Tom Martin's Development Log

This project – to create a print-and-play game with 18 cards – already seemed more daunting than the previous one. My key worry is the openness of the brief when compared to the previous: videoconference software provided some extremely rigid limitations, which made ‘following the fun’ of a design quite easy. This card game, on the other hand, could have… any number of mechanics! The sky’s the limit!

So, rather than starting with a narrative hook or strong initial mechanic (as I had done with my early pitches for the videoconference game) I started the week by looking at the things I would 100% have – cards – and what a player could 100% do with them. I bought a pack of erasable cards from the internet, and spent an evening throwing them into different shapes and layouts, because the cards would of course 100% exist in real space.

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My hope was that these shapes might suggest some obvious mechanics or aesthetics. From above, you can see I experimented with stacking, arranging (with no borders touching and with borders touching), dividing into hands and shared cards, laying out in rows, and neatly ordering.

The parallel rows reminded me of lines of toy soldiers, and the ‘combat width’ mechanics of Paradox Interactive’s Europa Universalis series, in which army composition can encourage manoeuvres such as advances, volley fire, flanks, cavalry charges and artillery bombardment.

Arranging cards geometrically with borders touching reminded me of many landscape/dungeon generation games I had seen. I wondered whether something more organic might come out of this mechanic, though – a monster building game, with each card representing a different horrible body part? Build-your-own-Godzilla or -Cthulhu?

Placing the cards at different angles all over the table, however, instantly gave me an idea for an easy-to-understand game of strategy – players place their cards face down, anywhere on a table, and when they flip them up – depending on their direction – they can eliminate other players’ cards.

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Trying it out myself was quite difficult, as I had to keep both players’ strategic knowledge in my head, but the result was fast-paced and quite fun. The rules need to be finessed, but I will present this as one of my prototypes on Monday.

Slides:

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After jamming out some draft mechanics for games that could use cards as ammunition, resources or currency, I chose three of my favourites and knocked a few slides together for my presentation on Monday (using my drawing tablet for the first time). I’m still a good while away from defining specific rules, but I think the pitches for each of the games should be clear enough, and I’m happy that I’ve found a balance between performance games, strategy games and party games.

The first is the parallel lines, army composition card game I came up with during my layout experiments. I’m calling it Gettysburg!, mostly for flavour’s sake, but if other layouts are made possible within the ruleset it could be called Waterloo! or similar.

The second is a development of the dogfighting game I prototyped – thinking about the likely stock of the cards (printer paper), I wondered if flipping cards over and over again would feel a bit flimsy? Paper bends easily, and doesn’t lay flat on surfaces very well when cut to playing card size… From here, it was a simple thought-step to get to paper aeroplanes – cards could be designed into different paper aeroplanes, and actually thrown onto the playing space. The angle they landed would determine their interaction with the other planes in the space. Simple!

And finally, a team-based party game in which the cards are all burger ingredients – buns, lettuce, splodges of mayonnaise and ketchup – and the objective is to stack household objects in between these cards in order to make the tallest burger. I think it needs some more thrashing out, but the idea feels exciting, and I can imagine playing it with friends. Again, though, the worry of card material – this mechanic of stacking would feel better with thick card or plastic, a la Beasts of Balance or similar.

I’m looking forward to learning how to digitally prototype some of these rules – this would seem to be the chief hurdle in designing remotely at the moment.

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).

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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.

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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.

Meeting 9 – in Teams (16/11/20)

With David’s lecture on writing rules for board games fresh in our heads, we began to revise the flow of our ruleset. David’s suggested order played out like this:

• Title
• # of players / length of game
• Introduction
• Setup & components
• Goal
• Turns/Rounds/Actions 
• Ending rounds / continuing play
• Ending play / declaring a winner
• Credits

Seeing the information parcelled out this way helped us think about the way players experience the game, and what they need to know when. Especially useful was the suggestion of compartmentalising the rules for a round, and dividing turns into specific (walked through) actions. So all the information about the game’s actions suddenly became divided between ‘inside your turn’ and ‘outside your turn’.

