Hidden-Trackable Information

When a piece of information that was visible to a player becomes hidden, it's referred to as hidden-trackable information. A player with a perfect memory could "track" the information as if it were still visible.

Here are three examples of hidden-trackable information:

• Player-scores may be kept hidden, even though everyone sees every point that everyone else takes. A player with a very good memory can know exactly how many points each other player has.
• Players may draft face-up cards into a hidden hand. In such games, players also sometimes draw from the deck or steal cards from each other, which makes their hands only partially trackable.
• Cards or tiles that are visible may become hidden as they're discarded or collected into face-down tricks or sets.

The acceptability of hidden-trackable information is a hotly debated topic among both players and designers. Here's my own take on the subject.

As a player, I find the task of tracking hidden information to be difficult, but not interesting. It's a "shallow" task that my human brain is not good at, but that any computer could carry out perfectly with a minimum of programing. Therefore, I generally don't enjoy strong hidden-trackable elements in games.

As a designer, when considering a particular usage of hidden-trackable information, I ask the following question: "Is the task of remembering this information supposed to be an interesting element of the gameplay?" To the extent that the answer is "yes", I consider that particular usage to be unproblematic, whether or not I particularly enjoy it.

If the answer is "no", it usually indicates that the hidden-trackable information is covering up some design problem. For instance, if a game with closed scoring is played with open scoring, kingmaker problems or other end-game problems will usually arise. Keeping track of an opponent's hidden score is almost never supposed to be an interesting or central element of play. In fact, the designer is probably hoping that players don't try too hard to keep track of each other's scores, because if they do, the submerged end-game problems will surface. Therefore, I dislike this usage of hidden-trackable information.

Sometimes hidden-trackable information exists, but is relatively unimportant. No gameplay problems arise when players track the hidden information, but players don't gain much by doing so, either. In such cases, hidden-trackable information is harmless. Many card games fall into this category. It's almost impossible to design a card-game that doesn't have some kind of hidden-trackable information, but often that information isn't particularly important to the players.

The game of Bridge represents an interesting middle-case. In Bridge it's very important to keep track of the cards that others have played, and most Bridge-lovers view this as an interesting element of the gameplay. On the other hand, it's clearly not the primary focus of play, and the game would be perfectly functional if all tricks remained visible. (The game wouldn't be as graceful, because you'd need to visibly spread the tricks, or ask people to look through them for you, either of which would feel fiddly.)

As a player, I dislike Bridge's hidden-trackable aspect, but as a designer, I don't consider it to be a flaw.