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> Espen Aarseth asked if the game Senet could be said to still exist, given that the rules were unknown. In response, Alexander de Voogt of the American Museum

> Espen Aarseth asked if the game Senet could be said to still exist, given that the rules were unknown. In response, Alexander de Voogt of the American Museum of Natural History pointed out that games did not have a fixed set of rules, but rules varied over time and from place to place. The game is the rules. Those people played different games. If you can do anything you want with it, it's a toy, not a game. If everyone forgot and lost the rules to pinochle, would we say pinochle still exists because people are playing poker with the same deck of cards?

jlkuester7 5y ago
I get your point, but really is anything like this so black and white? What about "house-rules"? If I am playing Pinochle with several additional house-rules (that either add or subtract from the "official" Pinochle rules) then what am I playing? On one hand I could see the argument that I am technically no longer playing official Pinochle, but it seems wrong to say that I am playing a game that is completely distinct from Pinochle. It seems more accurate to describe games (and honestly most other human activities) as existing on a continuum of more-or-less instead of a rather black and white boolean reality.
- addingnumbers 5y ago
  You'd be playing a variant that directly evolved from pinochle. There's an undeniable lineage there. If you reverse-engineered your own rules from scratch knowing nothing but what a deck of cards looked like, it would be silly to claim you'd rediscovered pinochle. Say we fling a chess set out into space and ten million years later and alien civilization discovers it and concocts a game where they take turns placing pieces on the board like some elaborately-scored tic-tac-toe, would you say they rediscovered Chess?
  - platz 5y ago
    If you fling a chess set out into space, once it is disconnected from it's environment, does it enter a macroscopic superposition of states and start playing itself?
  - mannerheim 5y ago
    It's funny you should mention chess, because early modern chess was at one time considered just a variant of chess[0]: > The queen replaced the earlier vizier chess piece toward the end of the 10th century and by the 15th century had become the most powerful piece;[64] in light of that, modern chess was often referred to at the time as "Queen's Chess" or "Mad Queen Chess".[65] There was still some variation in the rules until the 19th century: > The rules concerning stalemate were finalized in the early 19th century. Also in the 19th century, the convention that White moves first was established (formerly either White or Black could move first). Finally, the rules around castling were standardized – variations in the rules of castling had persisted in Italy until the late 19th century. Is chess with different castling rules still chess? Chess without en passant? Plus, it's easier to point to the set of rules that were standardised in the 19th century and call that chess. For a game like senet, there may never have been a standard set of rules. Or there may have been multiple standards that were all fairly popular, like poker. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#1200%E2%80%931700:_Origins_of_the_modern_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#1200%E2%80%931700:_Origi...
    - rcoveson 5y ago
      This is a great example of the fallacy of gray. Compare the changes to the rules of chess you've described to the descriptions of senet's rules referenced by the wikipedia article[0]. If these are the best attempts at senet rule reconstruction that the article author could find, then I must assume that the rules are basically made up from scratch with nothing but a game board, some pieces, and the vaguest of references to the game in ancient texts. Familiarity with one of these so-called senet rulesets would be of no use at all to somebody playing the other, and I'm sure familiarity with both would be of no use at all to somebody wishing to play senet with any ancient player. Classifications can be fuzzy, but they're not just a giant meaningless void of gray where anything goes. Chess has variants that can be placed on an evolutionary tree. Senet appears to have nothing but a handful of naive attempts at total reconstruction from practically no information. The game that was historically called senet appears to be lost. 0. http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html
    - addingnumbers 5y ago
samatman 5y ago
This question is more like asking whether a card game qualifies as poker. There is no natural boundary with which to say that a game has so many variants from Platonic poker as to no longer qualify. Any abstraction proposed as a criterion for classification is just that, an abstraction, since poker is a socially-constructed category.
comicjk 5y ago
The rules are what matters, yes, but the naming of games is a classification problem over sets of rules. This is most obvious with competitive video games, which have complex rules that are tweaked often - each balance patch changes the rules a little, but it's still the same game. The boundaries are fuzzy, and even the players may disagree about what constitutes enough change to be a different game. With Senet, we don't even know how much the rules have changed, so it's hard to say. But hopefully the reconstructors did well enough that an ancient player wouldn't say "what game is that?" but instead "that's a goofy way to play Senet."
- platz 5y ago
  A video game with two hundred thousand lines of code doesn't seem like an apt comparison to a board game.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Pretty close to a physical sport, if we assume that most of that code is involved in simulating something resembling physics, or in running simple robot players. Like, how much of a basketball game is concerned with the actual Rules Of Basketball vs. simulating a bunch of people playing basketball? And if you made Space Basketball with characters with superpowers who kept getting balance tweaks as the player community figured out holes in the rules, most of that simulation code would stay the same, as the tiny percentage of rules code evolved.
- rcoveson 5y ago
  Here is the reference wikipedia gives for the two historians who have tried reconstructing the rules[0]. It seems that only "tomb images" and some game boards and pieces are used in the reconstruction. The article doesn't suggest that any rules have a basis in history. What rules we have are fabricated from nothing but the pieces, like reconstructing the English language from nothing but the alphabet. 0. http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html
ggggtez 5y ago
Of course you're right. But the rules are not entirely unknown. For example, archeologists found the pieces. So, they know the dice are involved. And they likely correspond to rules for other similar games (roll and move, like backgammon or Ur). So, it's not entirely black and white. Historians are pretty sure about some of the rules, but it's possible there were other rules we don't know. The rules played today are a balance between historical accuracy, and just trying the different theories and playing the one that seems the most fun. That might seem like just making things up, but that's what the quote is referring to. It's hard to say what set of rules was the most common, but there is some reason to believe that the current set of rules is as least similar, and might have been played due to the way that these games didn't have 1 concrete set of rules. "House rules" meant that there was often many different sets of rules in place. Think how checkers has sets of rules that allow for non-forced jumps, flying kings, etc. Maybe your can't tell whether your set of rules was the most common set, but if your rules are based on evidence, it's likely that it was played similar to that somewhere.
- rcoveson 5y ago
  I urge you to read the sets of rules invented by the senet historians referenced in the wikipedia article. I think you are overstating their knowledge of the game. From wikipedia: "Although details of the original game rules are a subject of some conjecture, senet historians Timothy Kendall and R. C. Bell have made their own reconstructions of the game." Here is the citation[0]. My belief is that these are two completely different games, and therefor probably completely different from any ancient iteration of senet. Using the same game board and (some of) the same pieces is totally insufficient to call a game a "variation". Is old Japanese text, which adopted the Chinese writing system, a variant of the Chinese language? 0. http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html
JackFr 5y ago
Well technically a pinochle deck is different from a deck you’d play poker with.

