Meeting 0 – in Teams chat (26/10/20)
Our team agreed on three video meetings a week, for which we would prepare specific things, both as a way to get to know each other and to build a strong knowledge foundation early on.
Our first bit of agreed prep was identifying and preparing 3-5 existing games to play on a videocall. We all agreed that jumping in with too clear an idea too early, without understanding the ‘context’ of videoconference play, might leave us with a dud idea after a lot of work.
After being briefed on the project, I started by looking at the work of Grant Howlitt (micro-RPGs with rules that can fit on one side of A4) and the zine Games For People (a collection of 60 folk games collated by V Buckenham and Pat Ashe). I was looking for examples of games that were ‘learnable and playable in <15 minutes’, as per the project brief, and happily I encountered many!
A quick analysis of games of that scale revealed the following: their rules are often boiled down to a single-line game pitch (eg. To play Boop, touch someone on the elbow and say ‘Boop!’ / YOU’RE A SCRAPPY LITTLE GOBLIN PUNK…IT’S TIME FOR AN ADVENTURE!). This pitch is then followed by an expansion of the rules that defines them more clearly, and then some rule variants that might be employed as play progresses, but don’t need to be covered in order to start playing.
Meeting 1 – through Teams videochat (27/10/20)
The objectives of this initial meeting were to get to grips with the mechanical and dynamic challenges of playing games via videoconference.
I had taken inspiration from our first lecture, choosing 20 Questions (verbal guessing game limited by the amount of questions), I Spy (object identification game, given a single-letter clue), and Just A Minute (game of verbally improvising on subject without deviation, repetition, or hesitation), as well as altering some games I had delivered live before. The first, Offerings, sees one player take on the role of a high status character who wants something in a certain, secret category. The other players must present them with objects or actions, which the high status character will either accept or reject, and they must work out what the secret category is. The other game was What Is This?, a variant on What’s In The Sock, where you feel inside a sock for a particular item. Players turn off their webcams, place an item very close to its lens, turn the webcam on and draw the item back very slowly. The first player to guess the item wins.
We observed that audio clarity was often an issue, so games that relied on quickfire guessing often felt unwieldy or confusing. Likewise, the fun of people maintaining or breaking a rhythm, as in games like 7 Up, was difficult to recreate through telepresence. There was some brief reliance on random number generators like dice or online dice rolling tools, and it was decided that trying to come up with a solution for this might point the way to some interesting mechanics.
Some good discoveries were made though: using the videocall as a prompt to engage with our actual surroundings felt satisfying (as with What Is This?); mechanics that kept the body engaged with the camera felt productive. Physical interaction with objects on our desks was really pleasurable – displaying items to the camera felt like a high point – and a key takeaway was also the use of fingers to represent lives, points, or just numbers. Ideally we don’t want the players reaching for too many things while they’re playing.
Feeling more familiar with the constraints of gaming through videoconference, we resolved to create for our meeting the next day a handful of short, playable games or mechanics that suited the videoconference context.
Meeting 2 – through Teams videochat (28/10/20)
Stephen brought a prototype of an object-naming game with a coin flip mechanic – a player presents an object, counts the number of letters in its name, then flips a coin. On a heads, the next player has to find an object with one more letter in its name; on a tails, one fewer. We played this with a time limit, and it was fast and furious, although point-scoring was a bit contentious. When a player blanked, it wasn’t very interesting for the other players to watch, unless they were shouting a countdown into the screen. The rowdiness of this game was its biggest success, although the rules became a little hard to follow.
Jacky tried out some ideas involving tracing routes between players by passing a pen through one side of the ‘screen’ and out the other, but this threw up an issue of both perspective and display order – we didn’t know if we could guarantee that, for example, player A would always be in the top left corner, player B would always be to their right, etc.
Jacky’s other idea was a fun object memorisation game – every player but one strikes a pose on camera, and the other player has to memorise their position, clothes, background etc. They close their eyes (or shut off their incoming video) for ten seconds, and the other players have to change three things (clothes, position, object placement etc). The guesser opens their eyes and has to identify the things that changed within a certain amount of guesses. We felt like this was one of the more successful games we played, but that it might be more suitable for a compendium of micro-games, as it can be explained in maybe two sentences and played in less than five minutes.
I brought two small games and an idea for a mechanic. The first game was a cooperative take on charades inspired by Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, a co-operative game where one player can see and interact with a virtual bomb, and another has the defusal handbook but cannot see the bomb. I looked at what elements could be altered in the videoconference setup to make such an asymmetrical experience. My pitch involved altering the videoconference settings so that player A could neither see nor hear the other players, but was able to communicate by mime through their webcam. Player B could see player A, and could talk to player C; player C could hear player B and type in the chat. Though this idea seemed smooth and interesting in my head, in practice it was too unwieldy to set up, and player C often felt isolated and bored. Clues were too easy to guess, and we couldn’t see a way to insert a ‘win’ condition.
It didn’t work!
