Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints

After reading some of your articles on depth, I have to ask. What exactly counts as a “state” in a game? Depth is characterized by the number of non-redundant states, but I’m not clear what counts as a state.

Have you ever used an emulator? You know how there are save states in emulators? Save states capture the current value of every single variable in the game. This is basically what I mean when I say a state. A state is the current value of every single object, element, or variable in a game. Any time something changes, even slightly, in a game, that is a new state, strictly speaking.

For an easier to imagine example, in a board game, a state would be every possible combination of pieces on every space on the board.

In most video games, it’s harder to think about every possible state because many games have things like velocity, or extremely minute and precise position tracking. Things appear to be more analog thanks to the use of floats and sub-pixels.

This is why I specify that depth does not count redundant states, because this level of minute detail goes far beyond what is significant in the majority of cases. Many of these tiny states can be said to be negligibly different from other states around them. Determining what states are non-redundant is unfortunately still a matter of interpretation. I count analog spectrums of information tracking as being more deep than a digital spectrum, but only slightly. I believe there are diminishing returns for additional subdivision of states. You only gain so much for going from an integer to a float in my book (look up data types if you don’t know what a float is).

This will probably help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(computer_science)