Games People Play

and the Computers that beat them 🕹️

Mancala was the first game. I’m skeptical. We’ve found Mancala board and piece fragments going back about 3,000 years in Africa; we’ve found rocks carvings of a Mancala board that are about 6,000 years old in Ethiopia.

Humans have been hanging out together well over 100,000 years and we like to play. Apes play games with their kids so I’m pretty sure we’ve been playing games a lot longer than 6,000 years.

Board Games

Rachel’s preschool got her hooked her on Mancala. We played it at home - I can see the chunky dark wood board, feel the heft of the shiny colored glass playing pieces, hear the clatter of the pieces dropping in the cups. I don’t remember the rules 🙄

When I was a kid I played checkers with my dad nonstop¹, could never beat him. David got into Chess and beat me routinely.

Here’s a more obscure one we got into - Gobblet! Bit like checkers but you gobble up the other players piece by dropping one of your larger ones on top of their smaller one. The pieces nest like Russian Dolls.

There’s something sensory about board games - I had a mini-backgammon game that fit into my backpack when I was in elementary school and I still remember how those little magnetic pieces magically stuck together and the joy of setting up the board.

I bet every single person reading this played Monopoly and you have a favorite metal token. Those tokens were avatars before avatars were a thing - I always grabbed the Top Hat 🎩

Video Games

It’s easier to figure out the first video game - it was Pong and it was 1972 - just over 50 years ago. Ok there were ones before that like the Star Trek game the teletype machine banged out on reams of paper in my Junior High - Before the Screens - but Pong was the first commercially available video game.

Atari made Pong and Pong made Atari and an industry was born. My neighbor got an Atari and immediately became the most popular kid on the block. The controller looked just like this 🕹️ with a big red button you hit frantically with one hand while you jammed the joystick around equally frantically with your other hand. We’d play tank battle until my parents came looking for me. Tank Battle was a bit more sophisticated than Pong where you maneuvered your pixelated tank around obstacles and tried to hit your friend’s tank.

Gaming blew up and thus began the Golden Age of gaming with the coolest stuff you ever saw showing up on every screen imaginable.

The Golden Age

Arcade games were first out of the gate in the Orange hitting $25 Billion in revenue in 10 years. Atari and friends surpassed Arcade games 5 years after that with ever more sophisticated gaming consoles in Blue and consoles are still going strong. Handheld games in Green busted out 5 years later, but once mobile hit the scene in the 2000s, that Brown hockey stick obliterated them.

I happily played across every segment:

• Handheld. Mattel Football was one of the first handhelds with a little LCD screen. I never had one but my friends did and it would make the rounds in the carpool. Similar to Tank Battle it wasn’t as much skill as madly hitting the buttons as fast as you could. Later on I got a fancier pre Game Boy Nintendo spiderman game because, well, SPIDERMAN!

• Arcade. I’d walk the block from my house down to the 7-Eleven on Sunset Blvd, my pockets full of every quarter I could snag to play Galaga² and later Tempest. The 7-Eleven had crammed 3 games side-by-side into a back corner by the Slurpee machine.

  As soon as my friend got his drivers license we were regulars at the Westwood Arcade by UCLA. Jammed with video games, it was dark, noisy and smelled like teen spirit. We’d play Space Wars in teams of two for hours and yell a lot.

  The best was when I worked the closing shift at the Chinese Theater and we’d get the key to open the coin box and play Missile Command and Defender cycling a quarter nonstop from 1 AM on.

• Console. 30 years after the Atari and Tank Battle, I got my first console when Microsoft, not to be outdone by Sony and Nintendo, jumped into the Console Wars with Xbox. We played lots of Lego games (Indiana Jones was the best) and EA Sports (Basketball was the best). Highlight for me was the Kinect Augmented Reality camera that let me slice up watermelons with my hands like a mad human windmill in Fruit Ninja.