Together we jammed on the ruleset for an hour, fitting the rules into the above rubric. Along the way, we realised that the ‘valuation round’ not only provided the chief pain point in playing (it was where players had repeatedly stuttered, or had to re-consult the rules), but also the chief obstacle in smoothly reading (it took half a page of explaining to achieve maybe three seconds of play). On reflection, we realised that the same tactics of raising bids could be achieved by simply locking the starting bid at the number of the round – if a player wanted to put an antique out of reach of their opponent, they would have to take some risk in actually bidding for it.

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We also received some more positive player feedback on the game from Luke, who had played it independently with his friends on Zoom! 

Playtest with David and Valery – in Teams (18/11/20)

This time Shiquan observed and took notes, while Jacky and I played with David and Valery. We asked Valery to deliver the rules. Although she relied on her memory of the first time she played when she initially explained them, I steered her back to reading the new ruleset. Things were made much clearer.

Play was quick and fun – I didn’t miss the valuation round overmuch, which was my major concern going in.

Shiquan’s notes:

• The average playtime for a 4-player round is about 10 minutes, and it takes 5 minutes for new players to learn the rules from the new ruleset.
• The average time players spent presenting antiques was 55 seconds – if we were to add some guidance on a presenting time limit, keeping it under a minute would seem logical.
• A few rules caused moments of confusion / rule consultation:
  • Most money vs victory points.
  • Players not taking coins for selling items.
  • Players being able to bid on their own items.
• Feedback:
  • Game was really enjoyable – “I had fun playing it” (David); “much more fun than the last version” (Valery).
  • Setting up how the player tracks points, antiques and coins should be made much clearer – almost hand-holdy. David and Val suggested making a sample chart or column for players to reduce the stress from inventing a new tracking and calculating system.
  • Lines that are used to describe conditions of gaining and losing victory points/coins should be more precise. David suggested utilizing more math symbols e.g. replacing “gain 1 point” with “+1 point”.

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Meeting 10 – UAL Campus (20/11/20)

On Friday I brought in the designed ruleset on USB and imported it into InDesign.

Over the week I had iterated on the ruleset’s design in Viva Designer – not the most user-friendly of programs, but I made it work! Moving the orientation to landscape gave me a bit more room to play with, and Jacky sent over some illustrations, which I incorporated into the design.

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Shaded boxes helped break up the text, and highlight the most important information: the basic introduction, and what a player needs to do during their turn.

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Note the illustrated guide to setting up a simple tracking system, as well as some example ‘everyday objects’ that players might employ. I also added some flavourful dialogue between two characters, to better illustrate how an item could define the theme for a round, and how another player might try to follow that theme.

I sent the document off to designer friends for feedback, as well as sharing regularly with Jacky and Shiquan and David. Our focus was on getting the rules as lean and clear as possible, and identifying where it was most useful to incorporate examples and flavour.

Now in the studio, and with input from Jacky and Shiquan, I played around with fonts and layout until we were satisfied with the visual communication of the rules. My teammates will make some new icons and images with which to decorate the rules over the coming weeks, but we don’t feel in a particular rush.

Going Forward

I plan on raising with the team the following idea:

Publishing the game on itch.io and disseminating it to friends, on social media and on Discord channels would give us the chance to gather feedback from the public. It has been difficult to organise a high number of playtests with our fellow coursemates, owing to time differences and not being in the same location, and so we’ve been making a lot of decisions fairly blind. While we’re happy with where the game has got to (in just four weeks!), we would love to balance it further.

A few thoughts that I have:

• Could more points be awarded for, say, everyone’s favourite antique, at the end?
• Modern Art has players exchanging money, unless they’re buying their own painting. Is this the system we should be using in AUCTIONEERS?
• Could a simple STEAL system be implemented? At the end of a round, players could pay 10 coins to STEAL another player’s ANTIQUE – as long as they can correctly identify it (at least one fact about the antique, and its name). If they fail, they lose only 5 of the 10 coins but receive no antique.

