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Monday, July 03, 2006
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Deal or No Deal is a poorman's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Sudoku is a Poorman's Crossword Puzzle
I noticed this relationship after playing the games for a while. Millionaire and crossword seem ornate where Deal or No Deal and Sudoku had been whittled down to the sparest combination of elements that are fun and appeal to a large audience.
And by "poorman" I don't mean to be snarky. I am horrible at all of the games, so no real or implied elitism is going on. Oh, and I would never make it to the final round in Jeopardy either. What I mean by "poorman" is the pure genius of the conceptual economy in the design of the new games.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire at one time captivated the US with the promise of riches and the delight of crazy rules like "phone a friend." And millions of puzzlers look forward to the daily delivery of their crossword fix.
Then came the new kids on the block. Deal or No Deal is the hot new game show replacing Millionaire in the public attention span. Sudoku rocketed into mass popularity, kicking crossword across and down the page.
What happened? Deal or No Deal and Sudoku are simply brilliantly designed games. They distill out the essence of game excitement while making the games simple enough they are playable by a mass audience.
The rules for each can be explained in one or two sentences:
Deal or No Deal: Choose a briefcase. Then as each round progresses, you must either stay
with
your original briefcase choice or make a "deal" with the bank to
accept its cash
offer in exchange for whatever dollar amount is in your
chosen case.
Sudoku : Fill in the grid so that every row, every column, and every 3X3 box contains the digits
1 through 9.
The rules for Millionaire and crossword are a lot more complex and sophisticated. So anyone can play these games and they are addicting enough to keep people watching and playing.
There is also a more subtle and complex subtext to each game that might account for why our minds stay bedazzled by these simpler games. The optimal strategy for Deal or No Deal is really complicated, combining a lot of math and personal judgments about value and risk. Everyone who plays Deal or No Deal sees a totally different game which is why it so much fun arguing about the right move might be.
Sudoku looks simple on the surface, but it too hides deeper complexity. The sudoku grid is a special case of a Latin square, which goes back to at least medieval times, and solving it is equivalent to solving problems in a well studied branch of computer science called graph coloring. The general problem of solving Sudoku puzzles is NP-complete, which is computerese for really really hard. So that's why even small puzzles are surprisingly difficult to solve.
I don't know how Deal or No Deal or Sudoku were created. I imagine someone sitting down at a desk and saying what makes games exciting? After some deep insight into human nature they then asked, what is the simplest possible way we can make a game to give the same excitement? How can we boil the games down to their essence?
Making something simple, interesting, and popular is perhaps the hardest game of all.
3:57:44 PM 
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© Copyright
2007
todd hoff.
Last update:
2/3/2007; 3:29:02 PM.
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