New Rule

My brother recently graduated from college with a degree in physics and a minor in mathematics. After spending the summer with me working theater in New Hampshire, he’ll be heading to sub-Saharan Africa to teach science for the Peace Corps for two years. When he returns, he plans to enter graduate school in Edinburgh in one of four programs related to environmental engineering and sustainability.

By contrast, I plan to spend the rest of this year finishing my degree, then either moving straight away into teaching game design at SCAD or heading off to a development house somewhere in the US to work on commercial games for two to four years before returning to academia.

Let us compare: my brother is going to teach science in a desperate part of the world, and then he’s going to learn how to help people undo the damage we’ve done to the environment and avert the climate crisis. I am going to finish art school and then go make games that, in all likelihood, will be nothing more than distractions for rich Westerners.

Which is the nobler purpose? Who is using their time more constructively, to effect greater positive change in the world? Who’s path is more worthwhile?

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One of the things I find most attractive about game design is the need for true multi-disciplinary thinking. A diverse mind engaged in diverse pursuits is a far more fertile designer than one that is focused, however nimble or learned that mind may be. Game designers create whole universes, and no mere education in digital modeling or interactive design or industrial design or whatever can possibly prepare you for the wealth of knowledge and insight necessary to pull that off. It requires a real Renaissance man (or woman).

Because I find kinship with polymaths and enjoy the pursuit of learning in literally every subject (I mean it), I attended Trinity University and sought a broad curriculum. I can say without hesitation that that decision was instrumental in my subsequent interest in and success with game design (moderate success, of the student variety of course :)). But for those not so fortunate as to enjoy the opportunity to learn from great minds in a wide variety of fields — such as those poor souls attending art school — I offer my suggestions for the Top Ten Noble Sciences for Game Design: the disciplines every game designer should endeavor to study and apply to their work. Obvious one such as math or writing or drama are left out because they are so pervasive that if you are trying to design games without knowing them, you probably ought to stop. Presented in order of least to greatest importance, they are all nonetheless important and indispensable to great design: (more…)

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Introduction: Hardly any necessary Roll your little gooey avatar around the table and try to bump your opponents as you compete to score points, but beware: your elasticity and density waxes and wanes with the dice rolls.

Players: 3+

Materials:

• Several twelve-sided dice, one per player, preferably of different colors
• Rulers or tape measures
• A playing surface at least twenty-four inches on a side
• A small sticker or counter to mark the center point

Setting Up: Each player chooses a die to represent themselves on the playing surface. Plot the center point of the surface and mark it with the sticker or counter. Each player rolls their dice and positions it that many inches away from the center point, in any direction. Designate a first player; play proceeds to the left.

How to Play: Each player’s die is their avatar, or gooball, with which they attempt to score points, flatten opponents, or both. On their turn, players indicate a direction in which they intend to move and place the ruler or tape measure along that line, with the edge in line with their gooball. They then retrieve their die, roll it, and return it to the position it occupied at the start of the turn with the newly-rolled value showing (player should mark the die’s position with their finger or the corner of the ruler in order to remember it accurately). The new value represents the gooball’s power for the turn: it is the extra distance in inches the gooball may move and the strength it wields when bumping other players’ gooballs.

Once the die has been rolled and repositioned, the player may move it along the path they indicated at the start any distance up to the gooball’s power plus five inches (they are not required to move the full amount if they so choose). Note that this means a gooball has a minimum movement of six inches (five plus a roll of one) and a maximum of seventeen. If the gooball collides with another player’s gooball, they bump it (see below). If they pass over or onto the center point of the playing surface, they score a point (see below).

Bumping: If a player’s gooball bumps another player’s gooball, the gooball’s movement ceases immediately and a collision occurs. The gooball with the higher power remains in place, and the gooball with the lower power is moved directly away from the stronger gooball a number of inches equal to the difference in their value, along the path the moving gooball was traveling before it hit. Distance traveled to effect the bump has no bearing on which gooball is displaced or the strength of the collision.

Scoring: Every time a player’s gooball passes over the center point of the playing surface, they score one point. Note that this means that a player may score multiple points in a turn if they are bumped across it by another gooball.

Winning the Game: The first player to reach fifteen points is the winner.

