as many points at that point in the game but one of them will screw over your opponent and the other won't.

Speaker 7 It is best to play the horrible version of that. But I play most of my games with my loved ones, with my family, where there's another consideration there.

Speaker 7 And you think it's people pleasing, I think, as well as people.

Speaker 10 I want to scroll over the most, though.

Speaker 6 I'm sure

Speaker 1 that bit where you're with your eight-year-old and you go, I am going to just wipe the floor with them.

Speaker 1 But I feel, having read some late 19th-century psychotherapy, that this may bring on later issues in terms of my care home choice.

Speaker 6 Well, bye.

Speaker 9 Do you ever do that? Because I know you.

Speaker 7 I do that loads. And actually, so I feel like I should admit, it's not a noble reason that I've started playing more ruthlessly.
It's because my partner is incredibly brilliant at games and lucky.

Speaker 7 And that's infuriating. So I've become more and more ruthless.

Speaker 7 But she's so lucky that the first time she played a game with my son, having learnt that I do let him win a bit for my future care home, she desperately tried to let him win and just kept winning.

Speaker 7 She couldn't do it. She's so lucky, she kept thrashing him.

Speaker 8 Dave, given that, as Marcus said, games seem to be somehow quite closely linked to consciousness, so closely linked to our humanity. If we go back into the past, when do we first see games emerge?

Speaker 10 There's like archaeological evidence. I think the oldest game board ever found is about 8,000 years old.
That immediately tells us we were playing board games before we invented the wheel.

Speaker 10 Something about them them was important and significant enough to emerge that early on and be an important part of our culture.

Speaker 1 That makes Monopoly very difficult, doesn't it? Because there's nothing on the chance cards and the car's got no wheels. So that is going to really...

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah, it's a very different version of Monopoly when you go back that far. Yeah.

Speaker 8 Do you have an example of one of the early games that we've discovered?

Speaker 10 The one I'm thinking of, I know the archaeological one that was found, like the archaeological record of about 8,000 years ago, I don't think anyone knows exactly what that is.

Speaker 10 It just looks like some kind of game board. But then you have these other old games like Senate, for example, which is about 5,000 years old and played by the ancient Egyptians.

Speaker 10 And often we don't quite know how they were played, but we can kind of work it out. Like, Senet was very important to Egyptian culture.

Speaker 10 It's in the tombs of pharaohs, it's on paintings on the walls of tombs.

Speaker 10 It was thought to represent like some kind of link to the afterlife, and it was thought to help people understand how to navigate the passage to the afterlife when they die.

Speaker 10 So it had this deep cultural symbolism to it.

Speaker 8 And what is the representation of it? Is it a game board?

Speaker 10 There are paintings of kind of one person playing with the board in front of them and the pieces on it, and there isn't an opponent because the idea was there playing with the part of themselves that's in the afterlife.

Speaker 10 Like it's this.

Speaker 7 Sounds like a cross between bogle and a Ouija board.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yes.

Speaker 1 A Ouija boggle is great. You're going to make a fortune on that this Christmas.
I just like the idea of going into a pyramid and finding all the mummies have been left on a twister mat.

Speaker 6 That would have been quite good. That would have been very different.

Speaker 11 There's another nice nice ancient game, about 5,000 years old, which is the Royal Game of Org,

Speaker 11 which is, again, is a racing game like Sennett, but it's a slightly better game.

Speaker 11 But there's an interesting connection to modern science, or ancient science, sorry, that the board, there's a common line of twelve squares that you race along, and you race five pieces along those squares.

Speaker 11 And it's thought this might be a little version of the cosmos, that the twelve squares that you race along together are like the constellations in the night sky.

Speaker 11 And then at that time, there were five five planets that they could see with the naked eye, and that they were racing the planets through the constellations.

Speaker 11 So, that's another idea that maybe we were, you know, once we understood that the universe is controlled by rules, our games were like little mini experiments.

Speaker 11 We say, okay, well, what if we crystallize those rules in a game and see what the implications of those rules are? And then maybe that would tell us something about how our universe works.

