Processing my process. Or: How to get better at game design.

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

I’ve sent my alpha version of Strangers out to some folks for feedback.  Most of the feedback boiled down to: ‘This is kinda complicated’ and ‘Where’s the fun?’

After getting the third return with the same feedback, I started to do some serious introspection.  While I don’t talk about it here on my gaming blog (heck, I don’t talk about much here at the moment) – I also do web design and programming.  Over the last few months, I’ve been lucky enough to gather a nice stable of clients and steady coding work.  It’s taken up a lot of my ‘free’ time, which is why I haven’t had much to say here.

Since I’ve been programming a lot more lately, I’ve started really honing my process for development, at least when it comes to web projects.  What I’ve discovered is that I’m: iterative, atomic and utile.  I’m no rockstar when it comes to coding – in fact, my programming blog is called ‘Groping for Code’, which it sometimes feels like I’m doing – looking at an end result that I want to achieve, and slowly building a scaffold to get me there, refining it along the way.

So:

Iterative: I make a lot of small changes, seeing what the result is along the way, and usually breaking shit.

Atomic: I work on one feature at a time, making it work, then integrating it with the whole.

Utile: I look for the best, cleanest way to do what I want to do, regardless of any sort of overarching programming principle.

I realize these things may even hold me back from being a good coder, but I’m working on improving – and more importantly, they’re working.  I’m getting things done.  Projects are moving.

So let’s contrast this with my game design process.  First of all, I don’t really HAVE a process, as such.  I just sort of jump into a design with both feet and see what happens.  Part of this is an artifact of how my completed (or mostly completed) projects to date have come about – they’re products of things like 24-hour RPG challenges or Game Chef, which imposes either a one- or two-week deadline.  Soup to nuts, make everything at least look like it hangs together.

But it’s not entirely that.  I have a sense of myself as ‘game designer’, so to some extent I’ve pre-judged the end result of my efforts: it will work, because this is hat I’m passionate about.  My designs tend to be all-or-nothing thunderclaps of effort.  This is just about as opposite an approach to process as you can get from my programming.  

I’m not iterative: Any changes that I make, I propagate them through the design without testing their viability, or the relative merits of the original version.

I’m not atomic: Games come out of me whole-cloth.  Any one section of the rules may or may not stand on its own.

Utile: I work from more formalist principles (the desire to create games that push certain envelopes, like integrating board game components, or exploring some facet of play) as opposed to looking for what works, then throwing mechanics at it until it sticks.

And the results are perfectly obvious: my programming gets done.  My games don’t.  So the question now is: how do I apply my programming process to my game design?

Iterative: Test, test, test.  Start with a framework for the game, then start hanging components on it, testing each component as I go.  If it doesn’t work, figure out what’s wrong and change it.  Question everything: is the form factor wrong?  Is the theme wrong? Is the approach wrong? IS IT FUN?

Atomic: Work with the minigame model – write up  mechanics for each aspect of a game, keeping in mind the overall shape of the project.  Test each minigame, then integrate and test again.  Obviously, some sort of testing mechanism is going to be crucial, here.

Utile: If principles are getting in the way, eject the principles for now.  If the principle is important, integrate it into the process at a lower level – does this facet support the principle AND the game, or just the principle alone?

Obviously, there are implementation problems that are independent of the process problem.  It’s a lot easier to iterate my web projects when all I have to do is alter a few lines of code and sync my localhost web directory.  But I like the shape of this, and I should invest brain cycles in trying to figure out a) how to make it work, and b) applying it to Strangers and Terrible World.

Theme and the Construction of Shared Imaginative Space

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

I’ve been listening to a metric ton of boardgaming podcasts lately.  In many of them, there’s a lot of talk about the theme of games, and whether or not it’s important to have strong theme, or mechanics that reflect the theme.  (If you want to take a listen, here’s a Q&A with Reiner Knizia where he talks about theme and his process quite a bit.)

A lot of talk about theme centers around the idea of a game ‘feeling’ right: Does a merchant game give you a taste of the experience of being a merchant trying to make it in 15th century Florence?  Does Lifeboat give you the feeling of trying to talk your way out of a grim death at the bottom of the ocean?

RPGs, particularly story-games, are all about theme.  They tend to be smaller in scope and focus their mechanical energy towards the theme that the designer has in mind.  For example, Jason Morningstar’s excellent Grey Ranks.  It’s a game about playing a teenage resistance fighter during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.  More to the point, it’s about the emotional lives of those soldiers during the intensity of combat.  The character sheet and the grid that the game is played on are tightly bound to the theme – there’s no hit location charts for combat, no list of skills – nothing that you’d traditionally associate with a game about war and combat.