The data from mass playtesting would help us to discover whether or not these kinds of alterations are necessary, and also hopefully gather some broader opinions about the ruleset’s design.

We’re finished with the major development arc for now, and further alterations are likely to be minor. I will continue tweaking the visual presentation of the ruleset, with Jacky and Shiquan providing some more illustrations. We’ve resolved to revisit the game at the end of the year, and put the finishing touches on it before the holidays.

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Example of Play:

Meeting 6 – 9/11/2020

Shiquan’s internet was down so he was unable to join us for much of this session.

Jacky reported back on his playtest with friends from last week – feedback was fairly consistent with that of other playtests, which reconfirmed the areas of investigation/improvement we had decided on for this week. They were:

• The order of play
• Different bidding systems
• Making the improvisations central to the mechanics
• Different methods of valuation and point-scoring

The lecture on Psychology and Game Design in the morning gave us some clear vocabulary to frame our discussions, and we touched on the intrinsic and extrinsic motivators in the game, as well as the balance of fast and slow thinking (both modes present, but maybe in the wrong places for a 15-minute game, we concluded).

Of particular use was the concept of bits, chunks, and the magic number (7 ± 2). Using this system to analyse the amount of information in our game, and the difference between those pieces of information, we were able to see that we were demanding too much of a player’s memory. With three players, by the end of the game each player would have to have kept track of: their own money, which went up and down dynamically; 9 items, their respective stories, and both their initial and current owners; the money of other players, at least in relation (bigger/smaller) to their own money. Much too much.

Aiming to decrease the amount of information needing to be held or parsed, we divided the game into clearer rounds, turns and actions. Presenting, bidding and valuating should all be wrapped up in each round, so that players can ‘forget’ the previous set of items before moving on to the next one. This also gave us the idea to add rewards/punishments for play during that round – the player with no items could get +5 coins; the player who drew the highest bid would get +5; the players’ backers open up different levels of cash per round, so nobody becomes stuck at 0 coins. 

Experimentation with different bidding systems was unsatisfactory. We used Modern Art’s systems as examples, but came to the following conclusions:

• Hidden Bids rely on the presence of game tokens (physical money), which obviously can’t be physically exchanged over videoconference.
• Going ‘round the circle’, as per the One Offer or Fixed Price auctions, is cumbersome to facilitate on videoconference.

The only auction technique to create a sense of excitement over videoconference was our original one – Open Bid – in which the auctioneer controls the flow and tempo, encouraging bids. It is as engaging for the auctioneers as it is for the bidder, and can vary in length and intensity. 

Meeting 7 – 10/11/2020

Another brainstorming session – finding available playtesters has proved difficult, with so many people on different timezones.

After two hours of rule alterations and playtesting, we finally landed on a system that we felt worked. By defining the goal of the game as ‘becoming the best antiques dealer’ rather than ‘having the most money’, we could 

Antiques now have a flat value of 1 VP. The player who sells their item for the highest bid each round gets an extra 1 VP, and the player with the most money left over at the end gets 1 extra VP. 

We also repurposed the finger-based system as a method of determining the opening bid: now, after an item is presented, the players vote using their fingers (up to a value equal to the current round) to determine the starting bid for that item. This feels like a reward system for giving a great pitch on your antique, but there is also a strategic level to it: you can lower the likely price of an item you want, or you can bump up the price of an item you know you won’t or can’t buy. Canny players can even force the presenter to buy it themselves at an inflated price, or make it impossible for any player to buy, thus removing it (and a VP) from the game.

We spent an hour writing up this version of the ruleset, ahead of a playtest the following day.

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Playtest with Luke – 11/11/2020

We thought it would be useful to playtest the game with an unfamiliar player in charge of explaining the rules. Luke was kind enough to jump in – I observed, and Shiquan and Jacky joined him in playing. 

