Russian Roulette: A Postmortem (nyuk nyuk)

Russian roulette is a game of chance wherein a revolver is loaded with one round, spun to randomize the chance that the round is chambered, pointed to the player's head, and fired. Losing means death. Winning rewards the player with nothing.

"Wanna see something Cool?"

I bring this up for three reasons:

One, because Russian roulette is a game. Students of video game studies seem to trip over themselves in search for a definition of "game." Not only is it generally unnecessary to define "game" (If we can't decide to classify a thing as a game or a toy or even a war, what does it matter? It does not change the nature of the thing.), but games created for the purpose of exploring the definition of "game" tend to, as games, fail; they suck. Frankly, Russian roulette or, to be a little more fair, Sim City better explored the definition of "game" than, as I most recently played, Kloonigames' Conceptual 4 minutes and 33 seconds, in which the player must run a program for 4 minutes and 33 seconds to win. (The game connects to a server and can only run if no one else is playing. If someone else starts the game, your game terminates. That was a spoiler, by the way!)

Two, to point out the compelling nature of - as a parallel to video games, esp. violent ones - either the game itself or its portrayal in the media, in that it has the power to persuade people to kill themselves for excitement or whatever else a player might seek to derive from it. I have nothing to prescribe.

Three, penalty, that bastard child many* would rather ignore or eliminate completely. In my experience, penalties are much more interesting than rewards as well as more important. (Negative stimuli have more drastic effects on behavior than positive stimuli, but that's beyond the scope of this article.) In video games, with occasional exception, the worst case scenario is temporary, meaningless death. Dying in a Zelda game, for example, punishes the player by merely changing his location. Death becomes the "go back two spaces" spot on a cheap board game.

Russian roulette, however, is better. Russian roulette succeeds as a game.

*Asterisk.

Addendum: I wrote a Russian roulette script in mIRC a while back. Join #rpgn on irc.rpgamers.net and say !roulette if you feel like giving it a shot.