Speaker 8 So, it seems the picture you're painting of the first games is they're more entwined with the rest of culture than they are today. They're not just playthings in those days.

Speaker 10 Or if they started off in that way they quickly became more entwined with culture and ideas because I think partly there was this natural connection as well with like the idea of fate and chance and luck and so when people saw the way the world worked with sort of chance and fate and things happening they saw that kind of reflected in the way chance was used in games and so you get this connection between those two things and they become a way to when we face like chance and and luck in real life it can be quite devastating, it can be difficult to comprehend, understand, difficult to deal with, and then a game gives you kind of a way of tackling that in a way that's comprehensible and safer and more understandable.

Speaker 10 And it's interesting that, for example, the board game pandemic sells really well in real-world pandemics.

Speaker 10 And it's almost like people want a way of having an overview of something which in the real world feels quite incomprehensible and difficult to understand.

Speaker 10 And you have this representation of a system, and this is the way Senate worked, as a representation of of a part of the afterlife, something unknowable, something scary, becomes more knowable and more manageable and navigable when it's put in the form of a game.

Speaker 11 And both of these games actually gave rise to what I believe is one of the greatest games that emerged out of the ancient world, which is Batgammon.

Speaker 11 Because basically, those are very early versions of racing games, racing pieces around with the throw of the dice. And I think it's sort of evolved into modern-day Batgammon.

Speaker 1 I was wondering, board games, first of all, as you said, imagining the consciousness of someone else, the fact that we begin to realize there's thoughts within everyone generally. And then,

Speaker 1 but also that idea of, you know, Robin Dunbar has talked a lot about things like the importance of grooming, you know, in terms of basically the flea picking that we see within chimpanzees.

Speaker 1 So would a game possibly have something like that as well? You've got bored of picking the fleas off your friend.

Speaker 1 And so you've got to find another way of creating that kind of scenario, that kind of connection. Would it have anything to do with that?

Speaker 11 I think there is an element of that.

Speaker 11 And I think that word connection is really important because I think, for example, I just came back from India, I went to a wedding, and the wedding very often two people don't know each other and they need some safe place in order to try and understand who their partner is.

Speaker 11 And so, they start every Indian wedding with a series of games that the couple play.

Speaker 11 So, I think that element of using a game as a safe space to understand who somebody is, also a safe space actually to explore your own personality and try things out.

Speaker 7 I mean, there's that's an incredibly dangerous first date.

Speaker 7 You got thrashed on all four games. You'd be like, great, this is the rest of my life.

Speaker 1 I think you were winning, by the way, when you asked it to mate.

Speaker 6 Just take it that way.

Speaker 11 Well, it's funny that Pandemic actually emerged out of a married couple that the man was vicious in gameplay, and the woman just said, I'm just never playing games with you again because you always use psychological manipulation.

Speaker 11 And so he was devastated. So he came up with this kind of new idea, the concept of a collaborative game.

Speaker 11 So he made Pandemic because he wanted to play games with his wife, but they play together against the game. So it's a very different quality of game, I think, pandemic that emerged in recent years.

Speaker 1 Well Marcus, you met your wife, didn't you, when you were drunk playing Snakes and Ladders with her, is that right?

Speaker 1 But yeah, that theory of so that does play its part as well. So there might be some of that sense of connection, but it's not the most important part.

Speaker 11 Games just play just multiple roles.

Speaker 11 I mean, there's a lot of evidence, I think, of neurodiverse people finding the game a very safe space to explore parts of their personality that in normal life are just too frightening.

Speaker 11 So I think that's why Dungeons and Dragons, you know, which you see the beginning of Stranger Things, it's a really wonderful place to just try out.

Speaker 11 bits of your personality that you might be frightened to in uh with the reaction. I think the idea of rules just helps somebody to just understand what is allowed and what isn't allowed.

Speaker 8 You said to me earlier that as a mathematician, your family now don't like playing games with you because you analyze, I was going to say over-analyze, let's just say analyze again.

Speaker 8 So Monopoly, for example, which feels, I think, to most of us like a completely random game.

