What is a "dynamic mode"? And what does it have to do with games? Well, it can mean quite a lot. A rather innocent looking, normal game, when viewed from the theory side, can entail a rather wide, sweeping area of considerations. Establishing a line of reasoning in game theory may entail anything from thermodynamics to epistomology. Here we wish to consider some possibilities in games which a dynamic theoretical approach may yield.

If we regard a game as an information system combining knowledge, so to speak, which must be established by an operation, that is, if knowledge is defined in terms of action -- to know some thing is to carry on action with it -- then this gives a very dynamic character to information. Not only is this quite existentially edifying, it is also quite important to game situations. A strategy at a given point in a game is determined by the model of the game, and the information available to the players (except in games of chance, or to the degree of chance in a game, where strategy is meaningless).

The perfect game (or any game, to a degree) depends a great deal upon how one legitimizes, extracts, and produces the information in it. Consideration of theory enters in at this point. For example, in the case of a game: How much information is the structure of the game intrinsically capable of storing, how much can be extracted, and from that, how much new information will it be capable of producing? What is the potential information content of the game? Not only how many facts, but also how much information "feedback" and development of new information will the structure of the game (number and strength of operations, and the limits of their field of action) allow?

If one defines information dynamically, the results, it seems, could be quite good. This is the missing link between the static nature of rules, determinants, goals, and ends, on the one hand, and the dynamic nature of the process of the game on the other. Since the former is necessary, and the latter desired, one can appreciate the importance of de fining information dynamically for the purpose of games.

Since the essence of playing a game is one of making decisions (plotting stratgies and thereupon enacting structural transformations by making moves), that is, it is a dynamic operation, one might use this fact as the active element in the production of information.

That is, rather than having a game be a closed, static set of possibilities that plays itself through by inexorably exausting itself to the end of one player, or the other winning, or losing, it could be used as a little machine that just keeps producing more and more situations that require further playing.

This, granted, is an ideal situation, but still the idea could be applied practically (as you know, in life, since decisions determine actior~s, and one's actions determine one's self, knowing what decisions are worth making, and why, is of vital importance. Unfortunately we do not always know whether we are making our own decisions and often we do not know whether they were good ones until long after they were made. "It is how you play the game that counts" -- truer existential words were never spoken).

In a game, information can be used either to exhaust a finite set of possib ilities, or to manufacture new situations, if the structure of the game allows such things. Both of these are important, but for different reasons. One aspect uses the structure and dynamics of the game toward the manufacture of further sit uations, while the other establishes strategies which bring about the termination of the set of situations at hand. If a game employed these principles effectively, one could, by using its information dynamically, manufacture more and more complex situations, or, by using the information in the formation of strategies, one could bring the game to a close.

For example, imagine a game of some battle in which the players, upon bringing about a resolution to the battle, only find themselves in the situations of the next battle in some great war (just like real life, gang)! Admitted this is an over-simplified ideal, but, as stated before, it could be applied practically. First: players are not going to employ solely one method or the other, but rather, as a matter of course, employ a mixture of both. That is, they will attempt to win within a given set of situations even though the game is manufacturing the next "battle" for them. Secondly: no game is going to be perfect, will be in need of constant addition. New situations, rules, and simulations (quite possibly complete in themselves) will need to be produced, to be "plugged in" to the games already in progress, or start new ones of their own.

Something Else -- Kevin Zucker

If, in one game, the data that is significant is different in kind from the data that is significant in another game, special rules are devised to bring the new data into play. The player is never forced to sort out, to choose the significant data from among a great amount of data, some of which is significant, some irrelevant.

Whereas the individual who actually faced the historical position presented in a game had to choose the significant data from the great mass of information available, the player of a game knows that the finite amount of information that is included in the mechanics of the game is all significant, and that there is nothing else to consider.

Where this auxiliary information was assesed and acted upon correctly by the individual who actually faced the historical situation, or where it actually was of little importance, it does not appear in the game.

However, by omiting it from the game, the situation becomes far simpler for the player of the game. Where, in the game, solutions to problems plainly present themselves, in the actual event those solutions may have been obscured, or even ruled out, by considerations of data not included in the mechanics of the game.