I recently got lured in to downloading some casual game for my phone. (Thank you, gas station rewards program, for telling me I could earn a bonus from you if I downloaded this stupid game.)
I gave up these time wasters years ago when I realized how much time they wasted.
But with this addictive substance back on my phone, I was thrown back in and realized… nothing has changed. It’s even worse. These games are not games. They are ad platforms. Every few minutes you get an ad. Or, you have to watch an ad to get something you need.
I will repeat… These games are not games. They are ad platforms.
But, once new trend is how many ads for other games I see that offer “real cash” for playing them. They show folks who are broke pulling out their phone and then playing to get the money they need. “It’s just that easy!”
Obviously, if you could easily make hundreds of dollars playing a game, you wouldn’t need to pay to advertise that game. People would all know about it from word-of-mouth and we’d all be doing that.
What is even more amusing (at least to me) is how many ads warn you about “scam games” … while basically being the same game they are warning you to avoid.
But one thing caught my attention… These ads will claim to be “skill based” games. Many of them are card games like Solitaire.
While it is true there is skill to know how to play a certain set of random cards you have been dealt, there is zero skill that can prevent you from losing if you get enough bad hands. Likewise, any “skill” game that uses a roll of the dice you can 100% be guaranteed to lose if you had enough random bad rolls of the dice and your opponent had enough random good rolls.
And that gave me a (dumb) idea…
The house always wins.
As a kid, I remember playing Battleship with friends. In case you are unfamiliar, here is the wiki page for this game:
Basically, you place your ships on a grid, aligned vertically or horizontally, and your opponent does the same. You then call out the coordinate you want to “bomb” on your opponent’s grid, and they tell you if you had a “hit” or a “miss.”
Some of us cheated.
Since there was no way to verify where the ships were, if your opponent called a shot that was a “hit,” you could easily move your piece out of the way to a new spot and report “miss.” Evil. But fun. This caused LONG games, playing until you basically got down to where the ships had no other place to be.
Because of this, I never trusted the Battleship clone I played on my Radio Shack Color Computer. How could I ever trust that computer wouldn’t “cheat” the same way?
But hey, Battleship is a game of skill — after all, it does not use any random roll of the dice or deal of a card.
But the card and dice games are completely “random” and no matter how skilled you are, you can have a hard time winning against bad randomness ;-)
I thought it would be fun to write a simple BASIC Blackjack (or 21) card game, except the computer would cheat. It would have a list of all un-dealt cards, and ensure it always gives the best card to the dealer, and the worst to the opponent. If things were truly random, this is a possibility with a truly random outcome.
The same cheating computer could be done for any random game — just as Monopoly. Imagine ALWAYS getting a roll that makes you pay rent or Go To Jail, while the computer always got a roll that got them to a safe property, or one they could buy.
Shall we play a game?
I will not present code for this yet. I have not written it. But, perhaps one of you will beat me to it.
My idea:
- The cards are in a random array of 52.
- The computer dealer will always get the best cards. Initially a face card and an ace, then as those cards are depleted, two cards totaling ten. At that point, there is no way the player can ever get two cards at 21. And, if the player got 20, the “house always wins” so even if that happened, the computer wins.
- After the player receives its cards, any request to “hit” would be a card just enough to make them bust.
- This process would continue through the rest of the deck.
I am unsure if, at some point, it would ever turn into a “fair” game. And this is why I want to write this dumb idea.
Thoughts?