What’s most interesting about these two ideas, however, is how theme is approached differently between board game design and RPG design.  Theme in boardgames is primarily a physical function: do the pieces, the board art reflect the desired theme?  Process, while certainly part of the equation, has a much smaller role – many board game processes are identical to each other, or are structured around existing mechanical paradigms – the ‘chase game’, for example.  So theme, if we talk about it from an AGE Model perspective, is a function of the manipulation of resources in the gamespace.

This is inverted when we talk about roleplaying games.  Physicality is removed from many modern RPGs – dice and a character sheet can only do so much.  So theme emerges through play – do the patterns of the characters’ interactions conform to the themes as expressed in the rules?  So while the wellspring of theme is the same between RPGs and board games, the gamespace, theme’s ‘proper place’ in RPGs is in the emspace – in the shared narrative, and how the players interact.

Stepping back a bit – are these as different as they might at first seem?  It seems to me that board games simply don’t have explicit constructors for emspace – there’s nothing in the rules of Pandemic or Race to the Galaxy that promotes the idea of putting yourself inside the narrative flow of the game.  So does this mean that emspace doesn’t exist in boardgames?  No – I’ve played a lot of Pandemic lately, and Amy and I do enter a shared space inside the game.  We talk about our pawns in the first person (‘I’ll go to Bogota and cure there.’) – so the emspace appears to be present, though to a much lesser degree than in RPGs because of the lack of explicit construction of the shared imaginative space.

So is the emspace inevitable?  Is it inherent in play?  Reflexively, I’d say no – but there is an intriguing possiblity: perhaps there are two imaginative spaces: an emspace (or explicitly constructed shared imaginative world), and a second kind of shared world, formed from the collapse of the gamespace and the playspace.  I’d call this the gameplayspace, but that’s a very Germanic construct.  How about Ludospace (or Ludispace? – declension was never my strong suit)?  This, then, is the space constructed by theme in boardgames – the enhancement of the ‘magic circle’ of a game to include thematic elements.

How is this a different animal from the Emspace?

At first blush, the Emspace, while tied to the rules of the game (no matter how loosely), includes a much larger extraludic narrative component that exists independent of the rules of the game.  This is best explained (by me, at least), in computer terms: the Ludospace is a function of the Playspace and the Gamespace, and is wholly encompassed by the two.  For the Emspace, however, the game is a service - exposing some of the imaginative space to manipulation by the players, but not in its entirety – the rest of the space is manipulated directly by the players.  Again – a large portion of this is mediated in the Playspace, but is understood not to be encompassed by that. 

Taken another way, the Emspace in RPGs is assumed to be autonomous; in board games, it is wholly dependent on the structure of the game.  This essential difference is what gives RPGs their open-ended nature: the rules are the starting point of the narrative, instead of a description of it.

The Bucket List

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

I recently combed through the last 100 or so posts (we’re almost at 300 now!), and came up with a complete Bucket List of every game project that I’ve put the least amount of thought into.  Here they are, in no particular order:

1. DEAD
2. AFTER
3. Terrible World
4. Strangers
5. OORT
6. Expressionism
7. Bluebeard
8. Decathalon
9.  Merchant
10. Elsewhere
11. Elseworld
12. Cold War
13. Makuria
14. Get It On
15.  On the Air
16. Big Kahuna

So let’s play with this a bit to get priorities straight.  If I rank them in order of “words on paper” or “work done”, the list looks like this:

1. Elsewhere
2. DEAD
3. Merchant
4. Terrible World
5. Elseworld
6. Strangers
7. Decathalon
8. OORT
9. Expressionism
10. AFTER
11. Cold War
12. Makuria
13. On the Air
14. Get It On
15. Big Kahuna

Really, Big Kahuna is just an idea – but I included it for sake of completeness.  So now if I take this list and put it in order of “games I would want to have done”, it looks like this:

1. DEAD
2. Elsewhere
3. AFTER
4. Merchant
5. Terrible World
6. Strangers
7. OORT
8. Elseworld
9. Expressionism
10. Decathalon
11. Cold War
12. Makuria
13. Get It On
14. On the Air
15. Big Kahuna

So if we add the ranks from the two lists together, we get:

1. DEAD
2. Elsewhere
3. Merchant
4. Terrible World
5. Strangers

The interesting part of this exercise is that Merchant made it to the top five – the things that I really want to get done.  I think this is a sort of wake-up call that my pursuits are out of whack.  That I have so much done on things like Elsewhere and Merchant, but they’re sitting there on the shelf.  Mind you, they’re definitely not in a place where I could exploit them for the GenCon Year – not by a long shot.  But I think I need to take a long look at myself and my process – and figure out how these sorts of things happen.

Left 4 Dead + the First 101 Days

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Here we are at November 19th, 101 days into my GenCon Year.  Where are we?

Well, I’ve completed an overhaul of my Game Chef 2007 entry, Eidolon – now retitled Terrible World.  I’ve created a couple of prototypes and I’m alpha-testing it to make sure that the system mechanics aren’t completely out of whack.

