So we
could assume that any serious player had complete access to every episode and a complete knowledge of
whatever scoring system we were going to use, so no hidden information. Added to this was the idea that
the game had to be, you know, actually fun for a broad audience of nongamers, which meant it had to make
intuitive sense.
So the game had to be simple and obvious for casual players and ???unsolvable??? for a very large community
of expert players with a lot of time and cash-money motivation to ?¬? nd optimal solutions and complete
access to every event that was going to occur during the entire game. In all honesty, however, this isn??™t as
hard as it looks, because this is exactly what games do well!
I??™m not a big math guy, but I recognized that what I needed was a game system that was NP-complete.
NP-complete is a math term describing a class of problems that become very, very, hard as they scale
up??”the kind of math problems that are used to encrypt billion dollar bank accounts. Seems complicated, but
plenty of games are NP-complete, including Tetris, Minesweeper, and Freecell Solitaire.
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