jlkuester7 5y ago

I get your point, but really is anything like this so black and white? What about "house-rules"? If I am playing Pinochle with several additional house-rules (that either add or subtract from the "official" Pinochle rules) then what am I playing? On one hand I could see the argument that I am technically no longer playing official Pinochle, but it seems wrong to say that I am playing a game that is completely distinct from Pinochle. It seems more accurate to describe games (and honestly most other human activities) as existing on a continuum of more-or-less instead of a rather black and white boolean reality.

addingnumbers 5y ago
You'd be playing a variant that directly evolved from pinochle. There's an undeniable lineage there. If you reverse-engineered your own rules from scratch knowing nothing but what a deck of cards looked like, it would be silly to claim you'd rediscovered pinochle. Say we fling a chess set out into space and ten million years later and alien civilization discovers it and concocts a game where they take turns placing pieces on the board like some elaborately-scored tic-tac-toe, would you say they rediscovered Chess?
- platz 5y ago
  If you fling a chess set out into space, once it is disconnected from it's environment, does it enter a macroscopic superposition of states and start playing itself?
- mannerheim 5y ago
  It's funny you should mention chess, because early modern chess was at one time considered just a variant of chess[0]: > The queen replaced the earlier vizier chess piece toward the end of the 10th century and by the 15th century had become the most powerful piece;[64] in light of that, modern chess was often referred to at the time as "Queen's Chess" or "Mad Queen Chess".[65] There was still some variation in the rules until the 19th century: > The rules concerning stalemate were finalized in the early 19th century. Also in the 19th century, the convention that White moves first was established (formerly either White or Black could move first). Finally, the rules around castling were standardized – variations in the rules of castling had persisted in Italy until the late 19th century. Is chess with different castling rules still chess? Chess without en passant? Plus, it's easier to point to the set of rules that were standardised in the 19th century and call that chess. For a game like senet, there may never have been a standard set of rules. Or there may have been multiple standards that were all fairly popular, like poker. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#1200%E2%80%931700:_Origins_of_the_modern_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#1200%E2%80%931700:_Origi...
  - rcoveson 5y ago
    This is a great example of the fallacy of gray. Compare the changes to the rules of chess you've described to the descriptions of senet's rules referenced by the wikipedia article[0]. If these are the best attempts at senet rule reconstruction that the article author could find, then I must assume that the rules are basically made up from scratch with nothing but a game board, some pieces, and the vaguest of references to the game in ancient texts. Familiarity with one of these so-called senet rulesets would be of no use at all to somebody playing the other, and I'm sure familiarity with both would be of no use at all to somebody wishing to play senet with any ancient player. Classifications can be fuzzy, but they're not just a giant meaningless void of gray where anything goes. Chess has variants that can be placed on an evolutionary tree. Senet appears to have nothing but a handful of naive attempts at total reconstruction from practically no information. The game that was historically called senet appears to be lost. 0. http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html
  - addingnumbers 5y ago