Next: Designing “Gooball” (more…)

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I have occasionally thought that pursuing an advanced degree is a bit like playing a game… a massive, cumbersome, complex game. Maybe that’s a sign I think about games too much Recently, I had a rude awakening regarding the structure of this game I’m playing: they changed the rules on me. Rather, the rules did not change, I discovered an assumption I had made about the rules was false, and it changed the nature of my participation significantly. I stopped wanting to play.

American accredited universities have the custom of awarding Latin honors to new graduates: cum laude (meaning “with honor”), magna cum laude (”with great honor”) and summa cum laude (”with highest honor”). Usually these are determined by one’s cumulative GPA upon the date of graduation. For example, when I received my BA from Trinity, I had a 3.77 overall GPA and thus was awarded magna cum laude. I remember it clearly because it was the last semester’s good grades that pushed my GPA over the mark: 3.75 was the designator for magna cum laude, as opposed to cum laude (3.5). At the time I was somewhat preoccupied with this, and I received rebuke and criticism from many of my friends and colleagues for being so “obsessed with grades.” I was offended and hurt by their condemnation. I thought, “I have and achieved a great thing: excellent grades for four years of work, spanning many diverse departments and disciplines, is no easy task. What I have accomplished is noteworthy; it represents hard work, talent, determination, perseverance, and commitment above and beyond what is necessary simply to graduate. By merit of this effort I have earned a place of distinction among my peers. Why should I be blasé about this honor?”

I as mystified why my peers should be so scornful. What is the value of recognizing greatness and distinction among contemporaries? How should we do so? Hierarchical awards are nothing new. Most American universities give honorary degrees to persons of great vision, leadership, talent, or diligence. American high schools have valedictorians and salutatorians for the top achievers in the class. Kindergarten teachers give gold stars to students with exemplary behavior or who produce exemplary work. While it can be rightly said that no person should undertake great work simply for the attention that comes with a prestigious award, it is nevertheless important that such awards exist. Likewise, we do not award such honor in order to make the unrecognized feel less than, but to inspire them by example. When we bestow honor on our best and brightest, we are saying two things: to the honoree, we say, “You have accomplished a great thing. Your work stands as an example of the heights of possibility for human achievement, and you have bettered us all by your effort. For this contribution to the community, we honor you.” And to those in attendance we say, “Give due to this person and note their accomplishment. They have achieved a great thing, and have bettered us all by their effort. They stand as inspiration to all, and an example of the opportunities for and rewards of great endeavor.”

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“It’s not a mistake, it’s an iteration. I’m a game designer — everything I say is a prototype.”

- Brenda Brathwaite

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The other day I gave a lecture on the importance of criticism in game design, and I drew a parallel to ideas from my undergraduate study in philosophy. One of the tenets of Western philosophy is the idea of debate and defensibility as proof of merit. Simply put, philosophers debate ideas because they hold that the ability of an idea to withstand constant attack is proof of the merit of the idea. If you can argue and examine and criticize a thought until you hit the floor and fail to find significant flaw, then the idea is sound and should be respected. Conversely, if you find your idea shakes to pieces in the face of concerted scrutiny, then it was obviously broken and in need of revision.

I have long considered this to be true of all ideas, including creative works like pieces of art. Ruthless critique is supposed to be one of the great benefits of formal art education: you expose yourself to your peers and they do their duty by ripping your work to shreds. That way, they reveal all the weaknesses you missed and enable you to repair them and, in so doing, improve yourself. I argued in the lecture that, as creative works, games are no different. They must be subjected to ceaseless, brutal criticism to ensure that all the flaws are hammered out.

Many designers I have read believe that games are only truly observable when in motion, or during play. That’s when all the flaws become apparent, and it’s why playtesting is so important. From playtests comes the exposure of the flaws and the criticism necessary to fix them. However, I took it one step further. I argued that games are in need of critical attention not only because they are ideas, but because they are participatory. I claim that games need two cooperating agents to be complete: a designer and a player. The designer contributes their creative vision and effort in constructing the game — the rules, the tokens and board, the software, etc. — but what the designer is really doing is constructing the potential for a game. The game does not exist until someone puts into motion: the player. By contributing their effort and their personal experience, the player’s perspective combines with that of the designer (as represented by the system they have created) and creates a fully real, complete game.