Speaker 6 It's a highly flawed game as well. I mean, I hate Monopoly.

Speaker 11 I really don't understand why is Monopoly everyone's game of choice at Christmas time. It is, I'll tell you, one of the things, a couple of qualities that make a good game.

Speaker 11 One is that it shouldn't finish before it starts.

Speaker 11 And very often, you see, like chess, if you're playing somebody who's really good at chess, you know, Donald Trump against Gary Kasparov, it's not going to be an interesting game of chess.

Speaker 11 That has finished before it even starts.

Speaker 6 I'd pay to watch that.

Speaker 11 Why don't you like Monopoly? Yeah, so I think that's a game which doesn't satisfy my second quality, which is a game shouldn't finish before it ends.

Speaker 11 So, Monopoly is a game which finishes halfway through the game, and you just spend the second half of the game, just the person you know who's going to win, bankrupting everyone else.

Speaker 11 It's the most boring game ever.

Speaker 8 But you have a mathematical base strategy.

Speaker 6 I do have a mathematical strategy. I will share.
I will share my mathematical strategy with you.

Speaker 11 So, what is the most visited square on the monopoly board? Does anyone want to know?

Speaker 11 Jail, exactly, because there are so many ways to end up on the jail square. You can get sent to jail, you can visit jail.

Speaker 6 Again, Donald Trump. Yeah.

Speaker 11 You know, you throw a double, you're allowed to go again. You throw a double, you can go again.
But if you throw three doubles, you get sent to jail. I think that's really unfair.

Speaker 11 Anyway, but you can't buy jail. But then you say, well, mathematically, you know, you throw two dice.
What's the most common throw of two dice?

Speaker 11 Well, Dave's actually got it tattooed on his arm because he's got a six and a one tattooed on his arm, which is seven.

Speaker 11 And seven is actually the most popular throw because there are so many ways to make a seven. Six and one, five and two, four and three, three and four, two and five, one and six.

Speaker 11 Now, actually, seven sends you to, I think, community chess, so that's not much good. But six and eight are also common scores.

Speaker 11 So out of jail, most people are throwing dice, which sends them into the orange regions of properties.

Speaker 11 So my strategy is to buy up all the orange properties, stack them with hotels and bankrupt everyone as they come out of jail.

Speaker 1 Do you find, Dave, have you, as someone who designs games, have your tactics changed through the learning of designing your own games?

Speaker 10 Yeah, I mean, I play so many games now. As a designer, I have to play a lot of games.

Speaker 10 I guess it's kind of like, so when you come to play a game, and I mean, a lot of what I design is a very kind of narrative-based.

Speaker 10 So a lot of what I design has like puzzles in it or choose your own adventure type stories in. So particularly when I'm playing that type of game, I can often almost like see under the hood, right?

Speaker 10 So I can kind of, I'm almost like, oh, this is clearly that kind of puzzle, so this is going to go here, and that's going to go, oh, yeah, it is.

Speaker 10 And so that can be quite frustrating for people I'm playing with who are like, wait, we haven't even understood what the puzzle is yet, and you've kind of just already gone, it's obviously this thing.

Speaker 10 So there is that. You do just get this affinity with it and understand a bit more about how things work, what's expected.

Speaker 7 That makes it sound similar to like if you're someone who writes stories or who's often got that, then when you're watching, you might, you know, a really good film, you'll be like, It's them, they did it.

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 10 you're that guy, but with games, yeah, I'm like that with games, which is a bit more frustrating because with a game, if you're playing with other people, you're all trying to work that out.

Speaker 10 Whereas, at least with a TV show, you can just kind of keep quiet, but with a game, the whole point is to do that. So then I'm just annoying people I'm with because

Speaker 8 I just want to say

Speaker 8 the one more strategy you spoke of. So you've got your monopoly strategy, which now everybody knows.

Speaker 6 Yeah, you can't play any one of Monopoly Monopoly.

Speaker 8 But

Speaker 8 it's your strategy for a paper, scissors, stone. Well,

Speaker 1 I think we should get Jess to commentate this because I don't know what the strategy is. So why don't you and me, Brian, play paper, scissors, stones? Because it's radio.