Second, I’m in the process of formally writing up Strangers (more on that in my next post), a slice-of-life game based on the idea of an R-map ‘story machine’.

But what I really want to talk about is Left 4 Dead, the new zombie shooter from Valve.

* * *

Oh. My. God.  Even if this weren’t the most thematically appropriate game for me to play on the planet, this would be one hell of an amazing game.  In case you’re not into PC gaming, Left 4 Dead uses a new technology from Valve called the ‘Director AI’ that assesses the health of you and your teammates and adjusts the location of enemies and resources throughout the map.  I’ve played through the first two maps of the game more than a few times using the demo, and every single play-through felt different.  L4D keeps you on the edge of your seat, waiting for the next flood of rage zombies to come crashing through a door; and when you’re absolutely ready, it lets loose some slack, presenting room after empty room that you keep bursting into, waiting for that next adrenaline-fueled wave of enemies.  I’m not sure how it does it, but when you actually do release your sphincter, you’re due for a dose of REALLY rough times.

On other run-throughs, my co-ops and I have been hit by multiple waves of zombies in the opening seconds of the game, reducing us to pulp.

My only real gripe with the game is that the four co-op characters are completely alike.  I understand the reasoning: Having the characters as specialists weakens the whole ‘we all need to make it to the end’ vibe of the game.  It becomes a matter of each specialist doing their niche thing instead of all the players doing their damn best at fending off the dead.  It takes a lot of grief out of the mix.

It’s also been fun to play online, where the Counter Strike mentality has gotten more than one player killed but good.  Charging ahead alone is the fastest way to get killed – as is lurking in the aft.  The Director will measure that distance and pounce on you.  Online play also taught me that ‘turtling’ – taking it slow and clearing the level methodically – is a bad idea.  Go too slow and you’ll run out of bullets before the game runs out of zombies.  You have pistols that have unlimited ammo, but unless you’re a headshot god (much harder in L4D because of the erratic way that the Infected move!), running out of ammo is a bad idea.

Which brings me to the visuals and sound: Really great.  Given that there are so many objects on the screen at any one time, the graphics aren’t next-gen, but I can crank all of the settings up on my dual-core machine  and get a great ride.  The Infected lurch, fight, slump and then burst at you in a full-on screaming rage.  Again, because of the pure number of polygons, the bodies disappear but the blood doesn’t – making any serious encounter look like a pipe bomb went off in a slaughterhouse.  Molotovs set the Infected on fire, but they run at you anyways, a la 28 Days Later.

All in all, the game has given me a lot of inspiration for working some additional material and changes into DEAD.  The very idea of a Director (embodied by the Dead player) and the Threat deck in DEAD as a character in its own right just got a big pat on the back.

And with 264 days left, who knows?

Systems, Formal and Informal

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

In this post, Jonathan Walton asks “System Matters + Lumpley Principle = ?’.  At ‘Story by the Throat’, a blog name that I personally covet, Joel considers the differences between RPGs and what his friend Willem is doing with his own blogject, the College of Mythic Cartography.  Both posts consider the same subject: what is the boundary between structured play in RPGs and the unstructured ‘other stuff’ – either the happenings at the table in the Lumpley Principle, or in an activity such as story-jamming.

The answer to my mind is quite simple: with any activity of this kind, there are formal and informal systems.  The formal system in RPGs is the rule systems.  They define what is part of ‘the game’ – the exchanges of currency that can be made, and the channels that the players can operate in. 

Of course, the players also operate in one or more informal systems – social networks, interpersonal dynamics, gaming culture and the like – which have their own sets of rules and operations.  A classic examples of the informal systems at the table are the Girlfriend Effect, where the main squeeze of the GM gets special consideration for his or her character.  A more positive example is when I let my 5 year-old daughter know that there’s a better move that she can take in checkers.

With this in mind, story-jamming simply moves the formal systems surrounding story creation that are in place in most RPGs and places them inside the bounds of the informal social systems of the group doing the jamming.  The players do what feels right, and there’s no resistance from more formal systems of interaction – the game isn’t telling them what to do.  To varying degrees, the ‘classic’ RPG player wants that resistance.  They want the game to push back, to confine their actions.  Working within the bounds of that resistance makes the game interesting – the idea that you I can say ‘BANG’ and you can’t say ‘NUH UH’ – or rather, that you can say ‘NUH UH’, but you have to have the rules backing you up as well.

Various attempts over the years have been made to introduce formal structure to the informal areas of gaming, and vice-versa.  I would call any explicit Social Contract an attempt to introduce formality to the informal system around the game table.  Primetime Adventures codifies things like ‘everyone agreeing what the show is going to be about’ – that sort of explicit agreement is a formal structure inside the fuzziness of informal table gatherings.

