Modes of Play

A single game can usually only be played in a handful of ways, but it has many to choose from. Here I intend to enumerate some of the more common considerations.

Number of players: this is not merely a count of the number of people involved. The organization of them can have great impact on the act of play.

• Solitaire: a single player pursues a goal.
  
• Competitive: several players autonomously pursue goals mutually exclusive with those of other players.
  
• Cooperative: several players coordinate to pursue a shared goal.
  
• Team: two or more groups of several players cooperate with each other in competition with the other groups.
  
• Diplomatic: players or groups pursue goals which may be shared or mutually exclusive, and must choose individually whether to cooperate or compete.
• Massive: large numbers of players apply one of the above, and events in several concurrent games are capable of affecting each other indirectly.

Symmetry: the options available to a player from the beginning have a considerable effect on the dynamics of the game. Symmetry is a matter of degree, not of kind.

• Symmetrical: all participants begin under identical or virtually identical conditions.
• Balanced: participants begin with starting conditions which are considered equally likely to win.
• Asymmetric: participants begin with unlike conditions.
• Handicapped: participants' starting conditions are altered to compensate for skill differences between them.
  

Timescale: the limitations placed upon when the players may influence the game state. These are largely subjective, and others have been experimented with, but principally it is a question of the relationship between the player's decision to act and that act affecting the game, to say nothing of the possibility of other players, or the game, responding to the intention rather than the act.

• Real-time: players influence the game state at any time the rules do not forbid it.
• Turn-limited: only one player may influence the game at a given time.
• Asynchronous: players announce their intentions to influence the game at various times, but they are applied simultaneously.
• Simultaneous: players affect the game at the same time.
  

Information: what players know or are capable of knowing about each other and about the state of the game.

• Perfect: players are aware of the entire game state at all times.
• Imperfect: players are aware of only certain parts of the game state, but they know of what they are not aware.
• Paranoid: players are aware that the knowledge of the game state given to them is inaccurate, but they do not know in what way.
• Knowable: players are not aware of the entire game state, but they are capable of discovering any given part.
  
• Unknowable: players are not aware of the entire game state, and parts of it are totally beyond their ability to know.
• Deductive: players can logically conclude the nature of parts of the game state which the game has not explicitly told them.
• Inductive: players must predict unknown parts of the game state without logical certainty.