Speaker 6 He's not very good, radio. No, but Jesus.

Speaker 6 Jess is.

Speaker 1 Do you know what the first review in the Daily Telegraph said about this?

Speaker 1 So, Jess is going to commentate so the audience at home know what's going to happen.

Speaker 9 Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready.

Speaker 1 Okay, are you ready, Brian?

Speaker 11 You're going on three. Three, two, one, draw.

Speaker 6 Okay, then. Three, three, two, one, draw.

Speaker 7 Okay, two papers. They've both gone paper.

Speaker 11 Robin would already be disqualified because what you can't see on radio is that his paper was actually 90 degrees of audience.

Speaker 6 Exactly.

Speaker 11 So the rules, because I played in international championship.

Speaker 6 You'd be disqualified.

Speaker 6 But that's this is...

Speaker 7 He had woochy paper.

Speaker 8 This gets to the interesting bit without all this fluff.

Speaker 6 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 6 No, no, no.

Speaker 6 No,

Speaker 8 an international championship, because most people would assume that this game is completely random. So how can you have an international championship? Anybody could win it.

Speaker 16 Is that correct?

Speaker 11 The point about this game is Siddashi is is very close to being a mathematician because I call a mathematician a pattern searcher. That's actually what we try and do.

Speaker 11 We look at the chaos around us and we try and identify: is there some pattern going on here?

Speaker 11 So, when you're playing rock, paper, scissors, what you want to do is to see if the person you're playing has got some sort of strategy that they always, or some little tick that they always follow scissors with paper.

Speaker 11 I mean, some people just have this pattern. So, if you play enough rounds, you suddenly see, oh, I know exactly, they've done paper, I know what they're going to do next.
So that's one side of it.

Speaker 11 If you can spot the patterns, you're in. But on the my side, if I'm playing rock, paper, scissors, I want to leave no patterns at all.

Speaker 11 So when I took part in this international championship, I actually used the decimal expansion of pi to make

Speaker 11 why is that funny?

Speaker 6 They're laughing, but they're also taking.

Speaker 11 I'm going to try that again. I use the decimal expansion of pi to make my choices because pi has a decimal expansion which is genuinely random, we believe.

Speaker 11 So if it was one, two, three, I chose rock, four, five, six in the decimal expansion, paper, seven, eight, nine, scissors. And if it was zero, I had a free choice.

Speaker 8 But you have to remember pi.

Speaker 11 Yeah, that was actually a problem. So I actually had it written on

Speaker 11 because I've got a terrible memory.

Speaker 6 So I actually had to have it written here.

Speaker 8 Are there no rules in this? Because it would seem like it was almost cheating to have this crib sheet written up your arm.

Speaker 11 Yeah, well, the person I lost to, when I looked at his arm, he had a Fibonacci spiral to him.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 11 I think he was using a Fibonacci number.

Speaker 9 Go on, then. Ready?

Speaker 6 Okay. Right, you ready? Three, three, two, one, draw.

Speaker 11 Right, see, I'll be drawing it.

Speaker 6 It worked, very well.

Speaker 6 It works.

Speaker 11 We probably should say for those listening at home that that was rock from me and scissors from Robin.

Speaker 1 Very poor decision by me.

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Speaker 1 So actually, that's what I wanted to ask.

Speaker 9 What do you think?

Speaker 1 I'll ask you first, Jess. What do you think is the most a game that you should really avoid because of the possibility of irritation?

Speaker 1 Because you know, again, that kind of time when a family are gathered together, there must be a league of anger that can occur.

Speaker 7 My family gets pretty testy over Scrabble.

Speaker 11 Okay. Yeah, I think Scrabble, I agree with that actually.

Speaker 7 I think the generations have different approaches. And my generation, that's geriatric millennial, you're welcome.

Speaker 7 We came in with a lot of two-letter word and clumping strategies that infuriated the boomers.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and that brought a really spicy element to Christmas after Christmas for us.