While I have no problem with the abstraction of game rules to fit in with a given social situation (Willem’s friends want to story-jam, not to do something kinda like story-jamming), I don’t agree with the imposition of formal structures into the social realm of games.  At best, I think that games designs should function well regardless of the social structure of the participants – imagine the rules of chess falling apart because the two players didn’t like each other.  A game should contain enough formal structure to insulate play from egregious social dysfunction – at least to the point where play is still possible.  If everyone walks away from the table, that’s another situation entirely.

A lot of the ideas that I’ve been playing around with: DEAD, AFTER and Cold War being the three that stand out, revolve around the idea that complete harmony at the table is all fine and dandy, but it’s not what makes a game interesting.  What’s interesting is having your best friends around the table and gleefully backstabbing them for the sake of a good story – which is the only shared endgame that everyone at the table shares.

* * *

As a postscript, the AGE Model takes all of this formal/informal stuff in stride.  The Gamespace is the home of the formal systems set up by the rules.  The Playspace is where the messy social stuff happens.  Interaction between the two spaces is the same idea covered by the Lumpley Principle, and taken together, and the two spaces taken as a whole, with all of their interconnections, is the answer to the equation ‘System Matters + Lumpley Principle’.  Call it the Fuzzyformal System, or something even more clever.

SPORE: Expectations and explanations.

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Out of the blue, I won a free downloadable copy of SPORE, which I promptly did, testing my new cable bandwidth for all it was worth.  About two hours and one giant unzip operation later, I installed the game and sat down with my 5 year-old daughter to kick the tires.  I was not disappointed.  Graphically and audially, the game is a masterpiece – in the Cell and Creature stages, you can see far-off (or much larger, in the case of the Cell stage) creatures with distance blur.  The procedural environments are intoxicating and the gameplay is simple enough that my daughter was able to play out the Cell stage on her own after a couple of go-arounds.

The Creature stage is also a lot of fun – you slowly morph your creature to fit your play style, encountering new adversaries along the way, along with the occassional, tantalizing glimpse of the future.  I was shocked to see a UFO, the centerpiece of the Space part of the game, appear over my creature and slowly circle the area, sucking up one of my brethren and some enemies from a nearby nest.

I’ve completed only about half of the Tribal stage, and it’s been a lot of fun too.  Some people have made hay of the fact that your creature doesn’t change anymore.  Well no, it’s not supposed to.  The game changes gears from millions of years per evolution to hundreds or thousands – that’s not enough to show evolution.  But my creature, once I finalized the design at the end of the Creature phase, kept its attributes and inherent scores.  My Creature, the Etophore, is a sneak-charger: Sneak up on Sasquatch feet up to a lone enemy, then charge and finish him off with my claws.  The Etophore is a herbivore – the attacking is purely in defense.  After reading some reviews, I expected this behavior to vanish in the Tribal phase – until I sent a war party to a nearby village and the whole tribe went into Sneak mode and charged the opposing villagers, popping up out of nowhere – all on their own.  Beautiful.

Now to my quibbles with the game.

First of all, you have to collect all of the available parts for the Cell and Creature stages, meaning that as a herbivore, I was only going to find about a third of all the bits.  As a Carnivore, you can collect parts by killing and eating – herbivores have to find skeletons and kill Alphas of competing species.  It’s slow going.  In the Cell stage especially, herbivores are at a disadvantage in that they can only get bits from pieces of meteor (the game is based on panspermia!) – I only ever found a single one, leaving me to get almost none of the Cell parts for my next creation(s).  While it’s interesting to find a new bit and use it, the collectible factor leaves me a bit dry.

My second quibble is that ‘evolution’ is all in the hands of the player – it’s possible to completely alter your Creature from one evolution to the next – everything from body-shape to diet to number of limbs is completely alterable.  This undermines the Creature phase a bit, unless you put artificial restrictions on yourself (which I did/do, and my daughter didn’t/doesn’t).  The game should restrict the number of bits you change with each iteration, either as a limit to the number of parts added/subtracted or by introducing a DNA (i.e. currency) debt.  This debt is present in the Tribal stage, but not in the Creature or Cell stage.  Maybe a mod will introduce it.

Lastly, the implements in the Tribal stage aren’t alterable, unlike the bits from the last two stages and the various creators for vehicles and buildings in the Civ and Space stages.  This is a bit disappointing.  Again, maybe there will be an expansion that allows you to make implements that suit your tribe’s temperment.

The game works exactly like Wright said it would: By introducing the player to larger and larger scopes of action, it scaffolds you into play in a way that few games of this genre do.  At the same time, it’s not as heavily structured as a similar game like Black & White was.  By the time I reached the end of the Cell and Creature stages, I was ready for more – which the Tribal stage provides.  Your scope expands – not until the Tribal stage can you move the camera off of your creature.  By the time you’re at the stage, you’re more than capable of managing the extra complexities.