Generally, the game was a lot of fun, with Luke really engaging heartily with both the roleplaying and competitive aspects.

Reflections and observations:

• 5 minutes talking through the rules – think we need to take this down to like 3 minutes…
• 20 minute playtime – game is still slightly too long for the brief!
• Luke was unclear on how to deliver the countdown for the valuation round, this needs to be made very obvious in rules. 
• Luke got really into the role; looked for a gavel at one point! Suggest we add some gavel flavour to the intro! ‘Open the bidding at…’ would be a good phrase to use in the rules, as would ‘going once, going twice’ etc.
• Should we have a rule on no objects from the future? This category never results in a very interesting round.
• The pdf was difficult to follow as just text – Luke suggested working on the layout of the rules
• Confusion about what a round was / what a turn was re: the entire gameflow
• Luke felt anxiety about finding his three objects at start, relaxed once he realised this wasn’t a ‘rule rule’ – suggest more open / relaxed language about finding objects (tom today suggested the word ‘props’ as useful here)
• Luke also asked if after the project was over he could play it with his gaming group! Good to hear.
• Luke very aware of strategy, thought at least one round ahead in terms of bidding and saving money

Feedback:

• Generally very positive about game, and didn’t find anything too difficult to track. Luke liked the competitive aspect to it, but also appreciated that many players would be in it for the make-believe and fun factor.
• “Theme really works”
• “I’d love to play it again”
• “Nice diagrams” – about the draft valuation diagrams, suggest we lean into diagramming this game out through illustrations
• “Exciting!” about ‘your backers are excited’ – again, flavour has a big impact on player reaction! (maybe applause and reactions to each presentation could be encouraged in the rules?)

Meeting 8 (UAL campus) – 13/11/20

A quick meeting – we had intended to do some playtesting with our classmates, but realised that none of the computers in the UAL labs have webcams, so we’d just be running the ‘in person’ version of the game, about which we have fewer questions. 

Jacky reported back from another playtest with his friends – they had been less keen on the Victory Points system than Luke or ourselves, reflecting on ‘having another thing to count’. They preferred the objective of ‘getting the most money’ at the end. I observed that it might be worth taking this feedback with a pinch of salt, since it was the group’s second time playing the game and would have been coloured by expectations and experiences found in their first playthrough. Something to keep in mind though – in our view, the Victory Points de-intensify the mathematical difficulty of the game!

We used our time together to work on the whiteboard, responding to Luke’s notes on the rules document by drafting some ideas for visual communication.

We divided information into two columns: at-a-glance/necessary to start play, and in-depth/consulted during play. The first column was primarily to do with the flow and order of play, so we experimented with different diagrams to communicate that:

1. There are multiple rounds, and 
2. Each round contains three repeating phases, led by a different player. 

For the immediately necessary gameplay diagram, we settled on a triangular ‘loop’ that clearly illustrates the three phases of play, and shows that they continue until each player has presented, evaluated and auctioned. This will serve as a loose outline for the visual design of the final ruleset.

With only a week to go on this project, we want to spend our time playtesting and balancing the current ruleset, as well as producing some striking and polished material for our game, establishing tone and theme as early as possible. Tassos Stevens has a nice adage: the [piece of art] begins when you first hear about it and ends when you stop talking about it. So we want a title, some illustrations, and some game copy that primes the player for the sort of roleplay that will be useful, and connects them to the goofy worlds of Antiques Roadshow / Roadtrip, before they’ve even begun playing the game.

Micro playtest w/ David in Teams (2/11/20)

This was the first time any of us had delivered the rules, so predictably it wasn’t a very coherent experience. David said that he enjoyed the improvisation part of the game, but was unclear what he was working towards – having the most items, or making the most interesting item. He asked if we had considered using multiple or different bidding mechanics, and pointed us in the direction of two games with interesting bidding systems: Modern Art and Q.E. (Quantitative Easing).

We resolved to study their rulesets. David also suggested making it clearer that a large part of the game would be ‘bullshitting’ – that the objects didn’t have to bear resemblance to what the player is describing.

