# Browne's game-quality criteria

Cameron Browne · **not a simulator** — a measurement vocabulary ·
`checked` that it exists and its size; **the list itself `unverified`**

## What it optimises for

Answering *"is this game any good"* **numerically**, from played games,
so that generated or modified games can be ranked without a human playing
every one.

**Browne presented 57 criteria for measuring the quality of a game.**
`checked`

## How a game is defined

Not applicable — the criteria are computed over played games, whatever
produced them.

## What it can analyse

The families that recur in work building on it: `checked`

| family | examples |
|---|---|
| **turn metrics** | branching factor, **drama**, killer moves, **lead changes** |
| **endgame metrics** | completion, duration, advantage |

**Lead change is close to drama**: never changing leader is tedious, too
much is chaotic. `checked` That framing — *a good value is an interval,
not a maximum* — is the transferable idea.

## What it does not do

Nothing about **cooperative** games, hidden roles, or games with no
individual leader — at least, nothing we have confirmed. `open`, and it
is the question that decides how much of this is usable for GROUND.

## Relevance to clay-borg

**Track C is not open ground, and this is the evidence.** `Positioning.md`
§4 proposed "assimilate knowledge about why games work" as though it were
unclaimed. There is a twenty-year literature with a canonical criterion
set, and Ai Ai computes members of it.

**This is a good finding, not a bad one.** It moves Track C from *invent a
theory of fun* to *adopt an existing vocabulary, credit it, and locate the
gap* — and the gap is plausibly real: co-operative and hidden-role games.

## What to steal

- **The criteria as a vocabulary** for what our panels already half-measure.
- **The interval framing**: our register would be improved by targets that
  are ranges rather than "0" and "100%".

## What to avoid

**Importing a metric whose subject does not exist here.** *Lead change*
presumes a leader; SHARED GROUND has none, and `Modes.csv` says its
tiebreak is "Not applicable". Computing lead change there would produce a
number about nothing — [`../specs/Taxonomy.md`](../specs/Taxonomy.md) §2.2.

## Open questions

- The 57 criteria themselves, and which are defined for n-player
  co-operative play.
- Whether anyone has extended them to social-dilemma games.
- The primary source (Browne's thesis / *Evolutionary Game Design*) —
  **not read**, and it should be before Track C opens.

## Sources

- *Evolutionary Tabletop Game Design: A Case Study in the Risk Game*
  (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.20008) — cites the 57 criteria and the
  turn/endgame metric families
- *Quantifying game design*
  (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0142694X04000201)
- *Measuring Board Game Distance* (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.03913)