Stones.

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

The wife and I went to the beach this afternoon, and found a profundity of very smooth basalt stones.  She mentioned that ‘these would make great game pieces’, so of course I scoured the beach for a couple of handfuls.  The result:

beach stones

Twenty-five stones in all of various sizes: twenty-one drak gray, and four white ones.  The mechanic: reach into the bag and draw out the stones for a conflict.  Grab as many as you want, but if you draw a white one (or more than one), you fail.

I’m also thinking about the arrangement above: the stones are laid out in a 5×5 grid, with the final pattern being significant in some way.

Now the question is: what’s the theme?  What sort of game would call for this as a mechanic?

Strangers: The relationship map as story machine.

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

In a recent post, I mentioned the two games that will (I hope) be accompanying me to GenCon: Strangers and After.  I’ve mentioned the former, but not the latter, so I thought I’d post about it.

The core idea that I’m exploring with Strangers is using a relationship map (a physical representation of the relationships between the characters laid out on the playing table) as a means for creating story: both for eliciting player involvement, and also player coercion - pushing the players to play out consequences to their actions.

The game itself is an emulator for ensemble dramas: ER, Dawson’s Creek, Grey’s Anatomy, and Smallville.  Characters are defined by two sets of conflicts that they are involved in: a personal conflict and an arc conflict that all of the characters share.  For example, in the first season of Grey’s Anatomy, the characters are all trying to balance their careers and their personal lives.  These are placed onto the character’s play card, and the cards are laid on the table with their sides touching, like so:

Here are three characters, with Character 1 having relationships with Characters 2 & 3.  The basis for Character 1′s relationship is Aspect A – conversely, Character 2 uses Aspect D.  During the course of the game, the characters’ relationships will ebb and flow, affecting (and being affected by) the underlying aspects.  At some turning point, Player 1 decides to change the aspect used in the relationship, and turns the card, like so:

Character 1′s relationship with Character 2 becomes based on Aspect C, and Character 1′s relationship with Character 3 is now Aspect A.  Not only does this affect the current scene between Characters 1 & 2, but it also forces the player to have a scene with Character 3 to establish the new dynamic there as well.

These sorts of changes cause an ebb and flow – between relationships and aspects within a character, and between the characters (and players) as well.  This emulates the give and take between the characters and how they let other aspects of the show weave themselves into the story.

* * * 

Before you think that this is all sugar and light, I’m having real difficulties with articulating how the game plays.  I know, on an intellectual level, how I want the game to play out – but during the course of writing the playtest docs, I’ve had a really hard time codifying it.

This is a break from how I usually work – working from the top down is usually not this difficult.  So Strangers is pushing me to use playstorming to work out the kinks.  Playstorming is basically the same as playtesting, but instead of setting all the rules at the outset, you start with the basic idea-shape of play, then add rules as you go.  

So this is very nebulous, but the idea seems very … fertile.  I think that I can push it a long way uphill in a short period of time – hence my interest in putting it ahead of other ideas for the Big Day.

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.

Small Worlds

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

I found this set of polar panoramas on Flickr, and it just screams out for use in a game. A Little-Prince-inspired comes to mind immediately, with each tiny world having properties of its own. It also puts me in mind of the cover of SimCity Societies (sucked!) and Katamari Damacy.

Edit: And I just found a Flickr pool dedicated to polar panoramas.