So when chess was first played, this game was already ancient. That is pretty cool.
Senet
11–20 of 123 posts
Re: Senet
#12> 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?
Re: Senet
#13Looks a bit like Mancala. I don't know much about Senet, but we played Mancala all the time, when I was a kid (in Africa).
Well it's more like backgammon
Intriguingly, mancala is the Egyptian Arabic name for that game.
Some very early boards from e.g. Aksum in Ethiopia were identified by archaelogists as mancala boards, but are more likely to have been for Senet.
It's probable that the Ancient Egyptians played both, but I don't believe the record is clear on where mancala came from and at what time it reached Egypt, presuming that isn't where it came from, which it might be.
Re: Senet
#14> 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 eve…
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.
Re: Senet
#15> 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 eve…
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.
Re: Senet
#16I remember getting the game as part of a collectors edition of the show LOST. Used to play it quite a bit.
Re: Senet
#17> 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 eve…
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."
Re: Senet
#18I once won an AI tournament for senet :) so for me this post relates to AI... But still... it's a mystery how this gets to the top of HN
Random wiki pages are one of the things that give HN its pleasant Old Internet atmosphere to me. Sometimes I've thought about sampling over wikipedia uniformly at random, submitting to HN, and observing the trends in what rises to the top.
Re: Senet
#19> 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 eve…
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 distinc…
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?
Re: Senet
#20I can't remember the exact book, but contained in a book about Ancient Egypt, there was the rules, paper pieces and a sample board for this game - we used to play it all the time as kids. My grandpa helped us make a wooden set of pieces and a board before he passed, it was a a great little intro to woodworking project.
Egyptology?