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ITP Thesis: Midterm presentation (with notes) (PDF)

Here’s the midterm presentation I just gave in my thesis section (the PDF includes the presenter notes, and is perhaps more comprehensible). I felt like this presentation was a return to form for me – lots of photos, not a lot of text – and it seemed generally well received. I had just playtested for the first time the day before, and I feel like the project is gaining the momentum that it so desperately needed. The next step is to iterate on the version that I tested, adding a narrative (superheroes, I suspect) and some context, and also to try testing something that’s going in a completely different direction. Those should both be happening in the next week…meaning that I very well may have two playtests over spring break. Making up for lost time, it seems.

After the jump, my text-based summary of the presentation, which is a combination of the slides and the notes.

I’m working on social games, which I’m defining as games where the relationship between the players is an important part of how the game mechanic, or how the game actually works. There are two mechanics which i decided to try building a game around: Alliances and Collection. So, players would belong to different groups, and would decide which group to support at any given time, as well as collecting non-players as Friends, and scoring extra points for socializing them into one of the player groups.

Because I’m focusing on social relationships, and those are most acute face-to-face, it isn’t going to be a videogame or a board game, it was going to be a big game. I’m particularly interested in big games which break the rules of time by being somewhat persistent, and during which the players are inhabiting the same general physical environment. But why games in the first place?

Games are formal systems of rules which, once we know how to play them, makes it possible for us to predict the outcome of our interactions. This is what makes them fun, unlike the real world, which has too many unknown rules and variables. We do this by evaluating game state, which is a snapshot of what’s going on in the game at any given moment. Game state is reflected in the board of a board game, the field and scoreboard of soccer, and the heads-up display in a videogame.

It turns out we treat everything else in the world pretty much the same way: we devise theories of the way the world works, make predictions, test them, and revise them. Unlike in games, though, we mostly don’t think about those models consciously. It’s just how we see the world. Two areas where this is less true (ie, that we’re more conscious of the systems we’re examining) are social situations and our physical environment. This is evolutionary: it was (and is) important to our survival to have a conscious working model of these systems. I decided that I wanted to tackle the social side of things, and build a game that reflects the social relationships between players within the game mechanic itself. As it turns out, bringing the environmental systems into play might be a good solution for one of the problems during playtesting.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve been working on games which alter the relationship between the players and their friends, and between the players and the city itself. One example is Socialbomb, a game about reputation, which is a social system that’s easy to quantify into a game mechanic. Socialbomb players carry devices which display their reputation score which rises and falls based on the scores of other players they are near. The Invention of Murder is a mystery game which takes players to locations in lower Manhattan surrounding an actual unsolved murder from 1842, altering their view of the city by merging past and present.

Here are the basics of how the prototype game worked:
Players were assigned a different Team (A or B), and a Group (Circle, Square, or Triangle), and were set out with a limited number of stickers with which to claim friends. Each sticker could only be used to benefit their Team or the Group. We played 4 rounds, which lasted an hour each, and had a unique way to score. for instance, in the first round, if a player could convince their new Friend to buy them a coffee, they got a bonus point. At the end of the round, everyone would come together, tally their scores on a scoreboard, and find out what the special rule was for the next round.

The results were, of course, mixed. Friend collection and tagging was fun, and made the game highly visible in the environment and for non-players. On the other hand, the rules and scoring were too complex, synchronizing all the players in rounds doesn’t work well over several hours (much less days), and the game state itself became confused and stressful once there were a large number of friends tagged. And, perhaps most distressingly to me, this is the sort of thing which could have been made on Facebook, and probably would been easier to play, so what am I getting from doing it offline (other than the fun of stickering random people at ITP, which should not be under estimated)?

So, from here, I’m going to make two prototypes to playtest: one iteration on these basic mechanics, and one new concept. For the next version of this game, I’m going to use narrative and theme to help explain the game mechanics. Explaining that Teams and Groups are like Race and Class in a role playing game, for example, would have been more straight forward than my abstraction. Also, the players should be focused on managing the social state amongst themselves or others, but not both. I’m going to opt for internal social state, and thus replace the collection of people with the collection of the environment – players will collect places, rather than people. (See, I told you the environmental side of our brains was going to come into play.)

In brainstorming a new concept, I’m going to explore an infection and containment mechanic, since I really like the idea of players spreading something in the world and then having to go back and clean up their own mess. I’m also thinking about using real-world resources of some kind as power-ups for a smaller, more local game. Whatever the case is, I’ve determined that modeling the mechanics on very specific social concepts (ie, how Socialbomb is based on one word, “reputation”) is going to make for the clearest mechanic and most interesting play.

The questions I had, after all of this, are whether the mechanics of Alliances and Collection are good ones (people seemed to think they were), and what the interface of my game is ultimately going to be. I think finding the interface will help immensely, but it also seems that determining a narrative will go a long way toward establishing that. So, my next immediate step is probably narrative. And I’m thinking superheroes.