Case Study: Modern Art & Quantitative Easing
Modern Art (abbreviated forthwith as MA) is a board game in which players compete to collect paintings by different contemporary artists, then sell them for a high price to the bank. Quantitative Easing (abbreviated forthwith as QE) is a board game in which players ‘bail out’ failing companies, winning by having the most valuable portfolio of companies, and by not being the biggest spenders. In this case study I will analyse the bidding and points systems of each game, as well as their length and relationship to time, in the hopes of clarifying the design of our group’s videoconference project, Auctioneers!, which has a bidding system, and points.
Bidding systems:
MA offers five different auction types: Open, One Offer, Hidden Bid, Fixed Price and Double Auction (I attach the rules for each below).
In QE, bids are made by writing offers on the back of a bid card (in wipe-clean marker), and sliding to the auctioneer, who looks at them and awards the company on auction to the highest bidder.
Translating these bidding systems to a videoconference setting throws up a few pain points: MA’s Hidden Bids relies on the presence of game tokens (physical money), which obviously can’t be exchanged unless players are physically together; going ‘round the circle’, as per the One Offer or Fixed Price auctions, is cumbersome to facilitate on videoconference, when not all players share the same screen order, and in any case leaves little for the auctioneer to do. The QE bidding system requires bids to be communicated to the auctioneer in secret, which is also cumbersome over videoconference, and has some UX problems (for example: private chat functions do exist in some videoconference platforms, but training the average player in their use would be time-consuming).
The only bidding mechanic that effectively translates is the Open Auction from MA – the auctioneer’s more active role in managing proceedings is effective and fun in a videoconference setting, and players have more options for interacting with each other (more than one chance to increase their bid, interrupting, disagreeing etc). Crucially, feelings of autonomy and connectedness are promoted and maintained through this bidding system; in the others, these feelings decay.
Time:
In my theatre work with actors, I often reference this formula, which is used in mindfulness psychology: emotion = breath / time. This applies equally to participating in games – all actions are both broken up and multiplied by their relationship to time. More ‘actions per minute’ provoke a different player response than fewer; a game that lasts an hour encourages different emotions than one which last five minutes. In MA, QE and Auctioneers!, the primary mechanical action is the bid.
The potential amount of bids in both MA and QE massively exceeds the potential amount of bids in Auctioneers!. In MA, for example, between 4 and 20 auctions can take place each round (the round ends when 5 painting cards by the same artist have been played; there are 5 artists in total). And there are 4 rounds, so players will have anywhere between 16 and 70 auctions to play through (there are only 70 paintings in the deck)! QE is slightly shorter, with 21 companies to auction off (that’s still 6 more than the recommended max-duration for a max-player game of Auctioneers!).
The simplicity of some of these games’ bidding systems (pass money / write bid, hand in) suits their long-form, accretive structure – there’s a lot of drama in seeing your stock of money go up and down, and if you lose out on a bid, you are guaranteed many more chances to win. Your relationship to other players is processed through your relationship to your own resources – paintings and companies are abstract tokens, money and points are the real prize. In a short-form game like Auctioneers!, however, the social engagement of presenting and bidding needs to be given primacy – focusing on a number changing 9 times simply isn’t that thrilling. By investing the bidding with as much social feedback as possible, we can raise the perceived importance of the mechanic – players are flooded with feelings of connectedness while both presenting, listening to a presentation, and bidding.
In both games, players also engage in private ‘calculation time’, counting up either their physical money (MA) or consulting their company cards (QE) in order to figure out strategic bids.
In a videoconference game the private calculation time must necessarily be kept to a minimum, as any block to social engagement is likely to worsen the player experience – in order to create social joy, we have to foster lots of interaction and feedback, as we cannot rely on players enjoying the simple physical proximity inherent in most board games.
Points systems:
In MA, at the end of each round the paintings are valued according to how many of each artist were sold that round – the most sold artist’s paintings get €30k added to their value, the second most €20k, the third €10k, and the fourth 0. At the end of each round of bidding, players total the per-painting values for each artist, then sell the paintings to the bank. At the end of five rounds, the player with the most money wins.
In QE, at the end of the game each player calculates a number of Victory Points – one for each company purchased, 2 for each company purchased for nothing, and a range of bonuses for matching particularly coloured companies, or collecting companies that align with your ‘industry’ specialisation (determined randomly at the beginning of the game). The player with the most Victory Points wins, unless they are also the player who spent the most money.
So MA’s scoring system is the same as its economic system, though it has two resources – money and painting cards. I like this diegetic neatness. In a more ‘gamey’ theme, QE’s scoring system has two tiers – Victory Points, and money.
MA is the most difficult, maths-wise, but it avoids over-complexity by counting up player money at the end of every round (and allowing players to then spend that money as resource going forward). QE seems the most complex, but is actually very simple – money is abstracted (there is no limit on how much or little you can bid), and Victory Points are a low integer system, with players rarely asked to add more than 1-3 to their total at a time.
If this all sounds overwhelming, both games are designed in a way that breaks down the point-scoring into more easily grokkable bits and chunks. In MA it’s always easy to see how many paintings of each type you have in your hand because the cards are colour-coded. It’s also easy to keep track of the value of paintings, as there is a printed leaderboard representing each round upon which players rest tokens indicating where the respective artists came in each round. This makes it much easier for a player to track the relatively complex amount of point values. With QE, each company card has their value written on their base by the auctioneer, and that value is determined by the highest bid placed on that item.
Both games make use of an EASILY UNDERSTANDABLE CONTAINER to simplify the amount of information which a player needs to track.
Auctioneers! can take inspiration from both of these games, in terms of creating an EASILY UNDERSTANDABLE CONTAINER for players to keep track of their points or money. We may not have access to physical representations of money (bills) or tokens that can represent an item, but players will have access to a pencil and paper. Critically, score-recording needs to be kept as simple as possible, so that players spend more time engaged with the camera than with their scorecard.
The question that remains is whether to have a score-as-economy system, or a victory points system. In the case of the former, every antique would need to have a different – and tracked – value – more calculation and paperwork (and likely more bidding). In the case of the latter, alternative ways to gain points would need to be introduced in order to keep gameplay dynamic – more rules, fewer numbers. Whichever decision is made will have an impact on how the game functions over time – we either do more complex maths between each round, potentially slowing down play, or do simple maths at the end, potentially lessening drama.