Spore is enough of a cipher that I’ve seen more than a dozen reviews of the game that have completely conflicting views of the same features: the open gameplay, the simplicity of the opening stages, etc.  I’ve read that the later stages become uncomfortably difficult – time will tell.

Wii your game. Or: Physicality matters.

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

My wife, who is sainted beyond all recognition just for living with me, recently bought me a Nintendo Wii as my ‘back to school’ present.  I’m not going back to school, everyone else in my house is, but the wife wanted to make sure I was included in all of the money-burning fun.

I only have Wii Sports (and will only have Wii Sports for some time to come), but playing with it has totally opened my eyes, and reinforced a central notion of my thinking in game design: physicality matters with games.

I’ve played countless hours of baseball, boxing and bowling on the PC and elsewhere.  Not until I played with the Wii, however, was I so easily engrossed in the tasks at hand.  The force-feedback is one thing – that certainly helps.  But the use of the Wiimote as a bat, ball, or tennis racquet stimulates muscle memory and integrates the experience much more thoroughly for me.  I don’t think I’d have spent the time with Wii Sports that I have if it didn’t offer a much more compelling experience with the physical aspect – the games themselves are a bit short (3-inning baseball?!), but they scale up the difficulty nicely to the point where I really have to fight to win that damn 3-inning game, but my 5 year-old daughter can play and have fun at the same time.

So this has gotten me back to thinking about distributed play, and mechanical diversity.  If a simple game of tennis can be made much more rich with the Wii’s rather simple and intuitive change in mechanical play (from gamepad to Wiimote), the physical component of games we play is essential to our understanding of those games.  By changing the physical aspect (from a character sheet and dice, for example) to something more representative and correlary to the theme of the game, you can fundamentally change the way people play, without the need to impose extra rule structure to compensate.

I’ve decided to go ahead with creating a Distributed Play website and possible design competition to highlight these ideas – more on that later on in the week.

T +368, plus a new Cairn twist.

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

So I’m an idiot and I thought that GenCon was this last weekend – a weekend that I actually spent playing a lot of strategy games (GMT’s Paths of Glory and Fantasy Flight’s Cold War, mainly), but not writing a whole lot.  I was sitting down to do the first serious work in about a week, lamenting my lost seven days, only to find out that GenCon is this coming weekend (the 15th of August), meaning that I got a reprieve of seven days, with three days left.

Official countdown total: 368 days left.

* * *

During this trip, I interviewed my opponent (shout-out to Mike Bellar!) and we talked about his perfect game.  The answer was a manageable tabletop 4x (explore, expand, exploit & exterminate), with two different boards: a strategic and a tactical.  We talked a bit about the obstacles to 4x on the tabletop, and here’s my AGE-Modelish take on the problem:

4x games suffer from two conflicting forces: Authenticity and Simplicity.  Play should carry enough verisimiltude that you feel that you’re making valid decisions in the gamespace you’re playing – a space-empire game should feel different from a business/stock market game.  The addition of authentic rulespaces, though, creates complexity and exceptions that clutter up the game play – to the extent that now two different people that I’ve interviewed that have worked on their own 4x-ish games have resorted to Excel spreadsheets to manage play.  (In the interest of full disclosure, past versions of both Merchant and Manor have required the aid of a computer to make them work – so I’m no saint in this matter.)

Streamlining the mechanics of the game, however, dissolves the authenticity – pushing chits around on a board that provides only marginal thematic feedback isn’t satisfying.  The chits could be crates of exotic spices, tons of dilithium or shares in Gizmonics Institute.  If the play doesn’t create the right “feel” then the experience is lost.

Balancing the two is, if not nigh impossible, at least grindingly difficult.  On thinking it over for the past few days, the conclusion that I’ve come to is this: choose the key aspects of the experience that separate it from other 4x experiences, and keep those aspects to a minimum.  For my merchant game, maybe it’s spoilage orf the cargo.  For the space game, a unique mode of travel.  Then tie those core mechanics together to create secondary layers of derived mechanics.

Derivation of mechanics means less to remember, and an easier flow to the game.  Secondarily, layers of information that would take up a spreadsheet can be represented in a few key stats, so long as the derivations are relatively straight-forward.  The derivations themselves can aid verisimilitude, so long as they conform to the player’s expectations.

An example: In a space exploration game, the population of a colony could be derived from the Habitability score of the planet added to the Tech level of the colony, that technology representing the ability of the colonizing power to alter the habitability.  The habitability could be a raw score on a card; the Tech level a stat that the player is already keeping track of.

Of course, where this runs into problems is with highly dynamic/volatile aspects – for example, the price of a company’s stock during the course of a business 4x.  Part of the solution, I think, comes from the use of multiple-derivatives.  The stock price could be dependent on trade volume (a stack of chips of two colors), the scale of the company (its ‘market cap’), and the actions of the current round of play.  This is where Cairn comes into play: with three mediums of information storage (chips, cards and a tracking sheet), these factors can all be presented simultaneously by chip color and number, location on the card, etc.