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Introduction: In the good old days of Victorian England, raising a family was a breeze. Children were assets, measured in terms of marriageability and earning potential against cost of upbringing and risk of death or disownment. Why, it was practically just a business proposition. And women? Simply the means of production. In Progeny, players get in touch with their inner patriarch (or matriarch) as they attempt to grow and bloom a dynastic family tree. Have kids, raise ‘em, marry ‘em off, but watch out for usurpers and poor connections — they might dilute your noble bloodline and keep you from true aristocracy. Try to build the most dominant family before your fertility runs out!

Players: 3+

Materials:

• Several sheets of standard, letter-sized (A4) paper, one per player.
• Pens or markers of different colors, one per player.
• One coin.

Setting Up: Lay the sheets in the center of the table and distribute the pens or markers to each player. Roll off to see who goes first; play proceeds to the left. Beginning with the first player, each player writes their name at the top of their sheet of paper as the head of a new family tree. Each player then invents a spouse and connects his or her name to their own (see an example of a family tree diagram). These are the progenitors of the player’s family tree, the first generation. Draw three lines under the husband and three circles under the wife to represent their starting wealth and fertility (see below).

How to Play: Each turn, players manage their family tree, growing the wealth and influence of its male members and the fertility of its female members. Wealth and influence points are simply a measure of the level of the male member: males with greater wealth get preferential treatment when seeking wives, and can support more children. Wealth is indicated by lines drawn beneath the male family member’s name on the family tree. Fertility points are simply a measure of the level of female members: females with higher fertility are worth more as wives because they can produce more children. Fertility is indicated by circles drawn beneath the female family member’s name on the family tree.

Each turn, players take one action chosen from the following options. When the action is completed, their turn ends and play passes to the next player.

• Educate (Male): Any male family member may be educated or improved by age and experience. Education improves the member’s wealth and influence one level; to add education, draw a line underneath the name of the male family member. Males cannot be educated beyond level five (no more than five lines beneath their name).
• Court (Male): Any unmarried male member in the family may court an unmarried female member of another family. For each point of wealth or influence the male member possesses, draw a star beside the female’s name on her family tree. The first suitor to acquire five stars beside an available female’s name acquires her hand in marriage (see below).
• Birth (Female): Any married female family member with at least one available point of fertility can expend it to give birth to a child; gender is determined by a coin flip (heads are males, tails are females). Cross out the open circle beneath the female’s name and add the child to the tree. All newborn progeny begin with zero wealth or fertility.
• Debut (Female): Any unmarried female may be debuted: primped and primed and ‘put on the market’ for eligible marriage. Choose any unmarried and undebuted woman in your family and add three points of fertility to her.
• Arrangement (Couple): Any couple may resist an unwanted suit of one of their females by an opposing male. For every point of wealth the father possesses, negate one star placed by a courting male on any of his daughters. Note: you may resist suits against multiple daughters simultaneously.
• Settle (Couple): Any married couple in which the husband has more levels in wealth than the wife has levels in fertility may be settled — the husband’s stature is converted to fertility, representing the establishment and stabilizing of the family. A wife is allowed levels of fertility equal to her husband’s wealth, though this does include expended fertility (i.e. children already born). Add one point of fertility to the wife for every level of wealth not already assigned. Example: A couple has three levels each in wealth and fertility. Two of the fertility points have been used to produce two children, so the wife has one free point and two expended points of fertility. Events conspire to give the husband two new points of wealth, bringing his total to five. On their next turn, the player may settle the couple to add two new free points of fertility to the wife, bringing her total to five as well.

Marriage, Alliances, and Connections: The goal of the game is grow the largest and most influential family tree, and the best way to do so is by forging strong connections with other families through marriage. Male family members taking females from another family not only acquire the woman and all her fertility points for the purposes of birthing new family members, but they may also lay claim to the wealth and influence possessed by her father. Any male member acquiring a wife from another family immediately gains wealth or influence equal to half that of the female’s father (rounded up). Additionally: at the end of the game, the son-in-law with the most wealth gains the remainder of the father’s influence. Note: the father does not lose wealth or influence when his daughters are married. Rather, new wealth is generated and awarded to the new son-in-law.