Speaker 7 It got to the point where the deliberations pre-game, in terms of setting out what rules we were going to play by, took longer than the game itself.

Speaker 8 But davids are cooperative games, aren't they? So they don't have to be competitive.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I mean, most of what I designed is cooperative games where you work together. Like we mentioned, pandemic earlier, which was one of the first big, successful cooperative games.

Speaker 10 You each have a hand of cards and you're trying to move around a map of the world and collaborate together to exchange cards, to get sets which become cures for diseases.

Speaker 10 And so you're trying to collaborate to do that. Some people are completely unaware that that type of board game exists.

Speaker 10 They only think of competitive ones, and for some people, it's a real kind of eye-opener and a joy when they discover it.

Speaker 10 Because for some people, it's like, wow, this is a way of playing a game I really like.

Speaker 10 And they might not even like competitive games, and they suddenly realize there's something completely different.

Speaker 10 And this sense of collaborating together and working together can just be incredibly satisfying. It's a different kind of experience.

Speaker 10 In the kind of stuff I design, some of it's like escape rooms you play at home. I guess a lot of people know what an escape room is, where you're solving multiple puzzles.

Speaker 10 It's like that, but you do it at home, you open the box, you have lots of puzzles in it, you do it in a sequence.

Speaker 10 There are games that are based on communication, like the mind I mentioned earlier, like this limited communication, and you have to kind of read each other, and it's very satisfying when you...

Speaker 10 It basically, these kind of games create this environment where, when they work, you just get this thrill of working together as one and this sense of elation that you have jointly achieved some goal together.

Speaker 10 And that's a really satisfying feeling.

Speaker 8 You describe it because you said the mind. You chose it as your favorite game.
Can you describe describe what that is?

Speaker 10 Yeah, I love it because it's so incredibly simple. It's one of these games where when it came out, I think all game designers were like, why didn't I think of that?

Speaker 10 Because it's just, all it is is 100 cards numbered one to 100, and you shuffle them. At the beginning, you just deal one out to each player, and you're working together.

Speaker 10 You look at your number, but you don't show anybody else. And you then have to play them into the middle of the table face up.

Speaker 10 from the lowest number to the highest number without talking or directly communicating your number to other people. So you just have to look around,

Speaker 10 wait. Like if you have 99, you know you're going to be waiting towards the end.
If you have like a low number, you're going to be playing earlier.

Speaker 10 But you're trying to read other people, judge what number they might have, and play things in the right sequence.

Speaker 10 So the main sort of part of your brain that's activated is almost like this, you're like inner psychic. You're like just actually

Speaker 10 trying to read people and read minds literally is

Speaker 10 and I've never known any other game that really focuses on that. And when it works, it's amazing.

Speaker 10 When you've been playing it a few times, you kind of get into sync with the group you're playing with the more you play it.

Speaker 10 And the moment when you're kind of sitting looking at each other, and like you put down a 39, then the next person puts down 42, then 48, then 50, all in correct sequence quite quickly.

Speaker 10 And you look at each other and you're like, How did that happen?

Speaker 7 I'm getting flashbacks to A-level drama.

Speaker 1 I was getting Arthur C. Clarke's mysterious world.
You know, that Brian's going, maybe there is truth in psychic powers.

Speaker 1 Okay, he's not thinking that.

Speaker 1 But that is how did I know he wasn't thinking that well.

Speaker 6 But I'm

Speaker 1 that does sound to me, Jess, that does sound really delightful.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think it is interesting. And again, you learn so much about people.
It does bring back again to that, you're not meant to learn anything from it, or that not be the point.

Speaker 7 But for me, I don't mind it being the point that I'm going to learn that, you know, the person I'm playing with communicates with really wide eyes because they've got a low low number, or you know,

Speaker 7 or is great at competing. Some people are going to be brilliant at that compared to others, and they might not know that they were.

Speaker 7 That's the sort of thing that you, I suppose, practice can improve, but there's going to be an element of innate talent at how good you are at conveying or communicating without minimal verbal messaging.

Speaker 8 I'm just blinking 48 times.

Speaker 6 So that's not the point.