The mechanic I pitched was a way to solve the random number generation problem we found in the first session. Simply put, if each player (on a count of three) displays between one and five fingers to the camera, and the results are added together, a number can be generated between 3 and 15 (for 3 players), 4 and 20 (for 4 players), etc. If players can offer no fingers, then the variance increases to 0 to 15, 0 to 20 etc. Obviously with fewer fingers the variance can be reduced (a d6, for example, can almost be replicated by 3 players offering 0-2 fingers). This result could just produce numbers if needed, or could be used to select a result from a table (like those in Grant Howlitt’s one-page RPGs)! The group felt this was a neat solve for RNG, but wasn’t enough to necessarily build an entire game around, and none of us thought that writing a one-page RPG would display enough engagement with systems for this piece of assessment.
My second game offering was a role-playing/bidding game, in which players ‘auctioned off’ items on their desk/in their environment. All players start with 5 ‘fingers’, representing currency, and the auctioning player presents an object for sale and improvises a fun story about it. Then they set a minimum bid, which the other players either match or increase between themselves. If a player sells an item, they receive that amount of fingers, which they can use in the next turn to bid on somebody else’s items. We enjoyed the role-playing elements, and both bidding and auctioning were engaging without being too mentally taxing. The juxtaposition between domestic items and outlandish descriptions became very comedic.
We decided to think further on how to improve or even mix the ideas we had presented, and to do some live playtesting on Friday afternoon in the studio.
Meeting 3 – in person at UAL (30/10/20)
It was quickly decided that we would pour our time into the auctioning game, as the group felt more enthusiastic about playing it.
In the day between Wednesday’s meeting and Friday, I had reflected on the design decisions behind the auctioning game. It shared the single-line pitch with many of the folk games in Games For People (everyone has three antiques, and has to sell them!), but was missing their clear rules, and any variants. Its performative rules were very clear, but its mathematical rules lacked clarity – the group shared my reflections, so the key questions we had about it were to do with the win conditions. It didn’t feel fun to just assign the items a uniform value, or to make the game’s currency not count towards a victory (as in the ‘person with most items wins’ version). I had written a bunch of variant rules on Thursday, and we started by trying these out.
Early on in the playtesting, Stephen asked if items could be offered as pairs, and from this idea we naturally started introducing connected items – things owned by Princess Diana or Ghandi, for example. This was really fun, and so we decided to gamify this tendency by turning it into a rule. Now (at their own discretion) players can introduce their item as ‘one of a pair’ (eg. player A auctions a dinosaur bone, and player B auctions a dinosaur egg!). If one player has a themed pair of items at the end of the game, they get +5 fingers! So pairs are obviously valuable, and can be used strategically to draw out higher bids.
The scoring still proved difficult – we posited a tiered approach that limited the value of bids in round one, then increased in round two before becoming uncapped in round three, but we found that play did that naturally.
Two approaches seemed to work:
The first introduced an element of bluffing: at the start of the game, players write down a number between 1 and 3. This represents the item that will be a ‘fake’, and have a value of 0! It was hard to keep track of which item was which, but the results gave the end of the game an enjoyably dramatic conclusion, and the scoring achieved some satisfying variance. There was an element of paranoia whenever a player offered up a ‘pair’ item for auction now.
The second approach used my finger-RNG mechanic from the previous meeting. At the end of the game, for each item a player has bought, players would ‘roll’ together on a table of 16 values ranging between 0 and 10. There was a small degree of strategy towards how many fingers you put up for your own or other players’ items, and this process was actually a lot faster and more enjoyable than first imagined! Like a kind of rock paper scissors, but for scoring! It was observed that if the table looked like it could be ‘gamed’ then players would become even more excited by the valuation phase. Items this way take on a slight element of risk, as you could end up bidding 5 for an item that is worth 2, or 0! We would include this table with the paper rules, and make one for the web version of the game rules – of course, players could easily draw up their own in thirty seconds, as we did on the whiteboard.
We also played through some edge cases, like what happens when a player fails to draw a bid for their item (just losing felt too harsh, so we settled on the ‘house’ buying it for 1 finger). We observed that it was weirdly harder to keep track of one’s own resources when playing in person, which surprised us!
We left the session feeling positive about our game – we had turned a rough prototype into something that had a clear beginning, middle and end, and we had a good time playing it! Even at this early stage, its status as a ‘game’ seems strong, fulfilling as it does both Costikyan’s definition of ‘a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal,’ and Caillois’ elements, specifically Uncertainty and Make-Believe.
Our objectives for the weekend involve sourcing some reference images for inspiration, doing some research on table generation, and knocking together some draft instructions to test.
The general feeling is that if we can make a clear prototype for other players in Week 2 of this project, we’ll be in good shape – hopefully we can rope in some of the other teams to play it, either over videoconference or after the session on Friday! We’ve discovered some cool mechanics together and gotten to know each other better, so even if this game doesn’t continue to develop well we have enough time to regroup, iterate on other ideas, and make something else.