Well, it’s the last night of the week and therefore my last chance to get a post out. It’s been impossible for me to get anything whatsoever done for the majority of this week; and it’s only now, once the race has been called, that I’m able to start back up the machinery of my daily/weekly/monthly life. It’s just been a lot, y’all (I know there is no y’all). So what do I have? Well, I think I have some Mechanic Monday ideas percolating, but nothing solid, and it’s notably not Monday, so how about the blogging equivalent of heating up a pizza: some loose rambling on a mechanic-adjacent concept.
So how about ranked-choice voting, eh? In the real world, it can give us a much clearer picture of the will of the electorate; if ten voters all vote for different candidates, there’s no consensus whatsoever; but if they all give their second place vote for one candidate, that says a lot about their collective will and priorities. Voting for only one candidate gives no indication as to the degree of support either; A person who votes for Candidate A but will settle for Candidate B is, in that situation, indistinguishable from the person who is voting for Candidate A specifically to beat Candidate B. An election can, in a way, be seen as a contest of skill like any game; the skills in question are hardly inapplicable to those found in games analog and digital. Bluffing, kingmaking, resource management, pitting opponents against one another, the creation/sustenance/disruption of momentum, timing - I mean, there are plenty of games literally modeling or about elections, I don’t need to overstate the case here.
I’ve been watching a lot of Bake-Off, so I’d like to wedge that in here too; is Bake-Off not, at the end of the day, an election? One where there are, admittedly, only two voters (and the perception is that one of those votes carries more weight than the other)? I’ve now watched a couple rerun seasons where a contestant who took Star Baker multiple times (more times than any other contestant) ultimately failed in the final. And in both of those cases, the ultimate winner was the baker who had been most consistent throughout; in one case, a baker who had won literally zero of the episodes, but had come second in almost every single technical, and never been considered for elimination. Now, in Bake-Off, no one is actually awarded second-place Star Baker in an episode; you Win, you don’t win but you Stay, or you’re Out. But how much less shocking would the two ‘Upsets’ I’ve cited be, if we had more data about the closeness of the race?
Ok, how to make this about games; really, the mechanic closest to relevance here (and it’s not that close) is second-place points. I’ve added them into my latest version of Fantasy GM Squared, although it already exists in numerous numerous games (Smash Up and Sushi Go spring to mind) because allowing multiple players to get in on a pot increases interactivity, as a battle for first and a battle for second allows you to concentrate, silo, and interconnect conflicts. Much as they’re maligned as a rubber band mechanic, “catchup”, “consolation” or “loser” points, these tightened races can tell us a lot about skill vs luck, and while first place tells us a lot about a player’s ceiling, second place can tell us about their floor, and help us find where their skill truly is. “Close only counts in horseshoes or hand grenades” may be the common refrain, but I think that repeated close, over time, can tell us a more nuanced and interesting story about victory in the long run.
Anyway all this to say that I think Warren would have been the nominee if we’d all had ranked choice voting. Ok bye! Til next week!
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