Speaker 6 Some people are going to find that really frustrating.

Speaker 10 But yeah, some people hate it.

Speaker 10 I've played with some people who just don't get it or don't have the patience because if you're sitting there and there's four of you, you deal out four cards and you have 90, 92, 94, and 98, you're going to be sitting there a long time before anybody plays a card.

Speaker 10 So you need a lot of patience because the person with the 90 who's got the lowest number is thinking, I'm going to be, I'm the highest number, so I just need to sit and wait.

Speaker 10 And then like 20 minutes passes and they're like...

Speaker 10 Maybe I'm not the highest number. But yeah, it does help you understand and connect with people in a different way.
I think it's really interesting as a kind of bonding exercise.

Speaker 10 And this is one thing about playing games as well that we haven't really mentioned is how much of a bonding thing it can be to play with somebody in any kind of way.

Speaker 8 Marcus, I wanted to ask you about one of the very famous Nobel Prize that was awarded for game theory. So John Nash.
Because

Speaker 8 to this point, we've talked about games as play.

Speaker 8 But when a Nobel Prize is awarded for something called game theory, that becomes rather more...

Speaker 11 Yeah, and it's quite extraordinary. Yeah, I mean, 15 of the Nobel Prizes for economics have been given to mathematicians for analyzing games.

Speaker 11 Because, of course, that's the point. A game isn't just an isolated thing, it's actually a model of something which happens in real life.

Speaker 11 So, a lot of game theory is about analyzing the implications of rules in things like economics, politics, or warfare.

Speaker 11 And Nash came up with this thing called the Nash equilibrium, that you can analyze the way a game works. And if everyone is playing perfectly, you should be able to work out how the game evolves.

Speaker 11 And there are some lovely examples of games that have been analyzed by game theorists.

Speaker 11 One of the ones, a lot of people have probably heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma, but the one I really like is called the ultimatum game. So I wonder whether I could play this with Robin and Brian.

Speaker 11 So the game works like this. I'm going to give Robin £100.
It's a monopoly money.

Speaker 6 Very, very good. You see, there you go.

Speaker 11 The game is that you have to decide how to divide this money between you and Brian. And Brian will then vote on whether he accepts the offer or not.

Speaker 11 But if he rejects it, I get the money back and neither of you get anything. You're both greedy.
You're trying to get as much as possible. But basically,

Speaker 11 what have you got to offer Brian? Basically, to buy his vote. How much have you got to give up of your 100, do you think, to buy his vote?

Speaker 1 Genuinely,

Speaker 1 I probably would beat 50-50, but I'm going to say...

Speaker 8 That's what I would do.

Speaker 6 Would you do 50-50?

Speaker 11 Oh, my God, you're so nice, you two.

Speaker 8 No, it's obvious, isn't it? Because I suppose the strategy is not for you to take the money back.

Speaker 8 It seems to me that a 50-50 split is guaranteed.

Speaker 6 Yeah, but it would have to be a very straight.

Speaker 8 Would any of you, if it was 50-50?

Speaker 6 Well, let's play it with James. I don't think anybody was going to play with it.
I'm 100.

Speaker 1 And you're going to play it with Dave, so let's find out.

Speaker 19 Because you've said you're ruthless.

Speaker 6 But remember, you're greedy.

Speaker 11 The important thing is you're both greedy. In these games, it's important you're greedy.
You're trying to keep as much as possible. You're greedy.

Speaker 7 You can have 40.

Speaker 11 And now that's interesting because 40 is less than 60. Would you accept 40?

Speaker 7 It's so much more than none, Dave.

Speaker 6 It is more than none. It is seven.

Speaker 1 I like the way you brought maths into that as well.

Speaker 10 Okay, I'll accept 40.

Speaker 6 But you can see that.

Speaker 6 What if she'd offered you 10?

Speaker 11 Would you have...

Speaker 11 No, exactly. You see, you would say,

Speaker 6 it's still a lot more than none.

