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All card games hinge on the fact that a card has two sides, one of which reveals its identity (Ace of spades, Queen of hearts, etc.), while the other conceals it, being indistinguishable from the reverse of any other card in the pack…. This element of secrecy puts cards into the category of "games of imperfect information," by contrast with board games such as Chess, in which each player always knows exactly what his opponent's resources are…. This suggests that "information" and its acquisition are what card games are all about.—David Parlett, The Oxford Dictionary of Card Games
Introducing a Different Kind of Information
previous chapter. However, within this schema we shift to a very different understanding of "information." This shift should be relatively painless, because we are moving away from the counter-intuitive concepts of information theory and toward a much more commonsense understanding of information. Rather than thinking about "information" as a measure of uncertainty, we now do just the opposite."Information," for the purposes of this schema, means knowledge, the informational content or data of a game. Within classical information theory, games are signal-processing systems, balancing noise and redundancy. But in this schema, we consider games as interactive systems that put knowledge or information at play. Depending on the game, information can be randomized, acquired, transformed, hidden, rearranged, remembered, or forgotten. In the quote that opens this chapter, David Parlett describes playing cards as objects designed to conceal and reveal information. Earlier, in Defining Rules, we pointed out that we could still play the game of Poker even if we altered the "content" of the system by renaming the suits. Poker also came up in our schema on emergence, in which the activity of bluffing arose during play, even though it was not specified in the rules. If we had wanted to, we could have framed Poker as a system of uncertainty as well, perhaps charting the percentage chance of being dealt a particular hand. But by considering Poker within Games as Systems of Information, we can take a cue from game historian David Parlett and explore information as a commodity to be hidden or shared. How do players hide information in the cards they hold? How is information concealed, revealed, disguised, and deduced? Although Poker is premised on the manipulation of information, we can consider any game along similar lines. As a system of information, Chess is an array of data spread out on the gameboard grid, in public view of both players. The system of information known as Chutes and Ladders is constructed from the steady stream of data flowing from successive die rolls, and the way that this information is recorded and transformed into player movement on the board. A console adventure game such as Jak and Daxter brokers information in many complex ways, from hidden sections of the world revealed as the player unlocks them to special powers and abilities that are unknown to the player when the game begins.
