Monday, February 16, 2009

Basketball and Games

This is spillover from Wecrow, and this article in the NYTimes.

One thing that's interesting about basketball, from a gaming point of view, is it's a sport that balances individual and team goals. Shooting more will raise your scoring average, but passing up bad shots will help your team. Grabbing rebounds will bump your stats and help your team, but maybe not as surely as boxing out an letting your teammate do so, or tapping the ball to your teammate.

Has anyone seen a board game that really incorporates this sort of dynamic? For instance, a game could have two teams of players, and the single winner could simply be the highest scorer on the highest scoring team. Actions could vary from the completely selfless (boxing out, setting picks) to the win-win (shooting high percentage shots) to the completely selfish (taking terrible shots, or even refusing to shoot half-court shots before quarter buzzers). Further, in a sufficiently complex game, it would not always be clear which category each action fell into.