• Mobile. On a trip to London, JFran started dreaming in Tetris shapes. Candy Crush Soda Saga made some money off of me; it was an infatuation for a while. I stopped playing when I reached Level 666 - seemed like I’d been played enough 😈 ³

  

• Virtual Reality. Guess I lied when I said I played every segment - never touched VR. The Kinect was AR (augmented reality), super cool. VR is a still a little sketch to me. Wrote about this in one of my most popular articles - The Wacky World of Wearables.

Games computers play

Then it got weird. Computer scientists flipped the script. Rather than making games for humans to play, they measured their increasingly intelligent machines by playing and beating humans. And not just any humans, the smartest humans.

Garry Kasparov was the computer’s first victim. Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster who won the world title when he was 22. Kasparov dominated the chess world, maintaining his #1 ranking for over 20 years. Kasparov is arguably the best chess player that has ever lived.

IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated Kasparov in 1997 in a six-game match. Kasparov was furious and accused the IBM team of cheating as Deep Blue exhibited what he termed human skill in beating him. Deep Blue came 25 years after Pong and used brute force computation to analyze every move, with some randomization built in - it could evaluate millions of moves per second.

Next up was Go. The game Go is arguably even older than Mancala (again with the beads).⁴

in 2016 South Korea’s Lee Sedol was the Go world champion. Go is the most complex board game ever invented with a much larger set of moves and strategies than Chess. Google’s AlphaGo defeated Sedol in in a 5 game set 4-1. AlphaGo used AI machine learning / neural network techniques to learn versus the brute force computing Deep Blue used.

AI continues to beat up on all the best human players - IBM’s Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in Jeopardy. Carnegie Mellon’s Libratus beat four of the world’s top poker players in a tournament of Texas hold’em. Sodoku, Scrabble, Tetris, Pac-Man⁵ … all have fallen to AI.

There are yet a few games computers haven’t beaten us at, including Bridge, Pictionary and Dungeons & Dragons.

What comes after the Golden Age?

Ask AI for a picture of it joining a Dungeons and Dragons party and this is what you get. No longer a screen or a cute little robot, how about a majestic BEAST lording over it’s human+ teammates, hmmm.

Lets hope it’s going for a benevolent companion like Star Trek’s Data.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is last years breakout role playing video game and it just moved into bestselling RPG ranks with over 10 million users. It’s based on D&D and has been showered with awards including 2023 Game of the Year. I know all this because I have a nephew who is a semi-pro, thinking of going pro DM, if the engineering thing doesn’t work out. Watch some BG3 gameplay and you’ll get it - visually and mentally immersive.

Now add in stuff like Sora and the increasing sophistication of LLMs and whatever Apple’s⁶ scuba mask err Vision Pro turns into and we’re talking single digit years for what’s next in Games People People & Computers Play.

1. Thanks for always playing with me Poppa ❤️

2. The Rewind Arcade in Sebastopol got a Galaga game recently so I had to get over there to see if I still kick ass like I did in my 7-Eleven on Sunset and it turns out I do. High score baby. I’m a legend in my own mind.

3. Pandemic routine extended I play Wordle and my new favorite Connections puzzles from the NYT’s on my phone daily. There are more cranial games requiring no frantic finger pressing including the ubiquitous crossword. Never paid much attention to crosswords but turns out there is a whole indie crossword community including the American Values Crossword Club (AVCX) which you might want to check out.

4. The problem is materials used for the earliest of games were probably wood or leaves or a stick drawing in the sand floor of the cave. Those materials do not stand any test of time. In The Three-Body Problem trilogy, Cixin Liu build’s the ‘Earth Civilization Museum’ on Pluto with all our history carved into stones as the best way to memorialize it through time. Wachy idea, but I’d choose a hunk of carved granite versus a thumb drive if I knew I had to look something up in a couple bajillion years.

5. What madness is this - Pac Man and Tetris - human created games that run on machines and now we’re having machines play the machines to see if they can beat the best humans who played the machines? Inception.

6. Let’s not overlook Microsoft’s massive $70B acquisition of Activision that finally closed late last year - guess who makes Candy Crush! 🍭

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Check out last weeks post!