Female also gain advantages for marrying eligible bachelors. When a female member is first married, she immediately gains fertility equal to the wealth of her new husband (not including the wealth he is about to gain from her father). Additionally, when a marriage is formed the female member is crossed out from her native family tree and added in to the husband’s tree next to his name. She still counts for one point as a member of her native family (see Winning the Game), but her fertility points are now counted as part of her husband’s family and will add to or subtract from that player’s score.

Diplomacy and negotiation are allowed and encouraged. Players are free to arrange for exchanges of marriage ties as they see fit.

Winning the Game: Play continues until one family tree reaches its fifth generation. The player with the highest score wins — points are awarded as follows:

• One point for each family member in the entire tree, including married daughters.
• One point for each child per family above three (example: a family with five children scores two points).
• One half-point for every level of wealth and influence per male member.
• Minus one point for every unused point of fertility per female member.

Next: Designing “Progeny”: (more…)

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[Warning: Rant Forthcoming] The extra credit assignment I posted last week was a mysteriously unqualified failure. Not a single student submitted a ruleset. When discussing this with Brenda, we were both scratching our heads to try and understand why no one bothered even to submit a half-assed idea. All I asked for was two typed pages of rules; I can punch out a ruleset that long in fifteen minutes. It was hardly a taxing assignment, nor was it ill-publicized. So why the total apathy?

One theory Brenda hazarded was that students were unfamiliar with the rules of Chess. This concept astonished me. Number one: if anyone doesn’t know the basic rules of Chess (and there are… let me see… twelve. Twelve rules total.) five minutes on Wikipedia would solve your problem. And Number two: what aspiring game designer worth his or her salt doesn’t know how to play Chess?

There are a handful of board and card games termed ‘classic,’ meaning they’ve been around in an established, immutable form for at least a century. These games are not merely games, and they’re not important simply because they are old. They are important because they are forces of history. Chess, Go, Shogi… these are world-changing games. Go has been played in China and Japan in its present-day manifestation for millennia. Emporers and warlords studied it. Treaties have been signed or broken over games of Go. In 1972, American Chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer defeated Russian-French grandmaster Boris Spassky in chess match dubbed “The Match of the Century.” The duel with and subsequent defeat of the Soviet titan was important enough to alter the course of the Cold War. A chess match changed the course of history! When’s the last time you heard of a video game altering world events? Even Pong, progenitor of the video game itself, was nothing but an American fad. It was the computer it ran on that became powerful, not the game.

These games are canon. They are The Fundamentals, the ancient legacy of games as tangible forces of human interaction. No one calling themselves a game designer, aspiring game designer, or game design student can rightly do so without knowing these games. Knowing of them is not the same thing. Games are their rules; they are knowable only through play. “Know your roots” does not mean know the NES. These are your roots. These are the pillars of game design, the ancestral foundation upon which all our modern efforts at game design are built.

Tags: Game Criticism, Schoolwork // 4 Comments »

My entry for this weeks Game Design Challenge, conceived by James Portnow and hosted on the Game Career Guide. View the full description of this week’s challenge - “Design a WWII shooter.”

WWII Game – Croix de Lorraine

Selling points:
Bold new perspective on the conflict
Rich urban environments
Unique guerilla missions and level design
Strong female protagonist!

The game takes place in occupied Paris beginning in the early months of 1940 and continuing through the rise and fall of the Vichy Regime and the Nazi occupation of central France. Players take the roll of a young French woman, mother of a small child whose husband is killed during the opening moments of the game. Forced to flee for her life, our heroine is harbored by and eventually inducted into La Résistance. Divided into three “Acts,” the story and level progression follows thus:

Act 1: Paris Brûle (Paris is Burning)
Our heroine witnesses the horrible death of her husband and many of her neighbors at the hands of the invading Nazi armies. As the shells fall and the city shatters around her, she must flee through the ruined streets, scavenging supplies and weapons from fallen foes and friends alike. To add to her desperation, her young daughter, Cloë, travels with her. Teetering between numb shock and violent hysteria, Cloë must be constantly protected and tended to. [Level Design — Opportunities abound for HL2 or Thief-like sneak missions that require the player to traverse an area with Cloë at their side, trying to keep her calm and quiet and avoid attracting attention. Think missions with extremely scarce weapons – a pistol with three rounds, for example – that require environmental ingenuity to complete.] Act 1 concludes when our heroine and her daughter are found and smuggled into the underground by French freedom fighters.