Speaker 11 It's still, yeah, but it's still worth spending the £10

Speaker 11 to punish her

Speaker 11 for a bad division. And this is the interesting thing, because the Nash equilibrium here says that you should actually accept one pound because one pound is better than no pounds.

Speaker 11 But we feel that actually, I'm not going to accept, I'm prepared to spend one pound to punish somebody for the division. So the interesting thing is 40, you said, yeah, that's fine.

Speaker 11 So where is the sweet spot when most people play this game?

Speaker 11 And the weird thing is there's a piece of mathematics called the golden ratio, which actually seems to define where the sweet spot is where somebody says, I'm going to spend my money to punish the person, or I'll accept because that's just enough to feel

Speaker 11 like I'm benefiting, although the other person has got more. So, the golden ratio is a proportion kind of in art and in nature that comes up.

Speaker 8 So, to be specific, for a hundred pounds.

Speaker 6 It's about £38.

Speaker 11 So, £40, you both kind of went like £40, I'd be okay with. But anything less than that, you're beginning to feel, nah,

Speaker 11 their proportion to what they had at the beginning is just a bit bigger than what I got to what she's kept. So, the golden ratio seems to be that sweet spot.

Speaker 8 And how does this become more widely applicable? Because obviously the Nobel Prize was not awarded for that.

Speaker 11 You'd be surprised. So this is about.

Speaker 11 The interesting thing is a lot of games are about negotiation, deception.

Speaker 11 And so just a simple game like that can actually tease out what might be, you know, somebody in a position of power, what do they need to offer in order to win or feel like everyone is satisfied with how the game finishes.

Speaker 8 It's interesting because your favourite game, so you are leaning towards complexity. You don't like games that are pure challenge.

Speaker 11 Something like Backgammon. I learned Backgammon in one minute, but every time I play it, it's a different game each time.

Speaker 11 And I think that's the beauty of a really good game, is one that you can explain.

Speaker 11 I mean, if I'm still explaining the rules of a game to my family after five minutes, they've drifted off and we're watching Netflix.

Speaker 6 Well, that's what really good channels are available.

Speaker 6 At what point?

Speaker 1 Like, I'll ask you, Jess, first of all, but at what point?

Speaker 1 Because I've done that at Christmas, where someone buys, like, it's a game that's meant to just be a pocket game, and then you pull it out, and it's just instruction after instruction.

Speaker 1 What do we know, like for you? When would you go? That's too many.

Speaker 7 I've got much more patience as I've gotten older, but you know, in my 20s, I think one minute max. Yeah, that's all I've got for you, really, if I haven't got it.

Speaker 7 Whereas now, I sometimes go to board game cafes for fun and choose a new one that you know you're gonna actually your precious time, you're on the clock money-wise to be in there.

Speaker 7 But you go there to try a new game and then spend most of your time learning it the first time.

Speaker 7 You've got to take the hit the first time with really good games, but it's worth it for the long game because then you've learnt it then, and then every time you play it, it can get funner and more playful.

Speaker 10 I think it's a mistake people make at like Christmas and family time is you get out these games that either have quite a lot of rules and take quite a long time to learn.

Speaker 8 Escape from Cold It's. That's when I love escape from Coldists.

Speaker 6 Yeah, these are the things that I've been doing. Eddie Azardi at that, right?

Speaker 1 This was 30 years ago when he came to my flat and told me that I shouldn't have an airing cupboard because it was a level of luxury too much for creativity, right?

Speaker 13 And Eddie Azard

Speaker 1 made me the guard, even though I'd never played it before, which I think was a deliberate tactic so that Eddie would win.

Speaker 9 What do you reckon?

Speaker 10 I mean, that sounds perfectly viable.

Speaker 6 Yeah,

Speaker 10 I think that sounds. And like Marcus was saying about games that go on too long, like a lot of these games people play at Christmas, they seem to pick these games.

Speaker 10 I don't know why the games are popular. Trivial Pursuit often seems to go on too long.
Monopoly goes on too long.

Speaker 10 There's often these games you get out that can drag on for hours beyond their level of interest.

Speaker 10 Whereas what you want is these really quick, simple games that you learn in 30 seconds and that are short. That's what you want at Christmas time.