This is where 4x and complex wargames get it wrong – and where they’re starting to get it right.  Information is stored in the rules instead of right in front of the players – a multitude of exceptions instead of play structures that encourage following the same thought patterns.  In playing Paths of Glory, I was stunned by how the rule structures for Entrenchment and core mechanics simulated the plodding course of the war, and the rigidity of the fronts.  Despite endless attempts, both of us didn’t manage to budge the Western Front of the Great War more than a space in either direction.  Towards the end of our play time (we got through 1914 and a bit of 1915 in 4 hours, our time window), I decided to get bold, and I paid for it by winding up in a position where Germany was going to fall by 1916 at the latest.  WWI wasn’t about audacity, no matter what the posters said.  It was about grinding attrition and economic ruin for the win.

The other thing that GMT gets right in the game is the use of cards with multiple uses (this is similar to their Command & Colors system): you can use a card to order up replacements, advance the action, or as an event (say, phosphene gas attacks).  Deciding what to use each card for, and by placing mulitple forms of information on each card, they become much more versatile, and the game is deeper as a result.

This is distributed play at work – a wargame with cards plays out differently than a wargame with just the chits and dice.  Cairn is built on that philosophy.

Decathalon and Bluebeard: Rise of the Minigame

Friday, June 6th, 2008

On a recent episode of The Dice Tower boardgame podcast, the #1 response in a poll on what sort of sports-themed board game the listeners would want to see published was ‘the decathalon’.

During Game Chef, I was in a critique group (Go Hydra!) with a gentleman named SirElfinJedi, who created a game called ‘Masks of the Nautica’, which uses a mechanic based on a compass rose: the GM pics a direction (northeast, for example) and the player chooses a range of compass points based on the relative strength of their skills.  If they pic the right one, they succeed.

I’ve wanted to make a pirate game based around the Brethren Court introduced in the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which was itself loosely based on the actual Brethren of the Coast, a loose coalition of pirates in the Caribbean.

What do these three things have in common?  Mini-games, baby.  More specifically, a cluster of mini-games sharing the same mechanical core.

Let’s start with the decathalon, which gives us the physical games to model on.  The events of the decathalon are:

Day 1: 100 metres, long jump, shotput, high jump, 400 metres.

Day 2: 110 metre hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, 1500 metres.

The next step comes from clustering them together by type:

Footraces: 100m, 400m, 1500m.

Running + Throw/Jump: Long jump, high jump, pole vault, javelin.

Throw: Shotput, discus.

Now we can start to think of a way to model these games.  I’ll do that in the next post.

For the pirate game, I’ve already picked out a few minigames: mumbley-peg, the knife trick, shut-the-box, liar’s dice and the compass rose mechanic I mentioned above.  Each of these would perform a different task: mumbley-peg for duels, the knife trick for social challenges, liar’s dice for narrative control, shut-the-box for naval combat, and the compass rose for … a lot of other things.

Why do this?  And why do it in what is (ostensibly) an RPG?
It has to do with my idea of distributed play: that the form of a game influences the way that players interact with it.  Yes, I could just make one unified mechanic that would handle all of these things, but I’m interested in how player skill, and the difference in player skill, would play out in the choices of the players.  Someone who’s good at the mumbley-peg portion might use that to his or her advantage by bringing that mechanic into play more often.

What a collection of mini-games does, apart from adding a large dose of theme (always a good thing), is give players different paths to success.  Mixing that together with differences on the character sheet gives a wider variety of play for the game, and helps to support the unique, off-beat feel that I want to give the characters in Bluebeard.

The AGE Model expands a bit: The Three Fulcra

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

I’ve had the AGE Model on the brain quite a bit over the last few weeks, particularly as I engaged in Game Chef this year. As I’ve been working it around in my skull, quite a few Big Model-genic discussions have come up on Story Games: here and here, specifically.

I’ve come across another possible addition to the strength of the AGE Model: The Three Fulcra (Fulcrums, for the plebs).

Each of the AGE Model’s three axes (Art > Em, the Consensus Axis; Em > Game, the Clarity Axis; and Game > Art, the Constraint Axis) has across from it the third principle: For example, the Art > Em (Consensus) axis has across from it the Game Principle. What I’ve begun to wonder is this: Does the third principle act as a sort of fulcrum for the forces present on the axis? Does the Game principle act as a mediary between the Em and Art principles?

The seductive part of this idea is that the first example that I’ve given, with the Art > Em Consensus axis on one side, and the Game principle on the other), it seems trivial to come up with examples of the rules of a game mediating between players’ personal choice and the experience of the game. That’s what rules often do in RPGs.

The other two axes aren’t as clear-cut.