samatman 5y ago

This question is more like asking whether a card game qualifies as poker. There is no natural boundary with which to say that a game has so many variants from Platonic poker as to no longer qualify. Any abstraction proposed as a criterion for classification is just that, an abstraction, since poker is a socially-constructed category.

comicjk 5y ago

The rules are what matters, yes, but the naming of games is a classification problem over sets of rules. This is most obvious with competitive video games, which have complex rules that are tweaked often - each balance patch changes the rules a little, but it's still the same game. The boundaries are fuzzy, and even the players may disagree about what constitutes enough change to be a different game. With Senet, we don't even know how much the rules have changed, so it's hard to say. But hopefully the reconstructors did well enough that an ancient player wouldn't say "what game is that?" but instead "that's a goofy way to play Senet."

platz 5y ago
A video game with two hundred thousand lines of code doesn't seem like an apt comparison to a board game.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Pretty close to a physical sport, if we assume that most of that code is involved in simulating something resembling physics, or in running simple robot players. Like, how much of a basketball game is concerned with the actual Rules Of Basketball vs. simulating a bunch of people playing basketball? And if you made Space Basketball with characters with superpowers who kept getting balance tweaks as the player community figured out holes in the rules, most of that simulation code would stay the same, as the tiny percentage of rules code evolved.
rcoveson 5y ago
Here is the reference wikipedia gives for the two historians who have tried reconstructing the rules[0]. It seems that only "tomb images" and some game boards and pieces are used in the reconstruction. The article doesn't suggest that any rules have a basis in history. What rules we have are fabricated from nothing but the pieces, like reconstructing the English language from nothing but the alphabet. 0. http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html

ggggtez 5y ago

Of course you're right. But the rules are not entirely unknown. For example, archeologists found the pieces. So, they know the dice are involved. And they likely correspond to rules for other similar games (roll and move, like backgammon or Ur). So, it's not entirely black and white. Historians are pretty sure about some of the rules, but it's possible there were other rules we don't know. The rules played today are a balance between historical accuracy, and just trying the different theories and playing the one that seems the most fun. That might seem like just making things up, but that's what the quote is referring to. It's hard to say what set of rules was the most common, but there is some reason to believe that the current set of rules is as least similar, and might have been played due to the way that these games didn't have 1 concrete set of rules. "House rules" meant that there was often many different sets of rules in place. Think how checkers has sets of rules that allow for non-forced jumps, flying kings, etc. Maybe your can't tell whether your set of rules was the most common set, but if your rules are based on evidence, it's likely that it was played similar to that somewhere.

rcoveson 5y ago
I urge you to read the sets of rules invented by the senet historians referenced in the wikipedia article. I think you are overstating their knowledge of the game. From wikipedia: "Although details of the original game rules are a subject of some conjecture, senet historians Timothy Kendall and R. C. Bell have made their own reconstructions of the game." Here is the citation[0]. My belief is that these are two completely different games, and therefor probably completely different from any ancient iteration of senet. Using the same game board and (some of) the same pieces is totally insufficient to call a game a "variation". Is old Japanese text, which adopted the Chinese writing system, a variant of the Chinese language? 0. http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html

JackFr 5y ago

Well technically a pinochle deck is different from a deck you’d play poker with.