Dicing with destiny

Games Britannia showed that games have been around for hundreds of years. I was quite surprised by how some of these games were actually quite complicated. The medieval gospel game especially showed complexity and thought that you wouldn't commonly expect from a average medieval person. It is interesting that games can give a insight into how intelligent these people were.

It showed that games were often used in religious and political rituals. It seems strange that games which we play with so casually once held such significance. The fates of lives were often decided from the outcomes of these games. This is quite a scary concept. Religion has long since lost the power to be able to make these decisions but it wrong that a person would consider it reasonable to base important decisions on these kinds of games.

Games have been shown to have a history with gambling. The game of Hazard was condemned by the church not only because it was gambling but because dice were thought to show the will of god and hazard was said to trivialize this. To think that so many people lost their wealth over games is frightening but not unexpected even today people lose a lot in casinos. From what i can tell though modern casinos seem some what safer. In modern days casinos must be careful as to not cause outrage and must therefore be caeful of completely destroying the wealth of the person.

The documentary questioned whether games should be games of skill, chance or both. I personally believe that games should be games of skill and that chance should be kept to a minimum. In my experience a game that relies to heavily on chance in it's core mechanics is frustrating at best and boring at worst.

The documentary finished off by discussing chess. Chess I think is a great example of game of skill. Although the game is technically solvable it is so complicated that no human could ever solve it because of this it escapes the problem of chance based mechanics while still retaining the tension associated with chance based games.