The Clarity axis (Em > Game) represents the complexity embodied in the experience of the game, with Art as the mediating principle. So how does player expression mediate between the structure of the game and the experience that the game provides? The first example that comes to mind is the ‘hacking impulse’, the creation of game content on a local level (a game group, or a mod for a computer game) that alters the structure to provide an experience that the player(s) prefer.

This works either way, with the players hacking together rules to support some aspect of a given milieu – for example, making rules for a Star Trek game to support the command structure aboard the Enterprise. Similarly, players may create non-mechanical supports to bolster their experience of the game – for example, explicitly agreeing to keep in-character.

The last axis (Game > Art, the Constraint Axis), mediated by Emulation.  This is the hardest of the three Fulcra to put my finger on.  The axis itself is a measure of the extent to which players are free to make choices, or to express themselves through the play of the game.  Towards the Game end, players are limited in the amount of choices they have.  This has the positive effect, from a designand play perspective, of creating predictability and repeatability – players can devise strategies and expect them to work from one play of the game to the next; similarly, they can alter their strategies with some assurance that they know the outcome.

Games further toward the Art apex are eschewing predictability for player freedom – opening the players’ range of choices to the extent that they can create new game situations that the rules of the game may not account for explicitly. A couple of examples of Art over Game would be tabletop RPG play where conflicts are resolved through dialog between characters, with no mechanical backing; and ‘sandbox’ games like SimCity where the basic rules of behavior are mapped out, but players are free to develop cities in any shape or form that they see fit.

So how does Emulation, the creation of a certain type of experience, mediate this?  The answer lies in the social aspect of emulation – the idea that emulation is a purely social property of games.  Does a mechanical outcome ‘feel right’ to the group, or to the player?  Does resolving a long-standing conflict completely outside the framework of the rules ‘seem fair’?  Is it in the ‘spirit of the game’?   These are nebulous quantities, but they’re almost always present to some extent in games.  Playing within the spirit of a game can be just as important as playing by the rules – and while it may be ineffable to a degree, the sense of playing fairly or coming to a satisfying conclusion for all of the players is important: games are social constructs, and if that social cohesion, the ‘magic circle’ is broken, then the game falls apart.  Finding, and staying within, that social norm (whatever that is defined as by the group), mediates between the use of rules and players’ desire to express themselves.

Cold War in the River City

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Not that long ago, I posted about a spy version of DEAD that I was knocking around. This weekend I visited River City Hobbies in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. River City is very much an old-timey hole-in-the-wall kind of hobby store: lots of back-issue comics and baseball cards sharing space with Warhammer and a dysfunctional RPG selection. I manage to spirit away a copy of the Drangonlance SAGA system (the true prize!), a copy of the GoO version of Tekumel, Malhavok’s Arcana PHB on consigment for a song. I also picked up a copy of my spy version of DEAD, tentatively titled Cold War.

It seemed at first that Fantasy Flight Games had already published my game idea. You can find it here. I played it with with gaming buddy Jerry over the weekend, and it’s a blast. It also, of course, almost gave me a fucking heart attack. Here was my game, already published. Was my system doooooooooooooooooomed?

The short answer is: No. While there are similarities, mechanically, between my game and Fantasy Flights, there are crucial differences. In FFG’s version, you play the CIA versus the KGB, one player to a side. You contest over objectives that are mainly Cold War hot-spots, but you do so one at a time. And the mechanics, which are very, very slick, are more about suits (Economy, Military, Media and Political), each suit having a given power. By tapping the card, you execute the power. For example, the Media suit, once tapped, allows you to look the top card on the draw pile and either keep it for yourself, put it back on the pile for the other guy, or discard it. Each card also has a value attached (1-6), and your goal is to make a set of cards that are equal to, but not over, the target number of the current objective.

Like I said: the game is very tight and a hell of a lot of fun. I managed to squeak a win over Jerry with the very last objective in play, having been in running behind for most of the game.

My idea differs in several ways: all of the players in my version are NATO agents, and everyone is also the opposition. Actions aren’t entirely symmetrical on both sides of the conflict (FFG’s game is perfectly symmetrical), and there’s only one location in play at any one time.

So once again I dodge a bullet – but this is a bullet with a fringe benefit. First of all, it shows me that my ideas are eminently workable – FFG’s game was a blast to play, so there’s a lot more hope for DEAD and the core mechanic. Second, I found a new, awesome, two-player game to add to my collection.

And I got it for half price!

Play, Imagination and Media

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

It started with this piece from NPR on children’s play. The main thrust of the research presented in the piece is a rather old and cranky piece of wisdom: those darn kids don’t play like we used to.

In a nutshell, the research presents the idea that with the introduction of branded toys and structured playtimes, kids are losing the ability to self-regulate their behavior, and to create and carry out plans (called ‘executive function‘). This lack of executive function is correlated with poor outcomes in education – moreso than a lot of other cognitive functions, like a kid’s ability to read.