Act 2: Défense de la France
Cloë is safe and our heroine burns with the desire for vengeance. Taking up arms with La Résistance, she trains in guerilla tactics [Design: think character customization, fitting out our heroine with skills in different categories: knife fighting, riflery, explosives, safecracking, codes and radio espionage, escape artist, etc.] and joins gangs of freedom fighters in daring raids and hit-and-run battles with Nazi forces throughout the city [Level Design — Endless great options for rich levels depicting ruined Paris, and a wide variety of challenges and opponents: small bands of infantry, armored columns , VIP guard details, Nazi warehouses, etc. Opportunities for villain characters – brutal Nazi taskmasters who hunt down resistance fighters, kidnap them, or hold them hostage. Think arch-nemeses for our heroine and missions based on thwarting them.]

Act 3: La Libération
The Normandie invasion has succeeded and Allied forces are pushing inland. The Vichy regime is crumbling and the city is in chaos. The Paris Résistance joins the effort with other bands in the newly formed French Forces of the Interior (FFI) and the final stage begins. Now our heroine finds herself a soldier in pitched battles, part of an elite squad created to undertake the most difficult and critical missions: stealing codebooks, sabotaging Nazi convoys and airfields, pathfinding for Allied advances, breaking Allied prisoners out of Nazi camps and escorting them to safety, etc. [Level Design – again, plenty of rich environments around the French countryside, small towns, prison camps, and of course, Paris. Scale of the game grows from the more intimate, four-man team missions to larger battles with hundreds of combatants.] Act 3 and the game conclude with the Allied liberation of Paris.

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Introduction: In Starshower, players compete to cover the board with stars and patterns, but they may not always be able to call their shots. Each turn you have a chance to hit or miss, and if you miss you could find yourself ruining the very patterns you so carefully created. But even in despair there is hope… the clever player can turn their misfortune around and use it against their opponents.

Players: 2+

Materials:

• One sheet of standard, letter-sized (A4) paper.
• Pens or markers of different colors, one per player.
• One black pen or marker.
• One coin.

Setting Up: Using the black pen, make a grid of even-sized spaces on the paper at least ten lines in width and height (it may be denser as players see fit). Lay the sheet in the center of the table and distribute the colored pens or markers to each player. Roll off to see who goes first; play proceeds to the left.

How to Play: The goal of the game is to establish the greatest presence on the board before all grid points are filled. Players take turns trying to add stars of their color while avoiding drawing or being trapped by black stars. On their turn, player first flip the coin and call their toss. If they are correct they may draw a good star, but if they are wrong they must draw a black star. The pre-existing placement and timing of stars limits where new stars may be drawn, as described below.

Good Stars: Good stars are simply stars drawn in a player’s color that help that player score points. Each live star is worth one point at the end of the game on its own, but stars may also be formed into groups that count double. Groups are defined as three or more stars in a line that the player encircles. In addition to being worth extra points, groups are also invulnerable to black star groups (see below).

To create a group, the player first draws a star that forms or adds to a line of three or more, then draws a loop around the line of stars. Note that this means the player must use the star they added that turn in the new group! Players may not create groups from pre-existing lines of stars unless they add to it that turn. Groups may be any size the player chooses, but they must be linear (horizontal or vertical, not diagonal) and can only enclose stars of the player’s color.

Black Stars: If the player misses the coin toss, they must draw a black star instead of a good star. Black stars may be drawn on any open grid point and do not count for any points. Additionally, black star groups may be formed that kill existing stars or prevent new ones from being drawn. Similar to creating a good star group, black star groups are created by connecting a line of grid points between two black stars. To create a group, the player draws a black star in line with an existing black star. If the grid points between them are free — contain no good star groups — the player draws a line between the two black stars. However, if some part of a good star group exists on the line, the black star group may not be formed: it is blocked by the good star group’s invulnerability.

Any good stars that exist on points along this line are killed – they are no longer worth points and may not be used to form groups. Furthermore, no new stars may be drawn on points on this line, good or black. Black stars already on the line are unaffected.

Winning the Game: Play continues until all grid points are filled or unplayable (blocked by black star groups). Ungrouped live good stars are worth one point each. Grouped live good stars are worth two points each. The player with the highest score wins.

Next: Designing “Starshower:” (more…)

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