Meeting 4 – in Teams (2/11/20)

We spent most of this meeting collaborating on a Google doc to come up with the written rules of the current version, so that when we playtested later we’d have something concrete to reference. Placing everything, in order, on a single page was a clarifying process – we could see when it would be important to introduce goals and rules, and where we could leave information for later. We also found the process of defining a language for the game very useful, helping us to define the tone and ‘weight’ of the ruleset (we wanted to keep things light!).

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Playtest 1 – in Teams with Valeria, Trini, Arthur (2/11/20)

Valeria, Trini and Arthur kindly agreed to playtest our game. We met on Teams, and I was elected to explain the rules, which I did. Myself, Jacky and Shiquan then went off-camera and observed the group playing.

General Impressions:
The group took to the game quickly, and required little supervision to actually play it. Lots of laughter and smiles, very imaginative objects.

Feedback from the group:

• Lots of positive feedback on the improvisation/role-playing aspects. Group felt like they learned a lot about each other too.
• It was not obvious to the players how much their items would end up being worth, so some players did not bid when they could, or when it was critical for them to get an item.
• Some players were motivated by getting as many items as they could, others by ‘saving money’.
• The motivation for bidding high for an item was based on how much each player ‘liked’ the sound of it, or whether it was ‘interesting’. Players made up personal rules as to what they would or wouldn’t buy.
• The final valuation, while initially a little confusing, was defined as ‘fun’ and reminiscent of ‘luck-based’ gacha games. 
• Players struggled to track their own money as well as which items they had acquired, and play had to be stopped so I could remind players of who had what (I was keeping track). 

Observations and reflections: 

• The temptation to treat this as solely a roleplaying exercise was very strong; players spent a lot of time asking questions about items, which greatly affected the focus and length of the game. The playtesters played for about 45 minutes, which was 3 times as long as myself, Jacky and Shiquan take to play the game.
• Bidding turned more into haggling, which also slowed down proceedings
• We observed an extreme slowdown in pace as the players learned the ropes of the ‘finger RNG’ system.
• Arthur did not have a webcam, but played the game well enough on voice-chat. This may have affected the ease with which the group ran the bidding.

While watching the game, we talked in a private chat about immediate changes we could make to the instructions. Some ideas included:

• All players are generalists as well as experts, and know the broad value of items (so nobody needs to ‘convinced’ of an item’s status as an antique).
• Items are valued not for what they can do (any special powers), but for the value they would bring to someone’s collection (is the idea of a collection important to introduce?).
• Players also need to be briefed on how to bid at an auction (always up, never down).
• A theme that all items (or all items within a certain round) might help, but we worried that this will decrease the freedom players feel.

Meeting 5 – in Teams (4/11/20)

We didn’t have a lot of time in this meeting, as we had to playtest for Arthur, Valeria and Trini’s group afterwards, so we resolved to process the notes from yesterday’s playtest and come up with an action plan for next week.

From the playtest we were able to identify the following areas to think about and later work on:

• Clearer rules for the beginning of the game, especially regarding what we want the players to be chiefly *doing* (see our reflections on instructions above).
• A solve for the slowdown at the end of the game. Looking at the order of play seemed like a wise choice.
• A way to make bidding consistently exciting.
• A way to make the improvisations and objects feel meaningful.
• A way to decrease the amount of mental space needed to play the game – this might mean fewer rounds, fewer objects to keep track of, a different points-scoring system…
• A more compelling / clearer win condition: there needs to be more connection between players introducing items, bidding for them, and actually winning the game. The current ending feels almost apropos of nothing – too random!

Before we left to playtest the other group’s game, we recorded ourselves playing through:

We still felt positive about the state of the game – it remained fun to play, but needed a bit of streamlining and focusing in order to be a smooth and consistent experience.

All told, the group felt confident that with a few more playthroughs next week, we would have something approaching a final product, and then we could start finessing and balancing.

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.

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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.