The upshot is that a childhood playing with sticks, blocks and other highly neutral toys is better for kids than a childhood playing with Barbie and the Transformers. Cognitively speaking.

A while back I talked about distributed play – the idea that toys possess (or are assigned) roles in play.  By combining different toys in different roles, play emerges.  This is pre-ludic behavior – a child searches for ways to combine toys (or objects, for that matter), forming a set of rules regarding what works and what doesn’t.  Later on, this aids in the assignation of rules to bits and pieces on a game board.

So far, so good.

Where the researcher and I diverge is on the question of whether branded toys carry more or fewer narrative roles.  He would say that the narratives imposed on the toy by the associated media involved would decrease the number of roles a toy could (or perhaps would) take in play, and therefore act as a sort of ‘crutch’ for the child’s executive function.  Toys with more (or more clearly) assigned roles require less ‘work’ for the child’s imagination.

I’m not sure I agree.  Or rather, I agree with the idea, but not the outcome.

Branded toys may offer a narrower range of roles, but I don’t think that necessarily translates into a smaller range of narratives.  A Luke Skywalker action figure might always be Luke Skywalker (my own daughter prefers my vintage Hoth Han Solo), but Luke may find himself robbing banks or chasing after dinosaurs as often as not; activities that are divorced from the specific set of canonical roles adults would assign to Luke.

Furthermore, I’d say that there’s a skill is that is just as important for kids today to gain: media negotiation.  No matter how insulated we were to make our kids when they’re young, unless you’re Amish they are eventually going to enter a society awash in media.  Learning to negotiate that media, to manipulate and gain mastery over it (as opposed to letting it master you), is important.  Play with branded toys, I believe, simply shifts some of the skill development over into this new area – an area that will (hopefully) make our kids much more savvy media consumers than we are ourselves.

I enjoy being occassionally correct.

Friday, March 7th, 2008

In this first part of a review of 4E by a playtester at Ain’t It Cool News, the following is said:

From Everquest to the World of Warcraft (and the many other imitators in between and after) comes the notion of perfect balance – the idea that every class, every character, every role in the party, has something to do and never, ever, has to sit on the sidelines.

I’m not the kind of guy to say I told you so. Cookie for Kuma!

D&D 4th Edition is a MM(P)RPG.

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

John Kim put up a link to a 4th Edition set of character sheets that were provided by WotC at the D&D Experience in Arlington, Virginia.  This is my first look at the new system (I’m not tracking it closely because I want to come to it relatively fresh when it’s released in June), and it stuck me very suddenly – just as D&D birthed the MMORPG, the MMORPG has now wrought changes in D&D.

Very interesting.

Most of the sheets are the same as usual, until you get to the feats, class features and spells.  Now, instead of spell lists, you have ‘Powers’, which are further sub-divided by type: At-Will, Encounter and Daily.  At-Will is like it says – as a standard action, use said power.  Encounter powers are used once per encounter, and Daily are used once (or more) until you rest.

Looking closer, the mechanical breakdown of spells, feats and skills have reached an all-time minimum.  Most powers have been stripped down to their mechanical roots, and those roots are laid bare.   For comparison, check out the text blocks on those sheets again this list of Warlock spells and abilities from a WoW site, or even this list of Elementalist skills from Guild Wars.   The similarity is striking.

So why am I writing about it here?  Well, first of all I find this sort of feeback loop very interesting.  If you want to lure WoW players into D&D, make D&D more like WoW.  Basic marketing logic.  Secondly, this provides a very interesting test basin for Elsewhere.  Whereas modelling D&D was always a chore for previous editions, this one should prove a snap.  I’m going to start working on some basic diagramming this weekend.  I’ve modeled WoW and Guild Wars using Elsewhere as a framework for a while, and D&D 4th seems like a good way for me to transition into ‘traditional’ RPGs.

Company of the DEAD

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

I’ve been playing a bit of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, which I recieved for Christmas.  It was in the middle of this that I was also doing a bit of thinking about card resources and making the card play in DEAD more dynamic.  While the results that I came to with DEAD had little to do with CoH, I realized that you could very easily port the system that I’m generating with DEAD over to a WW2 game.  Elements of the spy version of DEAD also crept in.

I don’t think I’d go right ahead and call it NAZI, for obvious reasons.  But the idea would be the same.  At any point in the game, there’s one player who is the Opposition – and whose ‘real’ character is neutral while they are the adversary.  During the action part of the game, the players are united against the Opposition, but in order to maximize their own effectiveness, they have to play cards against each other as well.

It’s possible that the system would have to be changed in order to accomodate the ‘Band of Brothers’ ideal that goes along with most WW2 portrayals today.  Maybe I’d be better off setting it in a less glamourized time period, like Vietnam.

Food for thought.