Speaker 10 Find those kind of games and that everybody can just get involved with. That's what you really need.

Speaker 1 Again, drunk, snake, and ladders.

Speaker 6 Drunk snakes and ladders.

Speaker 1 You know, it's only mentioned one snake there as well. I made it a singular state.
I'm drunk already. So,

Speaker 1 should we go to the audience questions, Bro?

Speaker 8 We asked the audience a question: what game do you never want to play again and why?

Speaker 1 Oh, this is nice. This is Schrodinger's Escape Room.
I have to spend the rest of my life with a cat and a strawberry.

Speaker 8 Twister, because I'm pregnant.

Speaker 1 Can I check? Are you pregnant because of a previous game of Twister?

Speaker 1 Game of Thrones. Felt it was dragon on a bit.

Speaker 1 That goes straight to the Radio 4 Pun Museum where it will be preserved.

Speaker 7 In a similar vein, somebody's put rowing games because you just can't get the cocks these days.

Speaker 1 Two people laughed in a different way there.

Speaker 11 The dating game, because it used to be electric, but now it's just electronic.

Speaker 6 Russian roulette. It didn't go well for me.

Speaker 1 Thank to our panel, Master Sotoy, Dave Neil and Jess Fostercue.

Speaker 1 Next week we're going to be at Cheltenham Science Festival with a special infinite monkey cage in which all the questions are going to be asked by children.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 It's going to be challenging, that one, isn't it? And it is.

Speaker 1 It really will be challenging because the first event Brian and I ever did, this was probably like 2009, 2010, like the first live event beyond Monkey Cage.

Speaker 1 There was a kid at the front, and Brian went to them like 10 years old and thought, oh, it's going to be a lovely, sweet question.

Speaker 1 And the question was,

Speaker 1 dark energy, is it merely a fiction created by scientists from an area of knowledge they have absolutely no idea about whatsoever?

Speaker 1 So we're waiting for that in Cheltenham.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Speaker 6 Thank you.

Speaker 19 Now nice again.

Speaker 1 Hello, Robin again. I just wanted to let you know about another podcast that I've been involved with recently.

Speaker 1 And it was fantastic, an absolute joy to join Greg Jenner at the Hay Festival for an episode of You're Dead to Me.

Speaker 6 Why didn't you tell me about that? I would have done it.

Speaker 1 Oh, I think you were busy or something.

Speaker 1 It was lovely being free from him for once. Anyway, shush Brian.
We talked about the history of printing. We had a great chat, and I hope you find it interesting.

Speaker 8 Why the history of printing?

Speaker 6 I could have.

Speaker 1 That's exactly why I didn't have you on because I knew you'd be interrupting all the time. Anyway, you can listen on BBC Sounds.
Just search for You're Dead to Me.

Speaker 7 I'm Helen Lewis, and I have a question. What links family WhatsApp dramas? I flounced off after someone made a particularly ignorant comment.
Russian state propaganda.

Speaker 20 It's a very good platform for spreading all this proputian position.

Speaker 7 And a woman who married in AI.

Speaker 21 100%. I would never go back to humans ever, ever again.

Speaker 6 No idea?

Speaker 7 Well, they're all examples of how instant messaging has changed the world. Find out more by joining me for my new BBC Radio 4 series.
Helen Lewis has left the chat.

Speaker 7 Subscribe to Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 7 What do you think makes the perfect snack?

Speaker 6 Hmm.

Speaker 11 It's gotta be when I'm really craving it and it's convenient.

Speaker 7 Could you be more specific?

Speaker 11 When it's cravenient.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 11 Like a freshly baked cookie made with real butter, available right now in the street at AM P.M., or a savory breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at AM PM.

Speaker 6 I'm seeing a pattern here. Well, yeah, we're talking about what I crave.

Speaker 7 Which is anything from AM P.M.

Speaker 1 What more could you want?

Speaker 14 Stop by AMPM, where the snacks and drinks are perfectly cravable and convenient. That's cravenience.
AM PM, too much good stuff.